The Empire of Mediocrity and the End of the World

Global Politics

Vladimir Putin has harmed no American. Russia has not stood in the way of any American’s dream. As for the billionaires though, those American and British money bags, the Russians are posing an insurmountable hurdle for their investments. And we all know nothing can stand in the way of their progress. Unfortunately for the human race, mediocrity cannot rule either. Here is a prophesy as real as any newsreel you will view today, the “end all” conclusion for American “exceptionalism”.

Do you know where Crimea is? Seriously now, a gaff by presidential hopeful Gary Johnson the other day proved once and for all, not even educated Americans have a very big “mental map” of our world. I was a geography student first and teacher second, and I can tell you categorically that very few of America’s leaders know US history and geography, let alone world names and places. If Johnson had known where Aleppo, a city in northwest Syria was, I would have been amazed. 99% of Americans could not point to Syria on a map if their lives depended on it. Not even college students I once polled, would be able to reliably find Moscow, or even St. Louis in Missouri for that matter. Get this, if a geography bee were slated to solve world crises, the United States would end up a third world banana republic. Don’t take my word, read this study published by National Geographic, or this 2014 one from the US Government’s Accountability Office, or this Telegraph report that shows one quarter of Americans do not even know Earth revolves around the sun. Some of you will perceive my path to proving a “Putin point” later on. Others should take heed, the complacent billionaires need chastising:

“Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.”  Dale Carnegie

Read more

 

Inside the Submissive Void — Propaganda, Censorship, Power, and Control

Greg Maybury
Pox Americana

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. David Hume, Of the First Principles of Government, 1768.

—

Brief: The use of propaganda and censorship is more frequently associated with totalitarian, corrupt and/or despotic regimes, not modern democracies in the West. Yet the history of how western governments and their ever-vigilant overlords in the media, financial, and business spheres have controlled the political narrative of the time via these means is a long, storied and ruinous one, going back well before 1914. Along with serving the contemporaneous political objectives of its perpetrators as contrived, such activities often continue to inform our understanding, and cement our interpretation, of history. If as the saying goes, “history repeats itself”, we need look no further as to the main reason why. In this wide-ranging ‘safari’ into the fake news, myth-making, and disinformation wilderness—aka The Big Shill—Greg Maybury concludes that “It’s the narrative, stupid!”

— Controlling the Proles —

The following yarn may be apocryphal, but either way the ‘moral of the fable’ should serve our narrative well. The story goes like this: sometime during the height of the Cold War a group of American journalists were hosting a visit to the U.S. of some of their Soviet counterparts. After allowing their visitors to soak up the media zeitgeist stateside, most of the Americans expected their guests to express unbridled envy at the professional liberties they enjoyed in the Land of the Free Press. 

One of the Russian scribes was indeed compelled to express his unabashed ‘admiration’ to his hosts…in particular, for the “far superior quality” of American “propaganda“. Now it’s fair to say his hosts were taken aback by what was at best a backhanded compliment. After some collegial ‘piss-taking’ about the stereotypes associated with Western “press freedom” versus those of the controlled media in the Soviet system, one of the Americans called on their Russian colleague to explain what he meant. In fractured English, he replied with the following: ‘It’s very simple…In Soviet Union, we don’t believe our propaganda. In America, you actually believe yours!’

As amusing as this anecdote is, the reality of the Russian journo’s jibe doesn’t simply remain true now; that ‘belief’ has become even more delusional, farcical, and above all, dangerous. One suspects that Russian journos today would think much the same. And in few cases has the “delusional”,“farcical”, and “dangerous” nature of this conviction been more evident than with the West’s continued provocations of Russia, with “Skripalgate” in Old Blighty (see here, and here), and “Russia-Gate” stateside (see here, and here) being prime, though far from the only, exemplars we might point to.

Read more

South American Shockwaves Bring the New Silk Road Into the Americas as Neo-Liberal Order Crumbles

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture

Over the past several years Latin America has become a strategic battleground which involves much more than merely “geopolitical power plays” between the USA vs China as many commentators are asserting. Of course this is not to say that there are no geopolitical battles occurring. The entire western sponsored regime change operation in Venezuela couldn’t be understood unless one realized that China and Russia see Venezuela as a strategic ally in the Americas and a future zone for Belt and Road projects which are sweeping across the world… but something more is happening.

Over the past three years, over 17 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) nations have signed onto the new operating framework of the Belt and Road Initiative which extends far beyond the limited China-to-Europe corridor which many presumed it to be when it was announced in 2013. With its focus on long term planning and interconnectivity, China is already number one in vital infrastructure investments globally and while not number one in overall trade in the Americas, has now produced over six times more investment into Latin American energy infrastructure than the World Bank.

This new paradigm has been a breath of fresh air for many nations of the south that have been gripped by Western drug money laundering, poverty, debt slavery and organized crime which has been kept in place by over four decades of IMF-World Bank dictates enforced by London/Harvard trained economists positioned as local governors over the bodies of nationalist leaders.

In spite of the 17 nations on board the BRI, the big four powers (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia) have not yet joined, which has been a frustrating obstacle for the greater vision of integrated infrastructure to blossom. However, in the past few weeks, even this has begun to change.

Read more

Skripal – The Stupid Propaganda The State Can’t Let Go

Iain Davis
In This Together

The alleged Skripal chemical weapons attack is the UK state propaganda narrative it refuses to let go. Today (16/08/2019) the unquestioning parrot media are reporting that an unnamed police officer was poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok during the immediate Skripal poisoning response. 

Eighteen months after the incident, they are still flogging this dead horse.

The whole fantasy has largely been propagated by the MSM. So I am going to cite them here, just to illustrate the numerous contradiction in their ludicrous yarn.

If you want to understand my take on this silliness then, before reading the rest, get a coffee, sit back and watch this video. [...]

According to the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Policing network (CTP) scientists from the the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (Dstl) at Porton down have confirmed “that traces of Novichok were in the blood sample” of the officer concerned.

We need to be very clear about what Novichok (the family of nerve toxins) is supposed to be. It is said to be a deadly military grade nerve agent. The bottle supposedly used to deliver the Novichok was found a couple of months after the attack. The lead investigator, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dean Hayden, stated that it contained enough of the lethal nerve agent to potentially kill thousands of people.

He was right to be terrified, Novichok was said to be at least 5 times to 10 times more deadly than VX. It is unimaginably lethal, real nightmare stuff. Just 10mg of VX is enough to kill and Novichok is much worse. It is so deadly that Professor Alastair Hay (OBE,) a UK Government chemical warfare advisor, said just 50 micro-grams, that’s 50 millionths of a gram or 0.00005 g, is a lethal dose. To put this into perspective, that’s about a tenth of the size of a grain of sand.

Furthermore, Gary Aitkenhead, the chief executive of Dstl, reported that there is no known antidote to Novichok. The nerve agent was specifically designed to make possible oxim antidotes useless. Negating the third step in the three step process required if you ever hope to save anybody exposed to Novichok.

Exposure to Novichok is fatal unless aggressively managed. So the Skripal’s recovery was truly unbelievable because no one knew what they had been poisoned with a nerve agent for nearly two days and they were treated for a suspected Fentanyl overdose.

Read more

Enough and Not Too Much

Patrick Armstrong
Strategic Culture

Moscow will not engage in an exhausting arms race, and the country’s military spending will gradually decrease as Russia does not seek a role as the “world gendarme,” President Vladimir Putin said. Moscow is not seeking to get involved in a “pointless” new arms race, and will stick to “smart decisions” to strengthen its defensive capabilities, Putin said on Friday during an annual extended meeting of the Defense Ministry board. “Intelligence, brains, discipline and organization” must be the cornerstones of the country’s military doctrine, the Russian leader said. The last thing that Russia needs is an arms race that would “drain” its economy, and Moscow sure does not want that “in any scenario,” Putin pointed out.

– RT, 22 December 2017

It’s easy to forget it today, but the USSR was, in its time, an “exceptionalist” country. It was the world’s first socialist country – the “bright future“; it set an example for all to follow, it was destined by History. It had a mission and was required by History to assist any country that called itself “socialist”. The USSR had bases and interests all over the world. As the 1977 USSR Constitution said:

the Soviet state, a new type of state, the basic instrument for defending the gains of the revolution and for building socialism and communism. Humanity thereby began the epoch-making turn from capitalist to socialism.

A novus ordo seclorum indeed.

Russia, however, is just Russia. There is no feeling in Moscow that Russia must take the lead any place but Russia itself. One of the reasons, indeed, why Putin is always talking about the primacy of the UN, the independence of nation states, the impermissibility to interfere in internal activities – the so-called “Westphalian” position – is that he remembers the exceptionalist past and knows that it led to a dead end. Moscow has no interest in going abroad in search of internationalist causes.

Internationalism/exceptionalism and nationalism: the two have completely different approaches to constructing a military. The first is obsessed with “power projection“, “full spectrum superiority“, it imagines that its hypertrophied interests are challenged all over the planet. Its wants are expensive, indeterminate, unbounded. The other is only concerned with dealing with enemies in its neighbourhood. Its wants are affordable, exact, finite. The exceptionalist/interventionist has everything to defend everywhere; the nationalist has one thing to defend in one place. It is much easier and much cheaper to be a nationalist: the exceptionalist/interventionist USA spends much more than anyone else but always needs more; nationalist Russia can cut its expenditure.

Read more

New MH17 Documentary Proves Beyond a Doubt that a Cover-Up Took Place

Andrew Korybko
Global Research

The newly released documentary directed by Yana Yerlashova together with independent Dutch investigator Max van der Werff proves beyond a doubt that Ukraine and its Western partners did all that they could to cover up the true cause of MH17’s tragic downing half a decade ago, introducing new evidence and testimonies that cast serious doubt on the “official” narrative of what really took place on that dreadful day.

***

The entire world is already aware of the two competing theories about MH17’s downing half a decade ago, with the West insisting that a supposedly Russian-supplied BUK surface-to-air missile accidentally destroyed the passenger aircraft while Moscow has always maintained its innocence and claimed that it’s being framed as part of a politically motivated cover-up. Most people have already made up their minds about what they think really happened on that dreadful day, but those who doubt that an actual conspiracy took place might finally reconsider their views after the newly released documentary by Yana Yerlashova together with Dutch investigator Max van der Werff.

The “official” narrative blames Russia for this tragedy, but it’s since been revealed through the new evidence and testimonies that active efforts involving a broad array of countries were undertaken from the get-go to paint Moscow as the culprit despite there being no facts whatsoever to back up that provocative claim.

“MH17 – Call For Justice” sheds light on the dark truth of what happened immediately after the plane’s downing, with journalist John Helmer’s summary of the 28-minute-long documentary pointing out the key takeaways for those who don’t have the time to watch it in full. The video powerfully includes a brief interview with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, who had earlier spoken out about the cover-up and reaffirms that Russia was blamed for what happened even before any information was conclusively known about the incident.

India’s “Playing Hard to Get” with America by Letting the AIIB Fund China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)

Read more

War Profiteers And The Demise Of The US Military-Industrial Complex

Dymitri Orlov
Club Orlov

Within the vast bureaucratic sprawl of the Pentagon there is a group in charge of monitoring the general state of the military-industrial complex and its continued ability to fulfill the requirements of the national defense strategy. Office for acquisition and sustainment and office for industrial policy spends some $100,000 a year producing an Annual Report to Congress. It is available to the general public. It is even available to the general public in Russia, and Russian experts had a really good time poring over it.

In fact, it filled them with optimism. You see, Russia wants peace but the US seems to want war and keeps making threatening gestures against a longish list of countries that refuse to do its bidding or simply don’t share its “universal values.” But now it turns out that threats (and the increasingly toothless economic sanctions) are pretty much all that the US is still capable of dishing out—this in spite of absolutely astronomical levels of defense spending.

 

Let’s see what the US military-industrial complex looks like through a Russian lens.

It is important to note that the report’s authors were not aiming to force legislators to finance some specific project. This makes it more valuable than numerous other sources, whose authors’ main objective was to belly up to the federal feeding trough, and which therefore tend to be light on facts and heavy on hype. No doubt, politics still played a part in how various details are portrayed, but there seems to be a limit to the number of problems its authors can airbrush out of the picture and still do a reasonable job in analyzing the situation and in formulating their recommendations.

What knocked Russian analysis over with a feather is the fact that these INDPOL experts (who, like the rest of the US DOD, love acronyms) evaluate the US military-industrial complex from a… market-based perspective! You see, the Russian military-industrial complex is fully owned by the Russian government and works exclusively in its interests; anything else would be considered treason. But the US military-industrial complex is evaluated based on its… profitability! According to INDPOL, it must not only produce products for the military but also acquire market share in the global weapons trade and, perhaps most importantly, maximize profitability for private investors. By this standard, it is doing well: for 2017 the gross margin (EBITDA) for US defense contractors ranged from 15 to 17%, and some subcontractors - Transdigm, for example - managed to deliver no less than 42-45%. “Ah!” cry the Russian experts, “We’ve found the problem! The Americans have legalized war profiteering!” (This, by the way, is but one of many instances of something called systemic corruption, which is rife in the US.) 

Read more

Space Exploration and Humanity’s Struggle for Open System Economics

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture

The 50^th anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the moon on July 20, 1969 has created an opportunity to rethink some of the fateful decisions that set western society onto a trajectory of zero-technological growth and mindless consumerism in the early 1970s. Rather than speed up the momentum of ambitious goals for a permanent lunar settlement, nuclear rockets, terraforming and Mars colonization which leading NASA administrators had promoted after the successful landing of 1968, the very opposite occurred.

First the dollar was floated onto the international speculative markets on August 15, 1971 followed by the destruction of the Apollo program in 1975 and cancellation of most of the cutting edge projects that were meant to break humanity out of the closed system of geopolitics and finiteness of the earth’s limits for the first time in history.

Today, America has not only lost the capability to place a man on the moon, but cannot even send an astronaut into orbit without hitching a ride on a Russian Soyuz shuttle. While certain forces within America led by current NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and the sitting President earnestly do wish to revive those capabilities, America’s 50 year visionless dance with monetarism have annihilated the memory of how such funding and long term planning occurred in the post war decades. Ironically, nations like China, Russia and India have discovered these modes of thought and economic practice to such an extent that China has quickly become a leader in Space technology, being the first nation to land a rover on the far side of the moon while all three Eurasian nations have unveiled ambitious programs for lunar-Mars development.

The fact that America put itself onto a course of action that has hollowed out its technological capabilities, and brought about the creation of the largest speculative bubble in history, can be largely accounted for by recognizing the existence of two worldviews at war. Only one of which will win.

Read more

La-La-Land: US Media Cites Fake News Disinfo Site to Prove 'Russia' Behind 'Theory' Clinton Hitmen Killed Seth Rich

Sott.net via RT

The man who first reported on the discredited Steele dossier has a brand new conspiracy theory about Russia. The idea that DNC staffer Seth Rich was killed on the order of Hillary Clinton was invented by - guess who?

Yahoo News Chief Investigator Michael Isikoff, who is also the co-author of hit Russiagate book 'Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump,' has a new example of how the nefarious Russians supposedly subverted democracy in the US. According to him, it was Russian intelligence that started a conspiracy theory about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich on July 10, 2016 during an apparent botched robbery.

The supposed Russian disinformation showed up three days after Rich's death on a website called WhatDoesItMean.com. Befitting of the site's '90s design, it is, well, a badly written thriller fiction about Rich trying to expose the corruption of the Clinton campaign to the FBI, and instead being ambushed by her hit team. It is complete with a gun battle "just blocks from the White House" - all based on a 'report' by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). 

Read more

FBI agent accidentally reveals own 8chan posts; attempts to redirect white supremacist rage against Russia

Henry Krinkie
Current Events Enquiry

The unsealing of an application for a search warrant by the federal government on 8chan's servers has unintentionally revealed that a federal agent has been trolling the site and attempting to redirect the users' conspiracy theories against the Russian government instead of the CIA or Mossad.

The legal case stems from the April 27th shooting at a California synagogue by white supremacist and 8chan user John Earnest. The day of the shooting, Earnest is believed to have posted to 8chan a link to an anti-Semitic Pastebin manifesto and a not-so-cryptic suggestion that he was about to commit a murderous act of violence to back up his beliefs. In the accompanying affidavit to the search warrant application, FBI Special Agent Michael J. Rod requests the "IP address and metadata information about Earnest's original posting and the postings of all of the individuals who responded to the subject posting and/or commented about it. Additionally, agents seek information about any other posting coming from the IP address used by Earnest to post the subject posting."

In Appendix 1, Rod attaches a serious of screen caps from an 8chan thread that took place the day of the synagogue attack (it is not ultimately clear that Earnest took part in this thread). What is notable is that next to the "Anonymous" user label on some of the posts is a "(You)" marking: 

As it turns out, this text is to let the user know that they are looking at their own posts! This means that Special Agent Rod inadvertently exposed himself as 8chan user ID "8f4812" by including these screenshots as his supporting exhibit. As it turns out, a more complete version of this thread was saved on archive.is before it was deleted. By using Ctrl+F on the page and inputting "8f4812", you can look at all the posts made by the FBI in this thread.  

Read more

When the Deep State Controls Deep Thinking and Russophobia

Phil Butler

NEO

As citizens interested in policy, we can learn a great deal from the quasi-academic studies on Russian foreign relations strategies. A cursory review of any English language archive of academic papers on Putin, Russia, or even the word “oligarch” will produce a score of experts with doctorates who “know” exactly what Russia and her president are “up to.” My latest excursion into the knowledge vault at Academia.edu may be the benchmark for all future Russophobic genius.

In a white paper entitled “Putin’s Grand Strategy and US National Interests,” Dr. Christopher Marsh just comes right out and calls Russia a bunch of criminals led by an archvillain. From my perspective as an American citizen who actually studied Russia-US policy and detente objectively, it’s discomforting to know the military and our military industrial complex hold this dangerous attitude. I’ll explain why.

Dr. Christopher Marsh is a Senior Fellow in the Center for Strategic Studies at the Joint Special Operations University at US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). While this begins to sink in, let me explain that Dr. Marsh is “teaching” America’s brave, stalwart, and truthfully loyal Doberman Pinchers (Navy Seals etc.) that their missions to thwart Putin are from God. Or, for those agnostics on Seal Team Six, that anybody they snuff out from behind with a custom made Winkler belt knife deserves it. Sorry, I’m no pacifists, but academic propaganda fed into skilled killers is where the metal hits the meat. Marsh is just full of it, let me show you.

The white paper in question begins with the pretense that the author intends to “examine” whether or not Putin and Russia have a strategy. The author sets up his audience by pretending objectivity, then carries on to brainwash his readership (and class audience) that Putin does indeed want to take over the world. Here is the lead in:

“One of the most significant questions surrounding Russian foreign policy is whether or not Russian president Vladimir Putin has an overarching strategy.”

Read more

Putin Sets The Table To Leave The Dollar Behind

Rory Hall
The Daily Coin

This is twice that Russian President Putin has said on the global stage the Federal Reserve Note no longer deserves the status and privilege of “world reserve currency” that allows unlimited printing of the currency. The first time he made mention he actually said that it was a threat to Russia’s national security.

In a speech at the International Economic Forum, in St. Petersburg, Russia, “Russian Davos”, President Putin reaffirmed his position regarding the Federal Reserve Note and it’s international role. For the record, we see the abuse of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve Note, U.S. dollar, in similar light as President Putin. The current status of “world reserve currency” should not be allowed in this day and time. The absolute abuse of power, excessive power granted and the ability to shackle entire nations through the use of a currency that is not even their own should have never been allowed but it is way past time for this system to be dissolved.

In a speech at a plenary session, Mr Putin accused Washington of seeking to “extend its jurisdiction to the whole world.” “But this model not only contradicts the logic of normal international communication. The main thing is, it does not serve the interests of the future.” Source

As recently we pointed out Russia has been and is, apparently readying, a gold backed cryptocurrency to use as global trade settlement. When a man steps up to the microphone and says to the world – “The main thing is, it (U.S. dollar) does not serve the interests of the future.” while at the same time announcing that Russia, along with China, are working on a global trade settlement mechanism outside the dollar, well, you would have to be some kind serious stupid to ignore those words. 

Read more

The long arm of the Bilderberg Group

Manlio Dinucci
Voltairenet.org

For the last few years, many ridiculous stories have been written about the Bilderberg Group. However, working from the documents, it is possible to piece together a reliable vision. Numerous researchers have been working on this. It is absolutely not a world government, but a network of influence, composed by the CIA and MI6, intended to support NATO.

hree Italians were invited to this year’s meeting of the Bilderberg Group, which was held at Montreux in Switzerland, between 30 May and 2 June. Another journalist was invited with Lili Gruber, the host of the TV channel La7, and now the permanent host of the Bilderberg Group – this was Stefano Feltri, assistant director of Fatto Quotidiano, directed by Marco Travaglio. The « third man » chosen by the Bilderberg is Matteo Renzi, senator for the Partito Democratico, and ex-President of the Council.

The Bilderberg Group, constituted formally in 1954 on the initiative of certain US and European « eminent citizens », was in reality created by the CIA and the British secret service MI6, in order to support NATO against the USSR [1]. After the Cold War, it continued to play the same role in support of the strategy of the USA and NATO.

The guests of these annual meetings are almost exclusively citizens of Western Europe and North America. They number approximately 130 representatives from the world of politics, economy, the military, the major media and the secret services, who, formally speaking, participate in a personal capacity. They gather behind closed doors in luxurious hotels, each year in a different country, and are protected by draconian military security systems. No journalists or observers are allowed access, and no communiqué is ever published. The participants are sworn to silence – they are not even allowed to reveal the identity of the speakers who may have given them information (in total disregard of their proclaimed « transparency »). We only know that this year, they talked mostly about Russia and China, spatial installations, a stable strategic order, and of the future of capitalism.

Read more

Russia set to air TV series that reveals US role in Chernobyl nuclear disaster

Press TV

Russia is set to air a TV series based on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that implicates the United States as playing a role in the worst nuclear accident in history.

Currently in post-production, the series by the Russian company NTV tells the story of the 1986 explosion that ripped through reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The explosion led to a huge radioactive leak, which permanently affected areas in places across three quarters of Europe. Thirty workers and firemen were killed in the immediate aftermath of the explosion and rescue operations. Most of them died of severe radiation-related illnesses.

The plot revolves around a CIA agent dispatched to Pripyat — the town inhabited by Chernobyl workers — to gather intelligence on the nuclear power plant.

The series will follow KGB officers in their attempts to hunt the espionage operation.

Director Aleksey Muradov said that his version, filmed in Belarus, will show “what really happened back then.”

Read more

See also: Cracks Found On Nuclear Reactor Could Lead To Evacuation Of Edinburgh And Glasgow

Russia's Lavrov Blasts D-Day Memorials As Part Of A "False History" Of WWII

Zero Hedge

Speaking at a weekly news conference in Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova offered a tribute to those who died on the western front of World War Two but her comments likely irked many war veterans in Britain where the 75th anniversary on Wednesday of the largest seaborne invasion in history was marked at a ceremony in Portsmouth attended by Queen Elizabeth and world leaders including Donald Trump and Angela Merkel.

As Reuters reports, Russia told the West on Wednesday the Normandy landings on D-Day in 1944 did not play a decisive role in ending World War Two and that the Allied war effort should not be exaggerated.

It should of course not be exaggerated. And especially not at the same time as diminishing the Soviet Union’s titanic efforts, without which this victory simply would not have happened,” she said.
 
“As historians note, the Normandy landing did not have a decisive impact on the outcome of World War Two and the Great Patriotic War. It had already been pre-determined as a result of the Red Army’s victories, mainly at Stalingrad (in late 1942) and Kursk (in mid-1943),” Zakharova told reporters.

The Soviet Union lost over 25 million lives in what it calls the Great Patriotic War, and Moscow under President Vladimir Putin has taken to marking victory in the war with a massive annual military parade on Red Square.

Read more

Putin’s Choice: Risk Starting a War – or Give In to US’s Greater Israel Plan

Strategic Culture Foundation
via Blogfactory

Secretary of State Pompeo was in Sochi on 14 May for talks with his counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. And in his opening address, Lavrov observed: “I believe it’s time to start building a new, more responsible and constructive matrix of how we see each other. We are ready to do so, of course, if our US partners are interested in doing so as well … The fact that we are meeting for the second time in the past two weeks inspires certain optimism. Let’s give it a try and see what happens”. 

President Putin subsequently hosted Pompeo for a short discussion, noting: “I got the impression that the President [Trump] is in favour of restoring Russia-US ties and contacts – and of resolving issues of mutual interest. For our part, we have said many times, that we would also like to restore relations on a full scale”.

It is clear that Mr Putin’s impression of a US possible apertura arose from Trump’s call to him on 3 May, in which co-operation on assuring ‘strategic stability’ was discussed. The remarks by both Lavrov and Putin indicate both a readiness and a generosity (i.e. calling the US Administration “our US partners”) that is a mite surprising, given the extent to which Washington has been inserting its spanners into all, and everything, Moscow recently has tried to do.

Why this Trump initiative – managed by two foremost US war hawks – precisely now? Ok, the Mueller investigation is closed, but Moscow will not be naïve enough to imagine that this draws a line under the Russian malign intervention narrative. Mueller has simply gifted the claim to Congress.

In one sense, Moscow’s warmth may be a surprise, but in another, it is not. America has viewed Russia as a ‘forever’ adversary, ever since Britain and America facilitated the return of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin to the Bolshevik Revolutionaries, in order to disrupt Russia. And even as Trump was calling Putin, the Rand Corporation was releasing its paper, ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia’ which outlines specific “geo-political cost-imposing” policy options. Any shift by America from this belligerency, of course would be significant, and would warrant exploration. President Putin repeatedly has warned of the unthinkable consequences for humanity, should these two states decisively enter into conflict. This is the existential threat par excellence.

Read more

Trump Attacks Military Industrial Complex and Calls for Infrastructure Investments in the Middle East

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture

For the first time in over half a century, an American President has actually come out attacking the Military Industrial Complex. Of course, everyone knows of President Dwight D. Eisenhauer’s famous outgoing 1961 speech warning the world (and the incoming President Kennedy) what sort of monster had arisen at the heart of America’s defense institutions. Very little on the matter was said on the frightening topic by decades of political leaders who rose to prominence in the shadow of JFK’s corpse. Instead, the beast grew like a malignant cancer over the ensuing years as a major branch of the British-run deep state that carried out a coup with Sir Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in 1946 and the MI6-directed re-organization of American intelligence with the creation of the CIA in 1947.

After John F. Kennedy’s assassination, networks of neoconservative contaminated all branches of government in both parties bringing the USA into a frenzied military doctrine centered on regime change wars, oil-centered geopolitics and unipolarism totally uncharacteristic with the better constitutional traditions of the nation. This geopolitical doctrine nearly drove the west into a full military confrontation with Russia and China in recent years.

The Tide Begins to Turn

On May 20 speaking to Fox News, President Trump echoed Eisenhauer’s warnings. Under a coterie of Trump’s war-mongering advisors such as John Bolton, Gina Haspel, Terrence O’Shaughnessy and Mike Pompeo, America has recently been brought to the brink of war with Iran. While Trump has too often accommodated this hive of neocons, his recent statements and repeated calls for cooperation with Russia and China demonstrate a sound push back which should be taken very seriously. In that Fox interview Trump said:

“With all of everything that’s going on, and I’m not one that believes—you know, I’m not somebody that wants to go in to war, because war hurts economies, war kills people, most importantly—by far most importantly.”
You know, in Syria, with the caliphate, so I wipe out 100 percent of the caliphate. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to have these crazy people who run around blowing up stores and blowing up things—these are seriously ill people. I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, they’re wiped,’ you know, ISIS. But, I wiped out 100 percent of the caliphate. I say, ‘I want to bring our troops back home.’ The place went crazy. You have people here in Washington, they never want to leave.”
‘You know what I’ll do, I’ll leave a couple hundred soldiers behind,’ but if it was up to them, they’d bring thousands of soldiers in. Someday people will explain it, but you do have a group, and they call it the military-industrial complex. They never want to leave. They always want to fight.”

Read more

The Next Economic Crisis, The Looming Post-Multipolar System And Hybrid War Forever

South Front

The Impending Crisis

At one time, specifically during the post-World War 2 Bretton Woods era, it looked like as if the capitalist model could be indefinitely sustainable and avoid plunging the world into major world conflicts. That era began to come to an end during the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, and came to a complete end at the end of the Cold War which ushered in the era of the so-called "globalization" which took form of unbridled competition for markets and resources. At first this competition did not show many signs of trouble. There were many "emerging markets" created as a result of the collapse of the Soviet bloc into which Western corporations could expand. However, the law of diminishing returns being what it is, the initial rapid economic growth rates could not be sustained and attempts to goose it using extremely liberal central bank policies, to the point of zero and even negative interest rates, succeeded in inflating-and bursting-several financial "bubbles". 

Even today's US economy bears many hallmarks of such a bubble, and it is only one of many. Sooner or later the proverbial "black swan" event will unleash a veritable domino effect of popping bubbles and plunge the global economy into a crisis of a magnitude it has not seen since the 1930s. A crisis against which the leading world powers have few weapons to deploy, since they have expended their monetary and fiscal "firepower" on the 2008 crisis, to little avail. The low interest rates and high levels of national debt mean that the next big crisis will not be simply "more of the same." It will fundamentally rearrange the global economy. 

Read more

The NY Times Invokes Russia and Conspiracy Theories in an Attempt to Stifle Opposition to 5G

Americans For Responsible Technology

On the eve of the May 15th 5G Day of Action, the first national campaign to push back against the unchecked deployment of 5G-ready small cell infrastructure, the New York Times has published a shameful and wildly inaccurate hit piece asserting that opponents of 5G are being unwittingly manipulated by Russia.

The article, "Your 5G Phone Won't Hurt You. But Russia Wants You to Think Otherwise," focuses exclusively on a television network most people have never heard of - RT America - and argues that the tiny network, controlled by the Russian government, is the sole driving force behind the growing public opposition to 5G.

The Times cleverly conflates 5G-enabled smart phones with 5G small cell antennas, and fails to note that RT America is just one of many media outlets that are covering the controversy over 5G antenna deployment, including Fox News and CNN.

It also neglects to mention the hundreds of recently published, peer-reviewed, independent scientific studies from highly credible academic institutions and our own National Institutes of Health that demonstrate biological harm, including cancer, from exposure to RF microwave radiation. A listing of some of the most recent studies is located here. 

 

Read more

My Role in Weaponizing ‘Moral Equivalence’ and ‘Religious Freedom’

James George Jatras
Strategic Culture

It’s confession time …

Without getting overly autobiographical, it is worth noting that my perspectives (whatever their value) on American public policy and global affairs reflect decades of first-hand, professional experience in both the Executive and Legislative branches of the US government. The former was at the Department of State as a commissioned US Foreign Service Officer, the latter at the US Senate as a policy adviser to the Republican leadership.

I’d like to believe that at all times my intentions were to serve the best interests of my country as viewed in light of the most venerable principles of the American nation, as well as the Christian, European, and human values that once undergirded that nation.

However, the consequences of my efforts, together with those of others, sometimes went horribly wrong. On at least two occasions, there was, to say the least, a disconnect between good intention and sound judgment, between what I had hoped and expected could be achieved – and what turned out to be the results.

For example, as the (first) Cold War was entering its terminal phase, I was one of the primary planners and organizers of the May 1985 international conference in Washington, DC, “Moral Equivalence: False Images of U.S. and Soviet Values,” sponsored by the State Department and the Shavano Institute for National Leadership. As described byImprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College, which later incorporated Shavano and published the remarks of some of the speakers, the conference brought together “forty-five participants from the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, Italy, Latin America, and Central Europe accepted the invitation to examine the issue of an alleged ‘moral equivalence’ between the two ‘superpowers.’ The attention this conference has received has been substantial. Articles have appeared in dozens of national publications such as Time, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Policy Review, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the New York Post, and the New York Times, as well as in over 500 other newspapers throughout the nation.”

Among the headline participants were UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe, the late, great Joseph Sobran, Richard Pipes, Sidney Hook, and many others spanning the spectrum from paleoconservatism, to libertarianism, to social democracy. As conceived by myself and other planners, the conference had a single message: that the godless ideology of Marxism-Leninism with its record of mass murder, destruction, and degradation (exemplified then by the USSR and its satellites) was not morally comparable to normal, non-ideological societies and states (then represented – so I believed at the time – by the United States and our allies.)

The conference was a smashing success (definitely worth the $45,000 allocated by the Department, though in the end Shavano commendably declined to accept the public funds, as reported by Imprimis). The phrase “moral equivalence” – which had been launched by Kirkpatrick a year earlier – became a widespread meme, with the communist Evil Empire weighed in the balances and found wanting.

Unfortunately “moral equivalence” is a meme that now just won’t die, even though the context for it receded into history a few years following our conference. What has since become evident (and maybe already was to eyes more discerning than mine at the time) was that the US and our (let’s be honest) satellites are every bit as ideological as the old Soviet Union. In fact, in some ways ours is the same ruling ideology as communism but shifted from economic class conflict of 
Bourgeoisie/Proletariat to new Oppressor/Victim paradigms defined by sex, race, religion, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, migration status, and so forth.

Read more