WaPo | As
government attorneys unravel Jeffrey Epstein’s complex finances and sex
trafficking ring, officials are training their focus on other
high-wealth individuals with whom the disgraced financier may have done
business.
One
of the most closely watched cases comes from the U.S. Virgin Islands,
where Epstein maintained a residence, as it pursues a lawsuit against
JPMorgan Chase, Epstein’s bank of 15 years. The suit alleges that the
institution profited from keeping Epstein on as a client and was
complicit in funding his long history of abuse and child sex
trafficking.
Deutsche Bank, where Epstein took much of his wealth after leaving JPMorgan in 2013, has already settled
a similar case for $75 million. But legal observers say the claims
against JPMorgan are far more sweeping than those against Deutsche Bank,
covering a period when his trafficking operation was more robust and
sophisticated.
Here are the figures surrounding the JPMorgan-Epstein case, and what you need to know about them.
theautomaticearth | In Bakhmut/Artyomovsk, all of NATO, all 31 member nations, were
defeated by a restaurant owner and a bunch of convicts, is how I saw
someone describe it. That of course caricatures the situation somewhat
(Wagner is well-organized), but it’s not that far off. And that spells a
serious problem for NATO. All of those 31 members may have lots of
control over their media, but in the end you can’t endlessly deny being
defeated.
So what will NATO do now? They will double down, and then again. And
at the end of the “doubling down road” lie nuclear weapons. Not Russian
nukes, because as my friend Wayne wrote the other day, their
high-precision hypersonic missiles make nukes look crude and primitive,
Middle Ages territory. But NATO/US never developed such weapons. They
spent 10+ times as much money on weapons, still do, and -comparatively –
ended up with bows and arrows.
Nuclear bombs are good only to create widespread panic and
destruction. But that includes your own destruction, because of Mutually
Assured Destruction protocols. Which also go back almost as far as the
bow and arrow. If you fire a nuclear missile, one very much like it will
land on your head a few minutes later. End of story, end of you.
US/NATO, the “collective west”, the hegemon, has lost. And has missed
the moment when that occurred. Because hegemon equals hubris. Look at
what they’ve all still been saying, and you notice they can’t see, and
can’t acknowledge, that -and how- the world has changed. Not just this
weekend, and the 9 months before, in Artyomovsk. It’s the entire story
of Ukraine: it illustrates how the West “lost it”.
The US plotted a coup and moved NATO’s borders east, and Russia
reacted exactly how they said they would. No nukes, no nazis, no NATO.
They got the last two, and know they can expect the first too. But still
the west maintains Russia’s special operation was entirely unprovoked.
Look, they’re not even listening anymore. They would like to negotiate
and end all this, but negotiate about what? Putting AZOV back on the
borders of the Donbass, so they can kill more Russians there? Not going
to happen.
It’s not only about weaponry, though that plays a major role: the
hegemon can no longer make its demands based on military might. It’s
been surpassed. Nor can it make demands based on the dollar’s reserve
currency status, and it caused that itself. Weaponization of the
currency has backfired to the extent that de-dollarization has become a
process that can no longer be halted.
The moment that Saudi prince MbS turned his back on “Joe Biden” is a
milestone. Because once he did that, it was obvious many would follow.
In central Asia, if you are Kazachstan or Uzbekistan, why on earth would
you opt to go with G7/US/NATO instead of BRICS? Why go with the power
that is waning, and not the one in ascendancy? Russia is your biggest
neighbor, strongly connected to China which is building its BRI network
in your region, and the nearby Arab states are about to join that
network. Why would you link yourself to the G7? When you know all your
neighbors do not?
Then there are the voices that say the US will push for a bigger and
wider war, perhaps including American troops. First, because NATO is
losing, and second, because it could mean American boots on the ground,
and presidents don’t lose elections in wartime. I’ve said before, I
would expect them to go with Polish troops first, possibly on Polish
territory too. But the Polish don’t appear all that eager anymore. And
neither would any other European NATO country. German and French and
Dutch troops are in no shape for war, and in the US over 70% of
potential troops are grossly overweight and/or handicapped in some other
way.
Ukraine had perhaps the best boots on the ground force in Europe,
financed and trained since 2014 by NATO, and they lost to a caterer and a
loose group of hired hands. You’re not going to win that. Your only
option is long distance weapons, missiles, planes, you name it. But NATO
has no advantage in that over Russia. To put it mildly.
The sole thing that’s in your favor is that Russia doesn’t seek to
destroy you. They want to live in peace and trade with you. Same thing
for China. NATO equals unipolar. But the world has moved towards
multipolar. Ergo, NATO is obsolete. Ukraine will never reconquer its
“lost” territories, and Zelensky will move to some property in Italy or
Florida, never to be heard from again, unless perhaps in his obituary.
The deaths of some 300,000 of his countrymen will be on his conscience.
But also on that of all the “leaders” who have sent their second-hand
armory to Kiev. They are just as responsible for all those deaths. The
world has changed a lot in the past few years, and ignorance is no
excuse if you are a “leader”, or a “Joe Biden”. Not even if you’re
“just” a voter or reader. Those deaths will be on your head when you go
see St. Peter at the gate.
PS: Don’t be surprised if “Joe Biden” sends US boots on the ground
anyway. No hegemon has ever given up power lightly. That part of the
road is yours, US and EU voters. You may have to fill up the streets
like you’ve never seen. The rest, the majority, of the world will be
waiting to see if you do or not. They’re prepared for either of the two
options.
AmericanConservative | Until the fighting begins, national military
strategy developed in peacetime shapes thinking about warfare and its
objectives. Then the fighting creates a new logic of its own. Strategy
is adjusted. Objectives change. The battle for Bakhmut illustrates this
point very well.
When General Sergey Vladimirovich Surovikin,
commander of Russian aerospace forces, assumed command of the Russian
military in the Ukrainian theater last year, President Vladimir Putin
and his senior military advisors concluded that their original
assumptions about the war were wrong. Washington had proved incurably
hostile to Moscow’s offers to negotiate, and the ground force Moscow had
committed to compel Kiev to negotiate had proved too small.
Surovikin was given wide latitude to streamline command relationships
and reorganize the theater. Most importantly, Surovikin was also given
the freedom of action to implement a defensive strategy that maximized
the use of stand-off attack or strike systems while Russian ground
forces expanded in size and striking power. The Bakhmut “Meatgrinder” was the result.
When it became clear that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and
his government regarded Bakhmut as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to
Russian military power, Surovikin turned Bakhmut into the graveyard of
Ukrainian military power. From the fall of 2022 onward, Surovikin
exploited Zalenskiy’s obsession with Bakhmut to engage in a bloody
tug-of-war for control of the city. As a result, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers died in Bakhmut and many more were wounded.
Surovkin’s performance is reminiscent of another Russian military officer: General Aleksei Antonov.
As the first deputy chief of the Soviet general staff, Surovikin was,
in Western parlance, the director of strategic planning. When Stalin
demanded a new summer offensive in a May 1943 meeting, Antonov, the son
and grandson of imperial Russian army officers, argued for a defensive
strategy. Antonov insisted that Hitler, if allowed, would inevitably
attack the Soviet defenses in the Kursk salient and waste German
resources doing so.
Stalin, like Hitler, believed that wars were won with offensive action, not defensive operations.
Stalin was unmoved by Soviet losses. Antonov presented his arguments
for the defensive strategy in a climate of fear, knowing that
contradicting Stalin could cost him his life. To the surprise of
Marshals Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov, who were present at the
meeting, Stalin relented and approved Antonov’s operational concept.
The rest, as historians say, is history.
If President Putin and his senior military leaders wanted outside
evidence for Surovikin’s strategic success in Bakhmut, a Western
admission appears to provide it: Washington and her European allies seem to think that a frozen conflict—in
which fighting pauses but neither side is victorious, nor does either
side agree that the war is officially over—could be the most politically
palatable long-term outcome for NATO. In other words, Zelensky’s supporters no longer believe in the myth of Ukrainian victory.
The question on everyone’s mind is, what’s next?
In Washington, conventional wisdom dictates that Ukrainian forces
launch a counteroffensive to retake Southern Ukraine. Of course,
conventional wisdom is frequently high on convention and low on wisdom.
On the assumption that Ukraine’s black earth will dry sufficiently to
support ground maneuver forces before mid-June, Ukrainian forces will
strike Russian defenses on multiple axes and win back control of
Southern Ukraine in late May or June. Roughly 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers
training in Great Britain, Germany, and other NATO member states are
expected to return to Ukraine and provide the foundation for the
Ukrainian counterattack force.
General Valery Gerasimov, who now commands the Russian forces in the
Ukrainian theater, knows what to expect, and he is undoubtedly preparing
for the Ukrainian offensive. The partial mobilization of Russian forces
means that Russian ground forces are now much larger than they have been since the mid-1980s.
Given the paucity of ammunition
available to adequately supply one operational axis, it seems unlikely
that a Ukrainian offensive involving two or more axes could succeed in
penetrating Russian defenses. Persistent overhead surveillance makes it
nearly impossible for Ukrainian forces to move through the twenty- to
twenty-five-kilometer security zone and close with Russian forces before
Ukrainian formations take significant losses.
Once Ukraine’s offensive resources are exhausted Russia will likely
take the offense. There is no incentive to delay Russian offensive
operations. As Ukrainian forces repeatedly demonstrate,
paralysis is always temporary. Infrastructure and equipment are
repaired. Manpower is conscripted to rebuild destroyed formations. If
Russia is to achieve its aim of demilitarizing Ukraine, Gerasimov surely
knows he must still close with and complete the destruction of the
Ukrainian ground forces that remain.
Why not spare the people of Ukraine further bloodletting and
negotiate with Moscow for peace while Ukraine still possesses an army?
Unfortunately, to be effective, diplomacy requires mutual respect, and Washington’s effusive hatred for Russia
makes diplomacy impossible. That hatred is rivaled only by the
arrogance of much of the ruling class, who denigrate Russian military
power largely because U.S. forces have been lucky enough to avoid
conflict with a major power since the Korean War. More sober-minded
leaders in Washington, Paris, Berlin, and other NATO capitols should
urge a different course of action.
gilbertdoctorow | The many months long battle for the provincial Donbas city of
Bakhmut, or Artyomovsk as it is known in Russia, has been described
variously from on high in Washington, London and Berlin. When the likely
outcome was unclear, the defense of Bakhmut was called heroic and
demonstrative of the brave fighting spirit of the Ukrainians.
π΄πΊπΈπΊπ¦π·πΊ"The Russians have suffered over 100 000 cssualties in Bakhmut...I'ts hard to make up. It's hard to make up" - Joe Biden
— AZ π°πππ (@AZgeopolitics) May 21, 2023
Casualty figures issued by Kiev and then trumpeted from Washington
suggested that the Russians were stupidly throwing away the lives of
their fighting men by using WWI style human waves of attackers who were
decimated by the defenders. Russian lives are cheap was the message. The
fact that Russian artillery on site outnumbered and outperformed
Ukrainian artillery by a factor of five or seven to one was freely
admitted by the Western propagandists as they pleaded for increased
supplies to Kiev. They, nonetheless, issued casualty reports for the
Russians that inverted the force correlation. It was assumed, obviously
with reason, that the public was too lazy or too uninterested to do the
arithmetic.
At one moment, the spin doctors in Washington, London and Berlin said
that Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut made sense because it was pinning
down Russian forces and giving time to the Ukrainians to train and
position their men for the heralded “counter offensive” during which
they would overrun Russian positions at chosen points in the 600 mile
line of combat and drive a wedge through to the Sea of Azov, opening the
way for recapture of Crimea. Those were grand words and ambitions to
justify continued and ever rising Western military assistance to Kiev.
At another point, the spin doctors said it would be better if Ukraine
stopped losing men in Bakhmut and launched instead that much vaunted
counter-offensive. Now we were told that Bakhmut is just a Russian
fantasy, that it has no strategic value.
In the past couple of weeks, the Russian command has issued daily
reports on the progressive capture by Russian forces of Bakhmut, square
kilometer after square kilometer. We were told they controlled 75%, then
80% and most recently more than 90% of the city proper while artillery
bombardment of the remaining blocks of high rise residential buildings
that were being used by Ukrainian defenders for their sniper attacks and
intelligence reports on Russian troop movements pulverized everything
in their path.
At this point, the attention of Western media defending truth against
Russian disinformation was directed at the Ukrainian “successes” in
recapturing settlements on the flanks of Bakhmut. Just three days ago The New York Times
was telling its readers that these “breakthroughs” by the Ukrainians
put in jeopardy the Russian forces holding the city proper: they might
be surrounded and compelled to surrender or die. The possibility that
the offensives on the flanks were only intended to facilitate withdrawal
of remaining Ukrainian soldiers from Bakhmut and were tolerated by the
Russians to avoid bloody fights to the death – that possibility crossed
no one’s mind at the NYT, it seems.
Midday yesterday, 20 May, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner
Group which did most of the fighting for Bakhmut on the ground, claimed
total victory. In the evening, President Vladimir Putin announced to
the Russian public that Bakhmut was taken. Joyous messages of
congratulations filled the internet message services in Russia as the
broad public celebrated a victory as iconic as the Battle for
Stalingrad.
Meanwhile, the defenders of the Western public against Russian
“disinformation” were hard at work, straining their brains to find what
to say. This morning’s New York Times still speaks of the battle for Bakhmut as undecided, pointing yet again to the Ukrainian hold on the flanks.
Given their losses in men and materiel defending Bakhmut, the
surrender of the city to the Russians will be a great blow to Ukrainian
fighting morale when it is finally admitted. So will the fate of their
Commander in Chief General Zaluzhny who, according to Russian sources,
has been hospitalized for the past two weeks and remains in critical
condition after falling victim to a Russian strike on a provincial
command center which killed most of the high officers around him. If
nothing else, this speaks to the amazing success of Russian military
intelligence directing their firepower.
Meanwhile, Western media attention to Ukraine is conveniently
redirected at the nonstop travels of President Zalensky who went from
his European tour on to the Middle East, where he attended the meeting
of the Arab League, and thence via French military jet to the G7
gathering in Hiroshima where he held talks with fellow heads of state
and joined them for the obligatory group photos. All the talk was about
when the U.S. will formally give its consent to the dispatch of F16s to
Kiev. For the disseminators of Western disinformation this is a
wonderful distraction from a war that clearly is going badly for Kiev
and in particular a distraction from the counter offensive that looks
less likely with each passing day of Russian military strikes on the
command centers and weapons stores of the Ukrainian side.
The plume of radioactive smoke and ash that rose from the Khmelnitsky
store of British depleted uranium artillery shells in Western Ukraine
after a Russian missile strike, just like the extensive damage to the
Patriot air defense installation near Kiev by a Russian Kinzhal
hypersonic missile tell us all what will be the fate of future Western
arms deliveries to Ukraine. It is an interesting question how much
longer the Ukrainian military or politicians will put up with their high
flying, good life President while the country is well on its way to
hell.
RUSI | This report seeks to outline how Russian forces have adapted their
tactics in the Ukrainian conflict and the challenges this has created
for the Ukrainian military that must be overcome. The report examines
Russian military adaptation by combat function.
Russian infantry tactics have shifted from trying to deploy uniform
Battalion Tactical Groups as combined arms units of action to a
stratified division by function into line, assault, specialised and
disposable troops. These are formed into task-organised groupings. Line
infantry are largely used for ground holding and defensive operations.
Disposable infantry are used for continuous skirmishing to either
identify Ukrainian firing positions, which are then targeted by
specialised infantry, or to find weak points in Ukrainian defences to be
prioritised for assault. Casualties are very unevenly distributed
across these functions. The foremost weakness across Russian infantry
units is low morale, which leads to poor unit cohesion and inter-unit
cooperation.
Russian engineering has proven to be one of the stronger branches of
the Russian military. Russian engineers have been constructing complex
obstacles and field fortifications across the front. This includes
concrete reinforced trenches and command bunkers, wire-entanglements,
hedgehogs, anti-tank ditches, and complex minefields. Russian mine
laying is extensive and mixes anti-tank and victim-initiated
anti-personnel mines, the latter frequently being laid with multiple
initiation mechanisms to complicate breaching. These defences pose a
major tactical challenge to Ukrainian offensive operations.
Russian armour is rarely used for attempts at breakthrough. Instead,
armour is largely employed in a fire support function to deliver
accurate fire against Ukrainian positions. Russia has started to employ
thermal camouflage on its vehicles and, using a range of other
modifications and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), has
significantly reduced the detectability of tanks at stand-off ranges.
Furthermore, these measures have reduced the probability of kill of a
variety of anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) at ranges beyond 1,400 m.
Russian artillery has begun to significantly refine the
Reconnaissance Strike Complex following the destruction of its
ammunition stockpiles and command and control infrastructure by guided
multiple-launch rocket systems (GMLRS) in July 2022. This has resulted
in much closer integration of multiple UAVs directly supporting
commanders authorised to apply fires. Russian artillery has also
improved its ability to fire from multiple positions and to fire and
move, reducing susceptibility to counterbattery fire. The key system
enabling this coordination appears to be the Strelets system. There has
been a shift in reliance upon 152-mm howitzers to a much greater
emphasis on 120-mm mortars in Russian fires; this reflects munitions and
barrel availability. Responsive Russian fires represent the greatest
challenge to Ukrainian offensive operations. Russian artillery is also
increasingly relying on loitering munitions for counterbattery fires.
Russian electronic warfare (EW) remains potent, with an approximate
distribution of at least one major system covering each 10 km of front.
These systems are heavily weighted towards the defeat of UAVs and tend
not to try and deconflict their effects. Ukrainian UAV losses remain at
approximately 10,000 per month. Russian EW is also apparently achieving
real time interception and decryption of Ukrainian Motorola 256-bit
encrypted tactical communications systems, which are widely employed by
the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Russian air defences have also seen a significant increase in their
effectiveness now that they are set up around known, and fairly static,
locations and are properly connected. Although Russia has persistently
struggled to respond to emerging threats, over time it has adapted.
Russian air defences are now assessed by the Ukrainian military to be
intercepting a proportion of GMLRS strikes as Russian point defences are
directly connected to superior radar.
Russian aviation remains constrained to delivering stand-off effects,
ranging from responsive lofted S-8 salvos against Ukrainian forming-up
points, to FAB-500 glide bombs delivered from medium altitude to ranges
up to 70 km. The Ukrainian military notes that Russia has a large
stockpile of FAB-500s and is systematically upgrading them with glide
kits. Although they only have limited accuracy, the size of these
munitions poses a serious threat. The Russian Aerospace Forces remain a
‘force in being’ and a major threat to advancing Ukrainian forces,
although they currently lack the capabilities to penetrate Ukrainian air
defences.
Following the destruction of Russian command and control
infrastructure in July 2022, the Russian military withdrew major
headquarters out of range of GMLRS and placed them in hardened
structures. They also wired them into the Ukrainian civil
telecommunications network and used field cables to branch from this to
brigade headquarters further forward. Assigned assets tend to connect to
these headquarters via microlink, significantly reducing their
signature. At the same time, from the battalion down, Russian forces
largely rely on unencrypted analogue military radios, reflecting a
shortage of trained signallers at the tactical level.
The US and Israeli anti-Semitism envoys have taken opposing positions
on whether supporters or critics of Jewish financier George Soros is
anti-Semitic. The argument kicked off when Twitter CEO Elon Musk
compared Soros to a cartoon supervillain.
In a tweet on Monday, Musk said that Soros reminds him of “Magneto,” a mutant-supremacist scientist from Marvel’s
‘X-Men’ universe. When a commenter pointed out that Magneto was depicted
– like Soros – as a Holocaust survivor and that both have “good
intentions,” Musk doubled down.
“You assume they are good intentions,” he wrote. “They are not. He
wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”
Musk was quickly accused of anti-Semitism, with Anti-Defamation League
CEO Jonathan Greenblatt declaring that by comparing the billionaire “to a
Jewish supervillain,” Musk would “embolden extremists.”
Washington thinks criticizing the financier is anti-Semitic, while
the Israeli government thinks supporting him is anti-Semitic
Is George Soros actually a real-life Magneto?
The Israeli government disagreed. “The Israeli government and the
vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing
entrepreneur and a role model,” Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli
tweeted on Thursday, adding that “criticism of Soros – who finances the
most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel
is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!”
Soros has donated more than $32 billion to liberal political causes
through his Open Society Foundations NGO, and was the largest donor in
last year’s midterm elections in the US, gifting $128 million to
Democratic Party candidates and organizations. Soros funds a number of
Palestinian activist groups that accuse the Israeli state of war crimes,
and several international organizations that promote boycotts of
Israeli goods and sanctions against its leaders.
In the US, the Biden administration sided with its leading donor against Chikli’s criticism.
“Irrespective of how one feels about George Soros’s politics or
policies, it is entirely disingenuous to deny that many ad hominem
attacks on him rely on classic antisemitic tropes and rhetoric,” US
Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt
tweeted on Friday.
“In bygone eras, the antisemites invoked the Rothschild family to
advance their conspiracies about Jews. Today they use Soros to do so,”
she declared.
Neither Soros nor his Open Society Foundations have responded to
Musk’s comments. Asked on Tuesday whether he was worried his
controversial tweets would drive advertisers away from Twitter, Musk
told CNBC News “I don’t care. I’ll say what I want to say, and if the
consequences are losing money, so be it.” (RT)
PCR |Against the backdrop of the United States’ recognition of the
investigation against Donald Trump as politically motivated, structural
and ideological controversies, and concerns that the American economy
will enter a recession, the GEOFOR editorial board asked Paul Craig
Roberts, Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy (USA), a PhD in
Economics and US Undersecretary of Treasury in the Reagan
administration, to share his views on America’s future.
GEOFOR: Special Counsel John Durham “acquitted” Donald Trump on the
so-called “Russiagate”, writing in his report that the FBI investigation
was politically motivated. How will this news affect the Democrats’
fight against Trump?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The Special Counsel’s vindication of Donald
Trump and denunciation of the FBI for conducting a politically motivated
investigation devoid of any evidence should collapse the equally
fraudulent Biden regime investigation of Trump on fake documents charges
and the New York state prosecution of Trump on alleged expense
misreporting charges. It has been clear for a long time that the list of
fake charges against Trump, supported by the media, are propaganda to
prevent Trump again running for President and to teach all future
potential presidential candidates that they will be destroyed if they
attempt to represent the people instead of the unelected ruling
oligarchy.
However, the Democrat Party and the presstitutes that service them
have no respect whatsoever for truth. Facts simply do not matter to
them. This is true also of American Universities, law associations,
medical associations, the CIA, FBI, NSA, the State Department, the
regulatory agencies such as NIH, CDC, FDA, the large corporations, and
many establishment Republican members of the House and Senate who serve
the economic interests that pay them, not truth. It is also the case
with a high percentage of Democrat voters who have been conditioned by
propaganda to hate Trump. To Democrats what matters is not facts, but
getting Trump. Truth is not permitted to prevent the destruction of
Trump.
Consequently, the US is moving toward a fatal split in the society
from which recovery is impossible. Trump represents ordinary Americans
who prefer peace to the neoconservatives’ wars, who want their jobs back
that the greed-driven capitalist global corporations sent to China and
Asia, who want their children properly educated instead of indoctrinated
with sexual perversion, Satanism, and told that they are racists. In
contrast, the Democrats are increasingly Woke–people who believe that
truth is an oppressive tool of white supremacy, that Christian morality
is tyrannical and discriminatory against pedophiles and other sexual
perverts, and that, as “President” Biden himself has said, white people
are the greatest threat to America. See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/05/15/us-navy-enlists-drag-queen-for-digital-ambassador-role-to-attract-more-recruits-2/
Now that official investigations by the House Republicans have brought the utter corruption of Biden and his son to light (see: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/05/16/bank-records-show-biden-family-received-10-million-in-payments-from-china-foreign-interests-house-oversight/
), the Democrats, the dangerous and corrupt military/security complex,
and the complicit whore American media, are desperate. They all stand as
being exposed. So, rather than apologize for their mistreatment of
Trump and his supporters–1,000 of whom the Democrats have illegally
imprisoned–they will likely strike out while they still control the
Executive Branch, the US Senate, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and federal agencies
such as the IRS that have been armed and militarized.
Alternatively, the corrupt and threatened Democrats might cause war
between the US and Russia, or Iran, or China in the hopes that a war
will unify even Trump supporters, especially the super-patriots among
them, around the “President” against “foreign enemies.”
azerbaycan | With the House of Representatives controlling the “power of the purse”
(the budget) of the US, it has become the norm in these politically
divisive days when the House is controlled by the party opposing the
president, to try to humiliate him by creating a crisis.
That being said, there has been an ever-growing chorus of US politicians
and officials who have called for the debt ceiling to be raised, saying
if they don’t do it, it will “help China,” or sometimes even Russia.
These claims are bizarre. Are they truly suggesting that the only reason
to maintain basic political unity and compromise in the US is Beijing?
And that this is the reason they should comply to keep the mountain of
US debt and spending going? Such a statement says a lot about US
politics, both past and present. First, it tells us that beyond exerting
aggression and fear of foreign adversaries, there is very little to
keep US politics together these days and its environment is essentially
toxic. Secondly, it also tells us how the US system sustains its power
as a whole.
The US is a vast and diverse nation. It has a population of over 300
million people across a territorial expanse which is the third largest
in the world by some definitions. Across its 50 states, a variety of
different ethnic and social backgrounds can be found. Your Baptist
pastor from Alabama has nothing in common with your ambitious young
middle-class banker living in New York City, and even less with your
struggling African-American family in the same city. In incorporating
such diversity, the political system of the US is also by constitution
decentralized, delegating power into multiple branches of government
dispersed across federal, state and local levels.
It is no surprise that this has produced a political system which is
beset by often bitter division and intense ideological and value-based
conflicts. This has been enough, as history demonstrates, to plunge the
country into a civil war. The development of mass media and social
networks has only made it worse. Thus, starting in the 20th century, the
American elite structure has sought to maintain control over its nation
by vesting itself in the politics of fear mongering, which forces a
continual emphasis on “American values,” namely democracy and liberty,
in the bid to maintain a basic consensus for the justification of the
state itself.
When analyzed through this lens, if the US runs out of adversaries and
threats, politicians genuinely might have difficulty justifying the
existence or unity of the nation altogether in its current form. The US
centralizes itself through fear and hysteria, because if not for those
things constantly looming, Americans wouldn’t have a whole lot to agree
on, be it guns, abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigration, or anything else.
antiwar | As Israel celebrates its 75th anniversary, the state-building project it cemented
into place in 1948 by expelling
750,000 Palestinians from their homeland is showing the first signs of unraveling.
The surprise is that Israel’s woes spring not, as generations of its leaders
feared, from outside forces – a combined attack from Arab states or pressure
from the international community – but from Israel’s own internal contradictions.
Israeli leaders created the very problems they all too obviously lack the tools
to now solve. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bombardment of Gaza in
recent days, killing dozens of Palestinians, should be understood in that light.
It is one more indication of Israel’s internal crisis.
Once again, the Palestinians are being used in a frantic bid to shore up an
increasingly fragile “Jewish” unity.
Israel’s long-term problem is underscored by the current, bitter standoff
over Netanyahu’s plan for a so-called judicial overhaul. The Israeli Jewish
population is split down the middle, with neither side willing to back down.
Rightly, each sees the confrontation in terms of a zero-sum
battle.
And behind this stands a political system in near-constant paralysis, with
neither side of the divide able to gain a stable majority in the parliament.
Israel is now mired in a permanent, low-level
civil war.
To understand how Israel reached this point, and where it is likely to head
next, one must delve deep into the country’s origin story.
Morality tale
The official narrative is that Israel was created
out of necessity: to serve as a safe haven for Jews fleeing centuries of
persecution and the horrors of the Nazi death camps in Europe.
The resulting ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the erasure of hundreds
of their towns and villages – what Palestinians call their Nakba,
or Catastrophe – is either mystified or presented simply as a desperate
act of self-defense by a long-victimized people.
This colossal act of dispossession, aided and abetted by western powers, has
been reinvented for western publics as a simple morality tale, as a story of
redemption.
Israel’s establishment was not only a chance for the Jewish people to gain
self-determination through statehood so they would never again be persecuted.
Jews would also build a state from scratch that would offer to the world a more
virtuous model of how to live.
This tapped neatly, if subliminally, into a western, Christian-derived
worldview that looked to the Holy Land for salvation.
Jews would restore their place as “a light unto the nations” by “redeeming”
the land they had stolen from the Palestinians and offering a path by which
westerners could redeem themselves too.
The photo they ran with–depicting Vitaly Klitchko inspecting the downed wreckage of a hypersonic missile–is quite misleading. Firstly, its from earlier in the month, not the recent attack on the Patriot missile battery. Secondly, that's not Kinzhal wreckage… the Kinzhal is
much larger and has different nose cone angles.
Ukraine presented "proof" that they shot down a Kinzhal, hoping perhaps that people will fail a basic shape recognition test. pic.twitter.com/CHRCFJ3jJN
— Big Serge ☦️πΊπΈπ·πΊ (@witte_sergei) May 10, 2023
And while the article invites, indeed sets up the
inference that the Russians have rounded these guys up because the
missiles were shot down (even though they weren’t), buried in the
article is a little problem with timing:
NBCNews | The three scientists — Anatoly Maslov, Alexander Shiplyuk
and Valery Zvegintsev — were employees of the Khristianovich Institute
of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in the Siberian city of
Novosibirsk. They were all detained on suspicion of high treason over
the past year, according to the letter published on the institute’s website.
The
letter professes the men’s innocence and praises their academic
achievements, adding that all three chose to stay in Russia rather than
accept highly paid and prestigious work abroad.
“We know
each of them as a patriot and a decent person who is not capable of
doing what the investigating authorities suspect them of,” it said.
It
is rare and risky in modern Russia to speak out in defense of people
charged with treason, especially after a bill was adopted last month
increasing the maximum sentence for the crime to life in jail.
The Russian state media agency Tass reported on the arrests of Maslov and Shiplyuk last summer and on Zvegintsev’s this week. It said Zvegintsev was detained about three weeks ago and is under house arrest. NBC News could not verify those details.
Shiplyuk was in charge
of the laboratory of hypersonic technologies at the institute, which
has “unique hypersonic aerodynamic installations designed to study the
fundamental and applied problems of hypersonic flight,” according to his
bio on the website. Maslov is a renowned expert in the field of
aerogasdynamics, it said.
The institute released an open letter
in support of Maslov after he was arrested in June for what it said was
“high treason,” saying his colleagues were “shocked” by his detention.
It was also raising money on behalf of the families of Maslov and
Shiplyuk to cover their legal expenses.
Tass reported
this week that the materials in Maslov’s case are classified and have
been handed over to a judge in a St. Petersburg court. The agency said
Maslov’s case was investigated by the FSB, Russia’s secret service.
While
the details of their cases have not been made public, the open letter
by their colleagues said the three men could have been arrested for
simply doing their jobs, including making presentations at global
conferences and taking part in international scientific projects. Their
work was also repeatedly checked by the institute’s expert commission to
ensure it did not include “restricted information,” the letter said.
“In
this situation, we are not only afraid for the fate of our colleagues.
We just do not understand how to continue to do our job,” it added,
raising concerns about “a rapid decline in the level of research” if
employees are too afraid to do their work.
This is the first time in history that the U.S. now has absolute proof
that Russian systems can penetrate the most advanced U.S. defenses.
Recall, that reportedly Ukraine was armed with the latest Pac-3
missiles, not the older Pac-2s,
etc. This has dire consequences for all European security as it proves
that Russian missiles can now penetrate any NATO base in Poland and
elsewhere with full impunity. In fact, these are the types of tectonic
moments that create generational doctrinal
shifts and change the calculus of defense postures entirely.
militarywatchmagazine | On May 16 as part of a complex series of strikes on the Ukrainian
capital Kiev the Russian Air Force employed the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal
hypersonic ballistic missile to neutralise a unit from an American
Patriot air defence system, destroying its a radar and a control centre
and reportedly at least one of its launchers. According to Russian
sources, the Ukrainian crew operating the Patriot were aware a strike
was incoming, but had only a limited warning time due to the Kinzhal
missile’s very high speed - limiting opportunities for the missile
system to change position or reload. The Patriot system targeted was one
of two delivered, with Germany and the United States having each
supplied a single unit. The unit reportedly fired 32 surface to air
missiles at the Kinzhal on approach, which at approximately $3 million
each amounted to a $96 million barrage to attempt to destroy a missile
with an estimated cost of under $2 million. The very high cost and
limited number of the Patriot’s interceptors was a key argument for not sending the systems to Ukraine, with their effectiveness also having been brought to question not only due to the system’s highly troubled combat record, but also to the advanced capabilities
of new Russian missiles such as the Kinzhal, Iskander and Zicron. These
are considered nearly impossible to intercept particularly in their
terminal stages. The delivery of Patriots was nevertheless seen as
necessary due to the near collapse of Ukrainian air defences, as warnings have been given
with growing frequency by both Western and Ukrainian sources that the
arsenal of S-300 and BuK missile systems protecting the country has
become critically depleted.
Destruction of the Patriot systems comes less than a month after the first systems were delivered in April, and follows a warning in December from Russian President Vladimir Putin that the destruction of the systems was an absolute certainty should
they be deployed in Ukraine. He assured that with Washington “now
saying that they can put a Patriot [in Ukraine]. Okay, let them do it.
We will crack the Patriot [like a nut] too, and something will need to
be installed in its place, new systems need to be developed - this is a
complex and lengthy process” - indicating that NATO had no newer
generations of long range air defence systems available to replace the
Patriot once its vulnerability was demonstrated. “Our adversaries
proceed from the idea that this is supposedly a defensive weapon. All
right, we'll keep that in mind. And an antidote can always be found,"
Putin added. The United States notably reassured Russia in
December that Patriot systems would not be manned by American
personnel, which was interpreted by some sources as an effective green
light to proceed with strikes. With Ukrainian personnel expected to take until 2024
to learn to operate Patriots, they are thought to have been manned by
contractors from NATO member states who are already acquainted with the
systems.
responsiblestatecraft | There might be a massive new Ukraine aid budget debate on the
horizon, as Uncle Sam is depleting the last one at a record pace and
Pentagon stockpiles are, by all accounts, running low.
According to a new report by Defense One,
some $36.4 billion of the $48.9 billion allocated for Ukraine-related
military aid since February 2022 has been delivered, contracted, or
“otherwise committed.” There is only $11.3 billion left, and it will
“run out in four months.”
The most recent allocation ($1.2 billion last week)
came under the U.S. Security Assistance Initiative, which means the
additional air defense systems, artillery rounds, and ammunition that
have been promised will be farmed out to U.S. defense contractors and
won’t be ready for shipment right away. Alternatively, aid has come via
the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which sends Ukraine weapons
directly from the Pentagon’s stockpiles. According to the Department of Defense,
there have been 37 such drawdowns totaling over $21 billion in weapons
and supplies since August 2021 when the U.S. first responded to Russian
forces massing along the border with Ukraine.
But now reports indicate that American stockpiles of HIMARS, Javelins, Stinger missiles, and 155 mm artillery rounds have been shrinking since late last year, and arms manufacturers are now scrambling to keep up.
This has led the U.S. to go out on an ammo-raising spree, gathering
pledges from allies and partners. Some, like South Korea, have resisted
but found a way to comply. According to the Wall Street Journal,
Washington has sent Ukraine more than one million rounds of 155 mm
caliber ammunition, and allies and partners have contributed more on top
of that. Moreover, NATO and European partners are being pressed to send
whatever they have from their own stockpiles for Ukraine’s anticipated
counteroffensive.
So where does this leave us? It would seem that defense contractors
need additional money and capacity to backfill the stores. Without more,
Ukraine with be under-supplied for both its counteroffensive and
whatever follows it. Meanwhile, American stockpiles are waning, which
hurts readiness.
One congressional aide “who closely tracks the issue” told POLITICO this week
that the money to draw down existing U.S. stockpiles will expire in
July. According to the report, which speculated when and how big the
next aid package will be, “that would mean the flow of equipment could
be disrupted if Kyiv has to wait an extended period for a new tranche of
funding.” Would it be included in the appropriations process, or a
supplemental? “I expect there will need to be a supplemental at some
point,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) told POLITICO. “It’s also clear
that it’s taken far too long to get munitions and tanks delivered to the
Ukrainians.”
But as Sam Skove points out in his Defense One report, there is the nagging issue of Republican members of Congress who have said they would not support another “blank check” to Ukraine and
would expect not only greater oversight but also an articulation of a
diplomatic strategy for ending the war before they would support another
multi-billion-dollar package. Their position not only reflects a need
for a full accounting for where the money is going, but also concern
that the American economy right now cannot afford what has become the
most expensive U.S.-war-that-is-not-a-U.S.-war in history.
MoA | In the 1990s and early 2000s Biden supported bankruptcy reform that made it more difficult, especially for the poor, to get rid of debt:
[Biden] had pushed for two earlier bankruptcy reform bills
in 2000 and 2001, both of which failed. But in 2005, BAPCPA made it
through, successfully erecting all kinds of roadblocks for Americans
struggling with debt, and doing so just before the financial crisis of
2008. Since BAPCPA passed, Chapter 13 filings went from representing
just 24 percent of all bankruptcy filings per year to 39 percent in
2017.
In 1984 he proposed
freezing Social Security benefits — that is, ending cost-of-living
adjustments that boost benefits to keep up with inflation. In January
1995 he gave a speech endorsing a balanced budget amendment (an utterly lunatic policy)
and boasted about his previous record of proposing "that we freeze
every single solitary program in the government, anything the government
had to do with, every single solitary one, that we not spend a penny
more, not even accounting for inflation, than we spent the year before."
In November 1995 he did so again,
boasting that "I tried with Senator Grassley back in the '80s to freeze
all government spending, including Social Security, including
everything."
There are other non-progressive laws and several wars that had
Biden's support. In the current fight over the debt ceiling the
Republicans demand cuts to several welfare bills. It is certainly not
obvious that Biden is against those. He may well be using the debt
ceiling fight to push for politics he favors but which a majority of
Democrats would otherwise oppose.
Talks have been held in the White House with Senate and House
majority and minority leaders. There were no serious results because the
Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer held Biden back from making concessions to the Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy:
The California Republican had vented to his colleagues just
hours before the meeting that the current format of negotiations — with
all four party leaders in a room with the president — wasn’t fruitful.
Speaking to his conference on Tuesday morning, McCarthy said the five of
them had achieved little in their first sitdown last week, arguing that
Schumer had prevented Biden from fully engaging with the speaker and McConnell, according to two people familiar with his remarks. Whenever Biden did seem to agree with Republicans, McCarthy said Schumer would try to cut him off.
The talks will now continue without the Senate leadership:
Leaders agreed to narrow a bicameral negotiation down to
Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Biden, hoping fewer players might be more
productive in reaching a bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling. Even
then, it looks like a longshot to some Senate Democrats.
That setting will give Biden the opportunity to make 'concessions'
that are favored by his rich donors but opposed by a majority of people
who voted for him. He will then sell those by presenting them as the
only possible step to take. Maggie Thatcher's "There is no alternative!"
will again succeed.
The current due date for a debt ceiling deal is Friday:
Reflecting the growing sense of urgency, the White House
announced Tuesday that the president will cut short his trip to Asia and
now plans return to Washington on Sunday in order to resume
negotiations with Republicans as soon as possible.
Biden will depart Wednesday for a trip to Japan but will no longer
make stops in Papua New Guinea and Australia before returning stateside.
1. Russia launches drones towards Patriot system in kiev
2. Patriot radar picks up swarm of drones approaching kiev
3. Patriot is activated and launches its full set of missiles (32)
4. Patriot radar activation gives away its exact location to Russian receptors
5. Russia launches Khinzal missile at the now exposed Patriot system
6. Boom!
The total cost of the Kinzhal strike on the Patriot
system. About $158,000,000 for the missiles. A radar was clearly hit.
And a launcher. That is not the entire system, of course. The cost of a
Patriot system is 1.1 billion. 400,000,000
for the system. 690,000,000 for the missiles. How much damage did the
Kinzhals do to the "system'. Probably $200,000,000 worth (conservative
guess). So... total cost close to $400,000,000 -- IN JUST 2 MINUTES. A
lot of money and the US is heading for a debt
crisis. As I have argued, Putin calls the war with Ukraine an SMO
because he reckons that the real war is beyond -- WWIII--hybrid
military, economic, cultural. The longer Ukraine keeps on fighting in
America's loincloth as we say here in Japan, the weaker
America becomes with its balls in the wind.
After all, a good deal
of evidence suggests that the administration’s real—if only
semi-acknowledged—objective is to topple Russia’s government. The
draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were
designed to crash its economy. As the New York Times reported, these sanctions have
ignited questions in Washington and in European capitals over whether
cascading events in Russia could lead to “regime change,” or rulership
collapse, which President Biden and European leaders are careful to
avoid mentioning.
By repeatedly labeling Putin a “war criminal” and a murderous
dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his
predecessors deployed against Noriega, MiloΕ‘eviΔ, Qaddafi, and Saddam
Hussein) has circumscribed Washington’s diplomatic options, rendering
regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome.
I counted 30 Patriot PAC-3 MSE launches here.
The FY2024 costs of these per missile is about $$5,275,000
That was $158,250,000 fired in about two minutes. And as we see, the battery or something else likely got blown up. So it failed in its mission. pic.twitter.com/9rwPnHkNGu
Diplomacy requires an
understanding of an adversary’s interests and motives and an ability to
make judicious compromises. But by assuming a Manichaean view of world
politics, as has become Washington’s reflexive posture, “compromise, the
virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes the treason of the new,” as the
foreign policy scholar Hans Morgenthau put it, “for the mutual
accommodation of conflicting claims . . . amounts to surrender when the
moral standards themselves are the stakes of the conflict.”
Washington, then, will not entertain an end to the conflict until
Russia is handed a decisive defeat. Echoing previous comments by Biden,
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal
is to weaken Russia militarily. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has
repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is
not serious about peace. For its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will
settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory
occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro
Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on
Russia to induce its political collapse.
Of course, the same momentum pushing toward a war in pursuit of
overweening ends catapults Washington into pursuing a war employing
unlimited means, an impulse encapsulated in the formula, endlessly
invoked by Washington policymakers and politicians: “Whatever it takes,
for as long as it takes.” As the United States and its NATO allies pour
ever more sophisticated weapons onto the battlefield, Moscow will likely
be compelled (from military necessity, if not from popular domestic
pressure) to interdict the lines of communication that convey these
weapons shipments to Ukraine’s forces, which could lead to a direct
clash with NATO forces. More importantly, as Russian casualties
inevitably mount, animosity toward the West will intensify. A strategy
guided by “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes” vastly increases
the risk of accidents and escalation.
The proxy war embraced by Washington today would
have been shunned by the Washington of the Cold War. And some of the
very misapprehensions that have contributed to the start of this war
make it far more dangerous than Washington acknowledges. America’s NATO
expansion strategy and its pursuit of nuclear primacy both emerge from
its self-appointed role as “the indispensable nation.” The menace Russia
perceives in that role—and therefore what it sees as being at stake in
this war—further multiply the danger. Meanwhile, nuclear
deterrence—which demands careful, cool, and even cooperative monitoring
and adjustment between potential adversaries—has been rendered wobbly
both by U.S. strategy and by the hostility and suspicion created by this
heated proxy war. Rarely have what Morgenthau praised as the virtues of
the old diplomacy been more needed; rarely have they been more abjured.
Neither Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war
aims in full. Notwithstanding its proclaimed annexation of the Luhansk,
Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson administrative districts, Moscow is
unlikely to establish complete control over them. Ukraine is similarly
unlikely to recapture all of its pre-2014 territory lost to Moscow.
Barring either side’s complete collapse, the war can end only with
compromise.
Reaching such an accord would be extremely difficult. Russia would
need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute
significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine. For its
part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk
and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised
by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would
grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional
Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas. More painfully, Kyiv would need to
concede Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a
land bridge between the peninsula and Russia. A peace settlement would
need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic
relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union
(to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its
rules). Most important of all—given that the specter of Ukraine’s NATO
membership was the precipitating cause of the war—Kyiv would need to
forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality.
Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s
goal of recovering the “entire territory” occupied by Russia since 2014,
and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that
Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the
war. Make no mistake, such an accord would need to make allowances for
Russia’s security interests in what it has long called its “near-abroad”
(that is, its sphere of influence)—and, in so doing, would require the
imposition of limits on Kyiv’s freedom of action in its foreign and
defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty).
Such a compromise, guided by the ethos of the old diplomacy, would be
anathema to Washington’s ambitions and professed values. Here, again,
the lessons, real and otherwise, of the Cuban Missile Crisis apply. To
enhance his reputation for toughness, Kennedy and his closest advisers
spread the story that they forced Moscow to back down and unilaterally
withdraw its missiles in the face of steely American resolve. In fact,
Kennedy—shaken by the apocalyptic potentialities of the crisis that he
had largely provoked—secretly acceded to Moscow’s offer to withdraw its
missiles from Cuba in exchange for Washington’s withdrawing its missiles
from Turkey and Italy. The Cuban Missile Crisis was therefore resolved
not by steadfastness but by compromise.
But because that quid pro quo was successfully hidden from a
generation of foreign policy makers and strategists, from the American
public, and even from Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own vice president,
JFK and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the
face of what the United States construes as aggression, together with
the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering
that aggression, define a successful national security strategy. These
false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis were one of the main reasons
that Johnson was impelled to confront supposed Communist aggression in
Vietnam, regardless of the costs and risks. The same false lessons have
informed a host of Washington’s interventions and regime-change wars
ever since—and now help frame the dichotomy of “appeasement” and
“resistance” that defines Washington’s response to the war in Ukraine—a
response that, in its embrace of Wilsonian belligerence, eschews
compromise and discrimination based on power, interest, and
circumstance.
Even more repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole
superpower would be the conditions required to reach a comprehensive
European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. That
settlement, also guided by the old diplomacy, would need to resemble the
vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and
Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War. It would need to
resemble Gorbachev’s notion of a “common European home” and Charles
de Gaulle’s vision of a European community “from the Atlantic to the
Urals.” And it would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what
de Gaulle labeled it): an instrument to further the primacy of a
superpower across the Atlantic.
thelastamericanvagabond | For those who have not closed their eyes to the integration of
leading unreconstructed Nazis, Italian Fascist, and Japanese fascists
into the Anglo-American intelligence complex after World War Two this
celebration is bitter sweet to say the least.
As Cynthia Chung demonstrated in her book The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,
between 1958-1973, every single head of NATO’s central European command
were former Nazi SS officers. And as Swiss historian Daniele Ganser
demonstrated in his NATO’s Secret Armies,
the Cold War served as the excuse to build a vast paramilitary complex
using fascists from Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, and Germany in order
to carry out a multi-faceted war on the people of Europe through the
organization of terrorist organizations like The Red Brigade and the
targeting assassinations of nationalist leaders unwilling to adapt to a
new depopulation-oriented world order.
Sadly, this devil’s pact
was not something that simply occurred in the wild days of the Cold War,
but continues virulently to this day on a number of levels.
Modern Nazi Revivalist Movements
For example, modern expressions of fascism can be seen in the renewal of swastika-tattooed, black sun of the occult loving, wolfsangel-wearing Azov,
C14, Svoboda and Aidar neo-Nazis in Ukraine today, on top of a whole
re-writing of WWII history which has taken an accelerated dive into
unreality during the 30 years since the Soviet Union collapsed.
Across the spectrum of post Warsaw Pact members absorbed into NATO,
such as Lithuania, Estonia, Albania, Slovakia, and Latvia, Nazi
collaborators of WWII have been glorified with statues, public plaques,
monuments, and even schools, parks, and streets named after Nazis.
Celebrating Nazi collaborators while tearing down pro-Soviet monuments
has nearly become a pre-condition for any nation wishing to join NATO.
In
Estonia, which joined NATO in 2004, the defense ministry-funded Erna
Society has celebrated the Nazi Erna Saboteur group that worked with the
Waffen SS in WWII with the Erna advance Guard being raised to official national heroes. In Albania, Prime Minister Edi Rama rehabilitated Nazi collaborator Midhat Frasheri, who deported thousands of Kosovo Jews to death camps.
In
Lithuania, the pro-Nazi Lithuanian Activist Front leader Juozas LukΕ‘a
who carried out atrocities in Kaunas was honored as a national hero by
an act of Parliament which passed a resolution dubbing “the year 2021 as the year of Juozas Luksa-Daumantas”. In Slovakia,
the ‘Our Slovakia Peoples Party’ led by neo-Nazi MariΓ‘n Kotleba moved
from the fringe to mainstream wining 10% of parliamentary seats in 2019.
Finland
has become a new member of NATO which will possibly be joined by
Sweden, both of whom share deep unresolved pro-Nazi traditions which are
slowly coming to the surface once more as I outlined in Nazi Skeletons in Finland and Sweden’s Closets.
Eugenics
has become once more a governing pseudo science of a fascist elite
class of social engineers seeking to breed out undesired traits in the
population while reducing the overall population levels to manageable
numbers — using the same formulas adopted by Hitler and his
collaborators in the 1930s -1940s.
The fact is that a certain
something wasn’t resolved on the 9th of May, 1945 which has a lot to do
with the slow re-emergence of a new form of fascism during the second
half of the 20th century and the renewed danger of a global dictatorship
which the world faces again today.
Free To A Good Home
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I know what gooning is same as I know what felching is but I don't care to
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ni...
If Free Will Is False, Destiny Is True
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Free will is like God: perhaps dead, its absence having something to say
about morality (what Nietzsche meant by “Gott ist tot” was that the
Christian God ...
FREE BOOK: On Nonviolence
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“Michael Barker’s interrogation of nonviolent protest tactics and regime
change is both timely and important. Drawing on cases ranging from American
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
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