strategic culture |Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.
The money quote:
“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has
a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it,
not to mention the territory of new regions.”
Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way
or another. The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.
Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.
Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail
and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers
leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes,
this is a NATO force.
That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.
Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a
music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots
people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on
fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing,
all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.
And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in
southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least
five strikes.
Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in
Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is
among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan
next October.
Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they
have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring
China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb,
Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total
political support from Beijing and Moscow.
The sponsors remain the same
Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no
one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of
course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers.
A massive investigation is in progress.
The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday
during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a
mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it
with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.
Let’s go pop. To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this
ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”. Oh no; it’s more like an
all-American psy op. ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real
Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them.
That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in:
ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably
Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian
SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the
commando killers did not look like Slavs.
It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He
directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and
British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places
in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible
terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.
The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the
Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…
sonar21 | Americans are by-and-large decent, genial folks. But when it comes to
history, most have the memory of an Alzheimer’s patient. Sam Cooke was
speaking for most Americans when he crooned, “Don’t know much about
history …”. So I will make this simple — America’s hatred of Russia has
its roots in the U.S. Government’s post-WW II embrace of Nazis. Tim
Weiner writes about this in his essential book, Legacy of Ashes.
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Berlin, U.S. Army
intelligence recruited and relied on German General Reinhard Gehlen:
“During World War II, General Gehlen had tried to spy on the Soviets
from the eastern front as a leader of the Abwehr, Hitler’s military
intelligence service. He was an imperious and cagey man who swore he had
a network of “good Germans” to spy behind Russian lines for the United
States.
“From the beginning,” Gehlen said, “I was motivated by the following
convictions: A showdown between East and West is unavoidable. Every
German is under the obligation of contributing his share, so that
Germany is in a position to fulfill the missions incumbent on her for
the common defense of Western Christian Civilization.” The United States
needed “the best German men as co-workers…if Western Culture is to be
safeguarded.” The intelligence network he offered to the Americans was a
group of “outstanding German nationals who are good Germans but also
ideologically on the side of the Western democracies.”. . .
“But in July 1949, under relentless pressure from the army, the CIA
took over the Gehlen group. Housed in a former Nazi headquarters outside
Munich, Gehlen welcomed dozens of prominent war criminals into his
circle. As Helms and Sichel feared, the East German and Soviet
intelligence services penetrated the Gehlen group at the highest levels.
The worst of the moles surfaced long after the Gehlen group had
transformed itself into the national intelligence service of West
Germany. Gehlen’s longtime chief of counterintelligence had been working
for Moscow all along.”
In the wake of this debacle, the CIA failed to recruit and run any
significant sources in the Soviet Government. The CIA had very few
officers who spoke Russian and swallowed whole hog the belief that the
Soviets were intent on conquering the world and that it was up to the
United States — relying heavily on the CIA — to stop the Soviets. That
became the cornerstone of American foreign policy and explains the CIA’s
obsession with regime change. No one in the intelligence hierarchy was
encouraged or permitted to raise the alternative view — i.e., the
Soviets, fearful of a Western invasion, took firm control of the
European nations on its western border and installed governments that
would served the Soviet interest. The CIA started its life as a new
bureaucracy in Washington firmly committed to destroying the Soviet
Union.
One of its first projects was recruiting and funding an insurgency
with Ukrainians who had sided with the Nazis. While that effort was
crushed by the Soviets, it served to further convince Stalin and others
in the Soviet hierarchy that the West was in bed with Nazi survivors and
could not be trusted.
The failure of the CIA to predict critical world events was an early
distinguishing feature of the CIA from the start. The Soviets detonated
their first nuke on August 29, 1949. Three weeks later a U.S. Air Force
crew flying out of Alaska detected traces of radiation beyond normal
levels. Weiner recounts what happened next:
“On September 20, the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union
would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another four years.”
The CIA’s leaders knack for getting it wrong continued with the
failure to heed warnings that China was going to intervene on behalf of
North Korea in 1950. Here is Weiner’s account:
“The president left for Wake Island on October 11, 1950. The CIA
assured him that it saw “no convincing indications of an actual Chinese
Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in
Korea…barring a Soviet decision for global war.” The agency reached that
judgment despite two alarms from its three-man Tokyo station. First the
station chief, George Aurell, reported that a Chinese Nationalist
officer in Manchuria was warning that Mao had amassed 300,000 troops
near the Korean border. Headquarters paid little heed. Then Bill Duggan,
later chief of station in Taiwan, insisted that the Chicoms soon would
cross into North Korea. General MacArthur responded by threatening to
have Duggan arrested. The warnings never reached Wake Island.
At headquarters, the agency kept advising Truman that China would not
enter the war on any significant scale. On October 18, as MacArthur’s
troops surged north toward the Yalu River and the Chinese border, the
CIA reported that “the Soviet Korean venture has ended in failure.” On
October 20, the CIA said that Chinese forces detected at the Yalu were
there to protect hydroelectric power plants. On October 28, it told the
White H ouse that those Chinese troops were scattered volunteers. On
October 30, after American troops had been attacked, taking heavy
casualties, the CIA reaffirmed that a major Chinese intervention was
unlikely. A few days later, Chinese-speaking CIA officers interrogated
several prisoners taken during the encounter and determined that they
were Mao’s soldiers. Yet CIA headquarters asserted one last time that
China would not invade in force. Two days later 300,000 Chinese troops
struck with an attack so brutal that it nearly pushed the Americans into
the sea.
Are you beginning to see a pattern here? While it is true there were
some solid intelligence officers in the ranks of the CIA, any attempt to
raise a warning that flew against conventional wisdom or defied what
the leaders wanted to hear was ignored or punished. The failures of the
CIA leadership to correctly predict the Soviets producing a nuclear bomb
and the Chinese invasion of Korea are not isolated incidents. When it
comes to big, critical issues — e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tet
offensive, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Shah
of Iran and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni, Saddam’s 1990 invasion
of Kuwait, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9-11 plot, weapons of
“Mass Destruction in Iraq” and Russia’s ability to survive western
sanctions and spin up its defense industry to outpace the U.S. and NATO
countries combined — the CIA missed them all.
SCF | Russian President Vladimir Putin was spot-on this week in his observation about why France’s Emmanuel Macron is strutting around and mouthing off about war in Ukraine. Putin remarked in an interview that Macron’s wanton warmongering over Ukraine was borne out of resentment due to the spectacular loss of France’s standing in Africa. One after another, France’s former colonial countries have told Paris in no uncertain terms to get out of their internal affairs. Since 2020 and the coup in Mali, there has been immense political upheaval on the continent, particularly in West and Central Africa, stretching from the vast Sahel region down to the equator. At least seven nations have undergone coups or government changes against Francophone rulers. They include Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, Central African Republic, Gabon, and Guinea. The continent-wide changes have come as a political earthquake to France. The new African governments have adamantly rejected old-style French patronage and have asserted a newfound national independence.
Paris has had to recall unwanted ambassadors, shut down military bases, and withdraw thousands of troops. Where to put these French troops? In Ukraine, pitted against Russia? Popular sentiment across Africa is exasperated with and repudiating “Francafrique” corruption. Meanwhile, with an unmistakable end-of-era sense, French media have lamented “France’s shrinking footprint in Africa.” A former diplomat summed up the momentous geopolitical shift thus: “The deep trend confirms itself. Our military presence is no longer accepted. We need to totally rethink our relationship with Africa. We have been kicked out of Africa. We need to depart from other countries before we are told to.” Africa analysts are now watching two key countries closely. They are Senegal and Ivory Coast. Both are currently governed by pro-France presidents but the rising anti-French political tide is putting those incumbents at risk of either a coup or electoral ouster.
The blow to the French political elite cannot be overstated. The loss of status in its former colonies is conflating multiple crises tantamount to the traumatic loss of Algeria back in the early 1960s. Financially, for decades after handing over nominal independence to African nations, Paris continued to exploit these countries through control of currencies and their prodigious natural resources. Most of France’s electricity, for example, is generated from uranium ore mined in Africa – and obtained like most other African resources for a pittance. The system of neocolonial suzerainty was typically sustained by France bribing local corrupt regimes to do its bidding and offering security guarantees from the continuance of French military bases. Not for nothing did Paris think of itself as the African Gendarme.
One of the extraordinary curiosities of this neocolonial arrangement was that African nations were compelled to deposit their gold treasuries in France’s central bank. Any African nation trying to resist the neocolonial vassalage was liable to be attacked militarily through counter-coups, or its nationalist leaders were assassinated like Thomas Sankara in 1987, who was known as “Africa’s Che Guevara”. Nevertheless, the halcyon days of France’s dominance over its former colonies are over. African nations are discovering a new sense of independence and purpose, as well as solidarity to help each other fend off pressure from France to reinstate the status quo ante. The collapse of France’s status in Africa is perceived by the French establishment as a grievous loss in presumed global power.
No French politician can feel more aggrieved than President Emmanuel Macron. Macron imagines himself to be on a mission to restore “France’s greatness”. He seems to harbor fantasies of also leading the rest of Europe under the tutelage of Paris. It was Macron who proclaimed one of his grand objectives as achieving a reset in Franco-African relations, one which would renew continental respect for Paris and promote French strategic interests. How embarrassing for Macron that a whole spate of African nations are asserting that they no longer want to have anything to do with the old colonial power. Chagrin indeed.
NYTimes | Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, on Thursday delivered a pointed speech on the Senate floor excoriating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as a major obstacle to peace in the Middle East and calling for new leadership in Israel, five months into the war.
Many Democratic lawmakers have condemned Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership and his right-wing governing coalition, and President Biden has even criticized the Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza as “over the top.” But Mr. Schumer’s speech amounted to the sharpest critique yet from a senior American elected official — effectively urging Israelis to replace Mr. Netanyahu.
“I believe in his heart, his highest priority is the security of Israel,” said Mr. Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States. “However, I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” Mr. Schumer added: “He has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
The speech was the latest reflection of the growing dissatisfaction among Democrats, particularly progressives, with Israel’s conduct of the war and its toll on Palestinian civilians, which has created a strategic and political dilemma for Mr. Biden. Republicans have tried to capitalize on that dynamic for electoral advantage, hugging Mr. Netanyahu closer as Democrats repudiate him. And on Thursday, they lashed out at Mr. Schumer for his remarks.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said on the Senate floor that it was “grotesque and hypocritical” for Americans “who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of the democratically elected leader of Israel.” He called Mr. Schumer’s move “unprecedented.”
“The Democratic Party doesn’t have an anti-Bibi problem,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “It has an anti-Israel problem.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Mr. Schumer’s remarks “earth-shatteringly bad” and accused him of “calling on the people of Israel to overthrow their government.” And House Republicans, gathered in West Virginia for a party retreat, hastily called a news conference to attack Mr. Schumer for his comments and position themselves as the true friends of Israel in Congress.
Mr. Schumer’s remarks came a day after Senate Republicans invited Mr. Netanyahu to speak as their special guest at a party retreat in Washington. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, asked Mr. Netanyahu to address Republicans virtually, but he could not appear because of a last-minute scheduling conflict. Ambassador Michael Herzog, Israel’s envoy to the United States, spoke in his place and also addressed the House G.O.P. gathering on Thursday.
In his speech at the Capitol, Mr. Schumer, who represents a state with more than 20 percent of the country’s Jewish population, was careful to assert that he was not trying to dictate any electoral outcome in Israel. He prefaced his harsh criticism of Mr. Netanyahu with a long defense of the country, which he said American Jews “love in our bones.”
roburie |While the Washington Post has long been considered the mouthpiece of the CIA,
the New York Times has been more effective at carrying water for it in
recent years. The recent longish Times article entitled The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin
contains recitation of CIA-friendly talking points that portrays it as
indispensable to ‘our’ ability to commit pointless, petty atrocities
against Russia as the US sacrifices more Ukrainians in its misguided
war. Missing from the piece is any conceivable reason for the US to
continue the war.
The oft ascribed motive (and here)
for the CIA’s existence is to act as the US President’s secret army
abroad. The wisdom of this arrangement has been debated over the years.
Former US President Harry Truman, who oversaw the founding of the CIA
from its predecessor, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), later regretted the decision
and argued that the CIA should be brought to heel. Later, the Cold War
presented cover for the CIA to act badly under the cover of national
defense.
In Stephen Kinzer’s book, All the Shah’s Men,
the CIA paid people to pretend to be communists so as to convey the
fiction that the CIA’s effort was about ‘fighting communism’ rather than
stealing Iran’s oil. Similarly, in the US coup that ousted
Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz for daring to raise the minimum wage
paid by foreign-owned industries in Guatemala, also featured fake
communists intended to convince the American press that the CIA was
fighting for freedom and democracy rather than to steal wages from poor
people for the benefit of rich Americans.
Together, these
imply that fake communists had been more effectively demonized by
Federal agencies than other available out groups because of the threat
they didn’t pose to American capital. Recall, in 1919 Woodrow Wilson
sent the American Expeditionary Force to join the Brits, French, and
Japanese in trying to reverse the Russian Revolution. Later, through the
Five Eyes Alliance, ‘the West’ spent the post-War era attacking the
Soviets while alleging that they were responding to political violence
that they (Five Eyes) started.
Oddly, given recent history,
the claim that the CIA is the President’s secret army still appears to
be the received wisdom in Washington and New York. This is odd because
while the CIA appears to be acting as Joe Biden’s secret army
in Ukraine and Israel, it went to war with (the duly elected President
of the US) Donald Trump for his entire four years in office. While Mr.
Trump played the victim of the US intelligence agencies to perfection,
he didn’t do what many normal humans would have done in his
circumstance--- clear out the top few levels of management at CIA, the
FBI, and NSA and see where this leaves ‘us.’
Implied
is a reversal of political causality whose proof can only be deduced. Is
Biden directing the CIA, or is the CIA directing Biden? For instance,
while Biden was Barack Obama’s point-man in Ukraine before, during, and
after the US-led coup there in 2014, Mr. Obama was publicly arguing
that Ukraine was of no strategic value to the US. With Donald Trump
following Mr. Obama as President, the CIA likely saw its 2014 coup in
Ukraine going to waste. This interpretation sheds a different light on
the Hunter Biden laptop fraud perpetrated by 51 current and former CIA employees.
(FBI informant Alexander Smirnov has been convicted of nothing
related to the new charges of ‘Russian interference.’ As was proved
with Russiagate, charges are easy to make, difficult to prove. No one---
not a single person, was convicted on the now antique charges of
Russian collusion. Those who were convicted were convicted on process
charges unrelated to the collusion charges. This use of the law as a
political weapon is called lawfare).
The view in this piece
is that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 because Barack Obama threw
several trillion dollars at the malefactors on Wall Street who blew up
the global economy while he pissed on the unemployed, the foreclosed
upon, and every working person in the US. In so doing, an income and
wealth chasm was rebuilt between the public welfare recipients who run
Wall Street and Big Tech and the former industrial workers whose jobs
were sent abroad as the final solution to the ‘problem’ of organized
labor.
With the current panic in the US over the rise of the BRICS
(China and Russia), the same politicians and economists who thought it
wise in 1995 to gut the industrial base with NAFTA are now busy
launching WWIII. These people never learn from their mistakes. For
instance, it apparently never occurred to them that outsourcing military
production might come back to bite when geopolitical tensions
inevitably flared again. Likewise, just-in-time production and inventory
management produced economic brittleness / fragility that created
problems when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
So,
where is this going? With the CIA’s and FBI’s undermining of the
elected President’s (Trump) political agenda and its open efforts to rig
the 2020 election in favor of his opponent (Biden), it certainly
appears that the CIA is now running the US. Biden’s foreign policy
team---Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland emerged from
the Clintonite death cult buried deep within the bowels of the American
foreign policy establishment, That they appear to be as uninformed and
arrogant as their policy outcomes to date suggest they are is only a
surprise inside Washington and New York.
However, this is at best a
partial explanation. What is surprising about US foreign policy is how
ignorant of world history, US history, basic diplomacy, military
tactics, economic relations, and basic human decency the American
political leadership is. It’s almost as if the answer to every foreign
policy conundrum of the last century has been to bomb civilian
populations, kill a whole lot of people, and then pretend it never
happened. Vietnam? Check. Nicaragua? Check. Syria? Check. Iraq? Check.
Ukraine? How can the body counts be hidden from beleaguered, clueless,
citizens so effectively?
Some recent history: the US launched a war against Russia when it (the US) invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked coup there in 2014 (see here, here, here)
and ousted its elected government. The Russians had taken issue with
the US / NATO surrounding it with NATO-allied states (maps below). Years
earlier, as Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in his recent interview
with Tucker Carlson, Mr. Putin had approached former US President Bill
Clinton about Russia joining NATO. Mr. Clinton ‘spoke with his people’
before telling Mr. Putin no to joining NATO as he reneged on George H.W. Bush’ s promise to keep NATO away from Russia’s border.
A
bit of additional history is needed here. The USSR was dissolved in
1991 to be replaced by non-communist Russia surrounded by former Soviet
states. Ukraine is one such state. The political – economic reference
point of post-Soviet Russia was an anachronistic form of neoliberalism.
Recall, Americans had been told since at least the early twentieth
century that ‘communism’ was the ideological foe of Western liberalism.
Current Russian President Vladimir Putin is proudly anti-communist. But
the US MIC (military-industrial complex), of which the CIA is a part,
needs enemies to justify its existence.
Following the
dissolution of the USSR (1991), there was discussion inside the US
regarding a ‘peace dividend,’ of redirecting military spending inflated
by the Cold War towards domestic purposes like schools, hospitals, and
civilian infrastructure. However, the CIA had been so hemmed in by
Federal budget constraints that it had inserted itself into
the international narcotics trade forty years prior in apparent
anticipation of just such an event. With the (George H.W.) Bush
recession of 1991, an election year, the peace dividend was rescinded.
thecradle |
British Defense Minister James Heappey informed parliament that Israeli
military operatives are “currently … posted in the UK,” both within Tel
Aviv’s diplomatic mission “and as participants in UK defense-led
training courses.” This hitherto unacknowledged arrangement amply
demonstrates how, despite
recent calls from
officials in London for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to exercise
restraint in its genocide of Gaza – if not institute a ceasefire – the
UK remains international Zionism’s covert nerve center.
Mere days earlier, Heappey likewise admitted that
nine Israeli military aircraft landed in Britain since Operation Al
Aqsa Flood on 7 October last year. Investigations by independent
investigative website Declassified UK show that Royal Air Force
aircraft have flown to
and from Israel in the same period, along with 65 spy plane missions
launched from the UK’s vast, little-known military and intelligence base in Cyprus.
The
purpose of those flights and who and/or what they carried are a state
secret. Freedom of Information requests have been denied, Britain's
Ministry of Defense has refused to comment, and local media is by and
large silent.
Nonetheless, in July 2023,
British ministers admitted that the UK's training of Israeli military
personnel includes battlefield medical assistance, “organizational
design and concepts,” and “defense education.” It is unknown if that
“education” has in any way informed the slaughter of more than 30,000 Palestinians since 7 October.
British military presence in occupied Palestine
Yet,
indications that London has long provided a highly influential guiding
hand to Tel Aviv in its oppression and mass murder of Palestinians are
unambiguous, even if hidden in plain sight. For example, in September 2019, the Israeli air force participated in a joint combat exercise with its British, German, and Italian counterparts.
The
Israelis deployed F-15 warplanes for the purpose, which have been
blitzing Gaza on a virtually daily basis since 7 October,
indiscriminately flattening schools, hospitals, businesses, and homes
and killing untold innocents.
A year earlier, in October 2022, it was quietly admitted in
parliament that London maintains several “permanent military personnel
in Israel,” all posted in the British Embassy in Tel Aviv:
“They
carry out key activities in defense engagement and diplomacy. The
Ministry of Defense supports the HMG Middle East Peace Process Programme
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel. The program aims to
help protect the political and physical viability of a two-state
solution. We would not disclose the location and numbers of military
personnel for security reasons.”
'Joint activity'
Netanyahu
and other Israeli officials have openly and repeatedly boasted of their
personal role in blocking Palestinian statehood. We are thus left to
ponder what these British operatives are truly concerned about – it
certainly isn’t protecting “the political and physical viability of a
two-state solution,” as that entire project was evidently never
“viable,” by design. It could be those “permanent military personnel”
who are present under the auspices of a highly confidential December 2020 military cooperation agreement inked by London and Tel Aviv.
British
Ministry of Defense officials describe the agreement as an “important
piece of defense diplomacy,” which “strengthens” military ties between
the pair while providing “a mechanism for planning our joint activity.”
Its
contents are nonetheless concealed not only from the public but also
from elected lawmakers. Speculation can only abound that the agreement
compels Britain to defend Israel in the event it is attacked. Such
suspicions are only compounded by the visible presence of the UK’s elite SAS forces in Gaza today.
As a December 2023 investigation by The Cradle revealed,
this apparent deployment is protected from media and public scrutiny by
a dedicated Ministry of Defense-issued D-notice, as are other ominous
indicators Britain is shaping the theater and setting the stage in West
Asia for a full-blown, protracted region-wide war.
This included an as-yet-failed effort to pressure Beirut into
allowing armed British soldiers total, unrestricted freedom of movement
within Lebanon, along with immunity from arrest and prosecution for
committing any crime.
The monarchy's departure from neutrality
At countless protests the
world over in solidarity with Palestinians since last October,
demonstrators have brandished banners and signs imploring US President
Joe Biden to impose a ceasefire in Gaza, if not order Netanyahu to seek
peace. It is a noble demand, yet potentially misdirected. The true power
to halt Tel Aviv’s current push to fulfill Zionism’s genocidal founding
mission may not lie in Washington DC but in London – specifically,
Buckingham Palace.
An
extraordinary and largely unremarked upon development since Israel’s
military assault on Gaza began has been the British monarchy’s shameless
abandonment of “political neutrality” over Israel.
Queen
Elizabeth II, publicly at least, refrained from commenting on current
affairs or appearing to take “sides” on any issue throughout her 70-year
reign. However, her recently coronated son has apparently, without
fanfare, comprehensively shredded that longstanding convention.
King Charles the Zionist
Within hours of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’s eruption, King Charles openly condemned Hamas,
saying he was “profoundly distressed” and “appalled” by the “horrors
inflicted” by the resistance group and its “barbaric acts of terrorism.”
Hamas is not recognized as a terrorist entity by a majority of
countries internationally, while the BBC – which has relentlessly manufactured consent for genocide in Gaza every step of the way – rejects the designation’s use.
In the years immediately prior to taking the throne, Charles made his Zionism abundantly clear,
breaking with his mother’s unspoken policy of not visiting Israel,
secretly attending the funerals of former Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin
and Shimon Peres. In the latter instance, in 2016, he also visited the graves of
his grandmother, Princess Alice, and her aunt, Grand Duchess Elisabeth,
in a cemetery on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, near the world’s largest
Jewish cemetery. Both were Christian Zionists.
The Jerusalem Post approvingly dubbed Charles’
Zionist sympathies and familial connection to the Mount “a problem for
Palestinians,” arguing he has a clear view of “who the city and the
country belong to.” Meanwhile, the Times of Israel has hailed him as “a friend” to Jewry “with special and historic ties to Israel.” One such “tie” was an intimate friendship with Britain’s former chief Rabbi and President of United Jewish Israel Appeal, Jonathan Sacks.
darkfutura |The one seeming contradiction is that these elites
predominantly “live in zipcodes exceeding a population density of 10,000
people per square mile.” This misleading implies they live in large
cities like New York, where they would in fact be
forced to endure daily commingling with the peasantry. In reality, we
know they sit entrenched in highly sequestered aristocrats’ quarters
within these cities—like the Upper East Side in Manhattan, or Kalorama
in D.C. Being shuttled in swank car service to and fro, they rarely
deign to cross paths with the commoners for whom they have nothing but
contempt, apart from some token quick-grab at the corner coffee-and-bun
kiosk to reassure themselves that they’re ‘in touch’ with the slipstream
of society.
In many respects, this is an age-old problem: elites have
always existed in parallel societies. However, the advent of digital and
social media technologies have allowed them to encase themselves in an
ever-impermeable confirmation bias bubble like never before. Listen to
interviews with top Washington policymakers, corporate bigwigs, etc.,
and note how they exclusively mainline the most
mainstream corporate publications like WaPo, NYTimes, etc. It becomes
its own hermetic self-referencing feedback loop increasingly shut-off
from the real outside world of human experience.
As the earlier NYPost article described:
If
America is to avoid a tailspin into this toxic feedback loop, its
elites will need to step outside their bubble, stop conforming in an
effort to blend in with their myopic peers and start addressing the
legitimate grievances of their fellow Americans.
This
explains such things as the elites’ obsession with climate change, as
that is one issue that exists solely ‘on paper’—as an abstraction—and is
not realistically felt in the common quarters. The aristos who
repeatedly reflect their own shrill echochamber alarmism on this issue
get increasingly radicalized, particularly given that—as reported
earlier—they put far more store in institutions of authority than the
average prole. This results in the calcification of their blind belief
in specters like climate change, despite their paying only lip service
to it, and not acting accordingly in light of such an existential
‘threat’.
The problem is exacerbated by social ills which create
divisions along gender lines, disproportionately giving weight to
female-centric concerns, as per the Longhouse theory:
The
Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two
generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine
methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.
Women
are naturally wired to be more sympathetic—and thus suggestible—to the
social engineering imperatives co-opting the current narrative. Men are
being increasingly pushed out from higher education, which means that
even among the elites funnelled upward, the stances skew increasingly to
the ‘Longhouse’:
This feminization of the managerial class can be seen from a variety of vantage points:
As
everyone is now aware, unmarried women by far make the most
disproportionate jump into Democrat Land, as well as increasingly
radicalized hyperliberal policies—which reflects in other interesting
ways:
As an aside, one X user had a topically cogent comment about the screenshot below:
Most
of the bluecheck unpacking of the collapsing male college enrollment
story focuses on how worrisome it is that these men won't espouse elite
political opinions
But one of the most
revealing disparities in the Rasmussen survey showed just how out of
touch the elites are specifically to economic issues which affect the
plebs most—as opposed to the airy abstractions of fringe intellectual
culture war issues:
Victoria Nuland has let me know that she intends to step
down in the coming weeks as Under Secretary of State for Political
Affairs – a role in which she has personified President Biden’s
commitment to put diplomacy back at the center of our foreign policy and
revitalize America’s global leadership at a crucial time for our nation
and the world. ... [I]t’s Toria’s leadership on Ukraine that
diplomats and students of foreign policy will study for years to come.
Her efforts have been indispensable to confronting Putin’s full-scale
invasion of Ukraine, marshaling a global coalition to ensure his
strategic failure, and helping Ukraine work toward the day when it will
be able to stand strongly on its own feet – democratically,
economically, and militarily. ... President Biden and I have
asked our Under Secretary for Management John Bass to serve as Acting
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs until Toria’s replacement
is confirmed.
She will be remembered for handing out cookies to anti-government demonstrators in Ukraine and for installing the 2014 coup regime.
That has been her main project in the State Department. But the 2014
Maidan putsch that turn the Ukraine into a battering ram against Russia,
has ended in a complete failure.
Neither was Russia 'weakened'
by the war nor has Ukraine any perspective to survive but as some
Russian controlled land-locked backwater country in Europe's east.
Given that billions were spent on Ukraine with little controls and
nothing to show for Nuland, and her family, have certainly made a bit on
the side. One wonders if any of the ongoing and coming investigations
into the black hole Ukraine will leave them unscarred.
As even Guardian commentators are now waking up to the mess they helped create it is high time for European politicians to also finally accept this reality:
Western Europe has no conceivable interest in escalating the
Ukraine war through a long-range missile exchange. While it should
sustain its logistical support for Ukrainian forces, it has no strategic
interest in Kyiv’s desire to drive Russia out of the majority
Russian-speaking areas of Crimea or Donbas. It has every interest in
assiduously seeking an early settlement and starting the rebuilding of
Ukraine.
As for the west’s “soft power” sanctions on Russia, they have failed
miserably, disrupting the global trading economy in the process.
Sanctions may be beloved of western diplomats and thinktanks. They may
even hurt someone – not least Britain’s energy users – but they have not
devastated the Russian economy or changed Putin’s mind. This year
Russia’s growth rate is expected to exceed Britain’s.
The crass ineptitude of a quarter of a century of western military
interventions should have taught us some lessons. Apparently not.
humanevents | Jack Posobiec hosted guest Mike Benz on Human Events Daily
Thursday to hear his take on the New York Times article that detailed
the CIA's involvement in Ukraine prior to the Russia invasion, which
Benz said will reveal itself to be "the largest operation in CIA
history."
The pair unpacked the reasoning behind the New York Times releasing
their story which essentially agreed with what conservative commentators
such as Posobiec have been saying since the war began.
"This is actually such a shocking moment in American journalist
history," Benz stated. "These are highly highly, highly classified
operations."
He said that "It's my contention that when the dust settles on this, the
Ukraine skirmish in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan coup is going to
ultimately be the largest operation in CIA history."
Compared to the CIA's Syrian operation under Barack Obama, which was
revealed to be the most expensive operation up to this point, Ukraine
will blow it out of the water once all said and done, Benz said.
Posobiec clarified that Benz was implying the NYT article was a "limited
hangout" when "an operation becomes so compromised, or public knowledge
or public interest becomes so obvious around something," that the CIA
begins to unveil pieces of the big picture, like an "onion."
When the US involved itself in Ukraine in the Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton, and John Brennan era, "We were riding high and riding dirty.
And that's what this was, we thought we were unstoppable and we could
just coup anyone we wanted, there'd never be any repercussions, and no
one would ever stand up for themselves, and Russia would never actually
backstop it," Benz said.
This, however, was a "serious miscalculation."
"And when it turned out that their own population didn't support these
dirty tricks, either in the form of the rise of a populace presidential
candidate like Donald Trump who was running on putting America first in
domestic priorities over foreign policy," he explained, "then all hell
broke loose."
I hope everyone appreciates what this means. The CIA disclosed highly classified intelligence to hand-picked journos in order to fight a PR war against Republicans in Congress who want to scale back Ukraine war funding.
dailycaller | Karine Jean-Pierre has turned over her spotlight to Admiral John
Kirby in an “unprecedented” way as the White House barrels toward a
pivotal election season, a Daily Caller review of briefing data reveals.
Since
Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Kirby has been a mainstay at briefings
alongside Jean-Pierre to answer reporters’ questions about the foreign
conflict. Though Americans have indicated the war is not their top
concern, Kirby has remained at the briefings — only missing three since
the start of the year through Oct. 7. Of the briefings he has attended
in 2024, 19 out of the 22 total held, Kirby has fielded questions for
almost the exact same amount of time as Jean-Pierre.
As of Feb. 27, Jean-Pierre has spent about 11 hours and 31 minutes at
the White House press briefing podium this year across 22 briefings.
Kirby has answered questions for just under nine hours and two minutes
in 19 briefings. In those 19 briefings when Kirby and Jean-Pierre were
together, the press secretary spoke for just shy of nine hours and 11
minutes — almost a perfect fifty-fifty split with her counterpart.
“There
is no precedent for this. Press secretaries always bring guests, right.
It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have the OMB [the Office of Management and
Budget] guys brief you on the budget and talk to you about that.’
That’s normal,” Sean Spicer, one-time press secretary for former
President Donald Trump, told the Daily Caller. “That’s as old as the
job. But this idea that you have a co-press secretary is unprecedented.”
Some
other names have made appearances at briefings and gaggles, either
alongside Jean-Pierre or Kirby: deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton,
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, White House spokesman for
oversight and investigations Ian Sams and a few other policy-specific
officials from the administration.
But none have appeared nearly as often as Kirby, who Jean-Pierre was reportedly concerned
might usurp her as press secretary when she first got the job. Biden
“awkwardly” added that Kirby would be joining Jean-Pierre’s team when
the president gave her the press secretary position in 2022, leaving her
“upset and confused,” according to Axios.
Jean-Pierre’s appointment was lauded
as historic and powerful when she got the job — she’s the first black
press secretary, and is also a lesbian woman of immigrant parents. From
the beginning, things have reportedly been rocky, though — Biden also
allegedly said that Jean-Pierre didn’t need to worry because she’d “have
an admiral looking over your shoulder,” a comment that was not received well by the new press secretary.
Amid the tension between Kirby and Jean-Pierre, the latter’s top deputy, Dalton, is reportedly ditching the White House for a gig at Apple.
That
leaves a clear path to the top job for Kirby. He has told some around
the White House he’s interested in the position, according to Axios, but
other White House officials denied those accounts.
When it comes
to gaggles, Kirby has appeared at more as of late, speaking at seven of
them between the start of the year and Feb. 16 for a total of more than
an hour and seven minutes. The pair has attended four gaggles together,
with Jean-Pierre answering questions for more than 41 minutes.
“I
don’t think the dynamic is awkward to begin with. I think they did it
under the presence, under the guise of national security and foreign
affairs. But the reality is, Kirby has really taken over a lot more, for
obvious reasons,” Spicer said. “The press secretary should be able to
handle all of the issues and it’s pretty obvious that there’s a level of
competence that just doesn’t exist.”
scheerpost | The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of
what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan
coup of 2014 to the present. The story, “The Spy War: How the CIA
Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” is one of initial bilateral
distrust, but a mutual fear and hatred of Russia, that progresses to a
relationship so intimate that Ukraine is now one of the CIA’s closest
intelligence partners in the world.
At the same time, the Times’ publication of the piece, which
reporters claimed relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the US,
and “several European countries,” raises multiple questions: Why did
the CIA not object to the article’s publication, especially with it
being in one of the Agency’s preferred outlets? When the CIA approaches
a newspaper to complain about the classified information it contains,
the piece is almost always killed or severely edited. Newspaper
publishers are patriots, after all. Right?
Was the article published because the CIA wanted the news out there?
Perhaps more important was the point of the article to influence the
Congressional budget deliberations on aid to Ukraine? After all, was
the article really just meant to brag about how great the CIA is? Or
was it to warn Congressional appropriators, “Look how much we’ve
accomplished to confront the Russian bear. You wouldn’t really let it
all go to waste, would you?”
The Times’ article has all the hallmarks of a deep, inside look at a
sensitive—possibly classified—subject. It goes into depth on one of the
intelligence community’s Holy of Holies, an intelligence liaison
relationship, something that no intelligence officer is ever supposed to
discuss. But in the end, it really isn’t so sensitive. It doesn’t
tell us anything that every American hasn’t already assumed. Maybe we
hadn’t had it spelled out in print before, but we all believed that the
CIA was helping Ukraine fight the Russians. We had already seen
reporting that the CIA had “boots on the ground” in Ukraine and that the U.S. government was training Ukrainian special forces and Ukrainian pilots, so there’s nothing new there.
The article goes a little further in detail, although, again, without
providing anything that might endanger sources and methods. For
example, it tells us that:
There is a CIA listening post in the forest along the Russian
border, one of 12 “secret” bases the US maintains there. One or more of
these posts helped to prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. That’s great. But the revelation exposes
no secrets and tells us nothing new.
Ukrainian intelligence officials helped the Americans “go after” the
Russian operatives “who meddled in the 2016 US presidential election.”
I have a news flash for the New York Times: The Mueller report found that there was no meaningful Russian meddling in the 2016 election. And what does “go after” mean?
Beginning in 2016, the CIA trained an “elite Ukrainian commando
force known as Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones and
communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them
and crack Moscow’s encryption systems.” This is exactly what the CIA is
supposed to do. Honestly, if the CIA hadn’t been doing this, I would
have suggested a class action lawsuit for the American people to get
their tax money back. Besides, the CIA has been doing things like this for decades. The CIA was able to obtain important components of Soviet tactical weapons from ostensibly pro-Soviet Romania in the 1970s.
Ukraine has turned into an intelligence-gathering hub that has
intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Kiev
could initially handle. Again, I would expect nothing less. After all,
that’s where the war is. So of course, communications will be
intercepted there. As to the CIA station being overwhelmed, the Times
never tells us if that is because the station was a one-man operation at
the time or whether it had thousands of employees and was still
overwhelmed. It’s all about scale.
And lest you think that the CIA and the U.S. government were on the
offensive in Ukraine, the article makes clear that, “Mr. Putin and his
advisers misread a critical dynamic. The CIA didn’t push its way into
Ukraine. U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing
that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about
provoking the Kremlin.”
It’s at this point in the article that the Times reveals what I
believe to be the buried lead: “Now these intelligence networks are more
important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more
dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies
far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: “If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kiev, the CIA may have to scale back.” (Emphasis mine.)
scheerpost | We can start, logically enough, with that desperation evident among
those dedicated to prolonging the war. The outcome of the war, in my
read and in the view of various military analysts, does not depend on
the $61 billion in aid that now hangs in the balance. But the Biden
regime seems to think it does, or pretends to think it does. The Times’s
most immediate intent, so far as one can make out from the piece, is to
add what degree of urgency it can to this question.
Entous and Schwirtz report that the people running Ukrainian
intelligence are nervous that without a House vote releasing new funds
“the CIA will abandon them.” Good enough that it boosts the case to cite
nervous Ukrainians, but we should recognize that this is a
misapprehension. The CIA has a very large budget entirely independent of
what Congress votes one way or another. William Burns, the CIA
director, traveled to Kyiv two weeks ago to reassure his counterparts
that “the U.S. commitment will continue,” as Entous and Schwirtz quote
him saying. This is perfectly true, assuming Burns referred to the
agency’s commitment.
More broadly, The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for
the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and
Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of
its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters
carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it
clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and
most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the
Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment
of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple.
It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence all the
baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there
for a reason.
To gather these thoughts and summarize, This piece is not journalism
and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as
journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be
journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to
be a newspaper.
■
Let’s dolly out to put this piece in its historical context and
consider the implications of its appearance in the once-but-fallen
newspaper of record. Let’s think about the early 1970s, when it first
began to emerge that the CIA had compromised the American media and
broadcasters.
Jack Anderson, the admirably iconoclastic columnist, lifted the lid
on the agency’s infiltration of the media by way of a passing mention of
a corrupted correspondent in 1973. A year later a former Los Angeles
Times correspondent named Stuart Loory published the first extensive
exploration of relations between the CIA and the media in the Columbia
Journalism Review. Then, in 1976, the Church Committee opened its famous
hearings in the Senate. It took up all sorts of agency
malfeasance—assassinations, coups, illegal covert ops. Its intent was
also to disrupt the agency’s misuse of American media and restore the
latter to their independence and integrity.
The Church Committee is still widely remembered for getting its job
done. But it never did. A year after Church produced its six-volume
report, Rolling Stone published “The CIA and the Media,”
Carl Bernstein’s well-known piece. Bernstein went considerably beyond
the Church Committee, demonstrating that it pulled its punches rather
than pull the plug on the CIA’s intrusions in the media. Faced with the
prospect of forcing the CIA to sever all covert ties with the media, a
senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take
that step.”
We should read The Times’s piece on the righteousness of the CIA’s
activities in Ukraine—bearing in mind the self-evident cooperation
between the agency and the newspaper—with this history in mind.
America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist
period when Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church
Committee convened, and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out
of the profession there was disgust at the covert relationship between
media and the spooks. Now look. What was then viewed as top-to-bottom
objectionable is now routinized. It is “as usual.” In my read this is
one consequence among many of the Russiagate years: They again plunged
Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia that
produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.
Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep
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4/3
43
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...
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