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https://www.globalresearch.ca/germany-eu-have-been-handed-over-declaration-war/5794928

Germany and EU Have Been Handed Over a Declaration of War

The sabotage of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipelines in the Baltic Sea has ominously propelled ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a whole new, toxic level.

This episode of Hybrid Industrial/Commercial War, in the form of a terror attack against energy infrastructure in international waters signals the absolute collapse of international law, drowned by a “our way or the highway”, “rules-based”, order.

The attack on both pipelines consisted of multiple explosive charges detonated in separate branches close to the Danish island of Bornholm, but in international waters.

That was a sophisticated operation, carried out in stealth in the shallow depth of the Danish straits. That would in principle rule out submarines (ships entering the Baltic are limited to a draught of 15 meters). As for prospective “invisible” vessels, these could only loiter around with permission from Copenhagen – as the waters around Borholm are crammed with sensors, reflecting fear of incursion by Russian submarines.

Swedish seismologists registered two underwater explosions on Monday – one of them estimated at 100 kg of TNT. Yet as much as 700 kg may have been used to blow up three separate pipeline nodes. Such amount could not have possibly been delivered in just one trip by underwater drones currently available in neighboring nations.

The pressure on the pipelines dropped exponentially. The pipes are now filled with seawater.

The pipes on both NS and NS2 can be repaired, of course, but hardly before the arrival of General Winter. The question is whether Gazprom – already focused on several hefty Eurasian customers –  would bother, especially considering that Gazprom vessels could be exposed to a possible NATO naval attack in the Baltic.

German officials are already spinning that NS and NS2 can “potentially” be out of commission “forever”. The EU economy and EU citizens badly needed that gas supply. Yet the EUrocracy in Brussels – which rules over nation-states – would not follow, because they have been dictated themselves by the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder. A case can be made that this Euro-oligarchy should one day be tried for treason.

As it stands, a strategic irreversibility is already self-evident; the population of several EU nations will pay a tremendous price and suffer serious consequences derived from this attack, short, medium and long term.

Cui bono? 

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson admitted that was “a matter of sabotage”. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen admitted “it was not an accident”. Berlin agrees with the Scandinavians.

Now compare it with former Polish Defense Minister (2005-2007) Radek Sikorski, a Russophobe married to US “analyst” Anne Applebaum, who merrily tweeted “Thank you, USA”.

It gets curiouser and curiouser when we know that simultaneously to the sabotage the Baltic Pipe from Norway to Poland was partially opened, a “new gas supply corridor” servicing “the Danish and Polish markets”: actually a minor affair, considering months ago their sponsors were in trouble finding gas, and now it will be even harder, with much higher costs.

Explosive Situation in Europe

NS2 had already been attacked – in the open – all along its construction. Back in February, Polish ships actively tried to prevent the Fortuna pipe-laying vessel from finishing NS2. The pipes were being laid south of – you guessed it – Bornholm.

NATO for its part has been very active on the underwater drones department. The Americans have access to long distance Norwegian underwater drones which can be modified with other designs. Alternatively, professional navy clearance divers could have been employed in the sabotage – even as tidal currents around Bornholm are a serious matter.

The Big Picture reveals the collective West in absolute panic, with Atlanticist “elites” willing to resort to anything – outrageous lies, assassinations, terrorism, sabotage, all out financial war, support to neo-Nazis – to prevent their descent into a geopolitical and geoeconomic abyss.

Disabling NS and NS2 represents the definitive closure of any possibility of a German-Russia deal on gas supplies, with the added benefit of relegating Germany to the lowly status of absolute US vassal.

So that brings us to the key question of which Western intel apparatus designed the sabotage. Prime candidates are of course CIA and MI6 – with Poland set up as the fall guy and Denmark playing a very dodgy part: it’s impossible that Copenhagen was not at least “briefed” on the intel.

Prescient as ever, as early as in April 2021 Russians were asking questions about the military security of Nord Stream.

The crucial vector is that we may be facing the case of a EU/NATO member involved in an act of sabotage against the number one EU/NATO economy. That’s a casus belli. Outside of the appalling mediocrity and cowardice of the current administration in Berlin, it’s clear that the BND – German intel – as well as the German Navy and informed industrialists sooner or later will do the math.

This was far from an isolated attack. On September 22 there was an attempt against Turkish Stream by Kiev saboteurs. The day before, naval drones with English language IDs were found in Crimea, suspected of being part of the plot. Add to it US helicopters overflying the future sabotage nodes weeks ago; a UK “research” vessel loitering in Danish waters since mid-September; and NATO tweeting about the testing of “new unmanned systems at sea” on the same day of the sabotage.

Show me the (gas) money

The Danish Minister of Defense met urgently with NATO’s Secretary General this Wednesday. After all the explosions happened very close to Denmark’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). That may be qualified as crude kabuki at best; exactly on the same day, the European Commission (EC), NATO’s de facto political office, advanced its trademark obsession: more sanctions against Russia, including the certified-to-fail cap on oil prices.

Meanwhile, EU energy giants are bound to lose big time with the sabotage.

The roll call includes the German Wintershall Dea AG and PEG/ E.ON; the Dutch N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie; and the French ENGIE. Then there are those which financed NS2: Wintershall Dea again as well as Uniper; Austrian OMV; ENGIE again; and British-Dutch Shell. Wintershall Dea and ENGIE are both co-owners and creditors. Their fuming shareholders will want serious answers from a serious investigation.

It gets worse: there are no holds barred anymore on the Pipeline Terror front. Russia will be on red alert not only for Turk Stream but also Power of Siberia. Same for the Chinese and their maze of pipelines arriving in Xinjiang.

Whatever the methodology and the actors who were in the loop, this is payback – in advance – for the inevitable collective West defeat in Ukraine. And a crude warning to the Global South that they will do it again. Yet action always breeds reaction: from now on, “funny things” could also happen to US/UK pipelines in international waters.

The EU oligarchy is reaching an advanced process of disintegration at lightning speed. Their window of opportunity to at least attempt a role as a strategically autonomous geopolitical actor is now closed.

These EUROcrats now face a serious predicament. Once it’s clear who are the perpetrators of the sabotage in the Baltic, and once they understand all the life-changing socio-economic consequences for pan-EU citizens, the kabuki will have to stop. Including the already running, uber-ridiculous subplot that Russia blew up its own pipeline when Gazprom could simply have turned off the valves for good.

And once again, it gets worse: Gazprom is threatening to sue the Ukrainian energy company Naftofgaz for unpaid bills. That would lead to the end of Russian gas transiting Ukraine towards the EU.

As if all of that was not serious enough, Germany is contractually obligated to purchase at least 40 billion cubic meters of Russian gas a year until 2030.

Just say no? They can’t: Gazprom is legally entitled to get paid even without shipping gas. That’s the spirit of a long-term contract. And it’s already happening: because of sanctions, Berlin does not get all the gas it needs but still needs to pay.

All the devils are here

Now it’s painfully clear the imperial velvet gloves are off when it comes to the vassals. EU independence: verboten. Cooperation with China: verboten. Independent trade connectivity with Asia: verboten. The only place for the EU is to be economically subjugated to the US: a tawdry remix of 1945-1955. With a perverse neoliberal twist: we will own your industrial capacity, and you will have nothing.

The sabotage of NS and NS2 is inbuilt in the imperial wet dream of breaking up the Eurasian land mass into a thousand pieces to prevent a trans-Eurasia consolidation between Germany (representing the EU), Russia and China: $50 trillion in GDP, based on purchasing power parity (PPP) compared to the US’s $20 trillion.

We must go back to Mackinder: control of the Eurasian land mass constitutes control of the world. American elites and their Trojan Horses across Europe will do whatever it takes not to give up their control.

“American elites” in this context encompass the deranged, Straussian neo-con-infested “intel community” and the Big Energy, Big Pharma and Big Finance that pays them and who profits not only from the Deep State’s Forever War approach but also wants to make a killing out of the Davos-concocted Great Reset.

The Raging Twenties started with a murder – of Gen Soleimani. Blowing up pipelines is part of the sequel. There will be a highway to hell all the way to 2030. Yet to borrow from Shakespeare, hell is definitely empty, and all the (Atlanticist) devils are here.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/09/29/new-zealands-pm-wants-more-online-censorship-for-the-war-in-ukraine/

New Zealand’s PM Wants More Online Censorship For The War In Ukraine

New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern continued her crusade for the expansion of internet censorship during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, this time using the war in Ukraine.

“Whether it’s climate, trade, health crises or seeking peaceful solutions to war and conflict, New Zealand has always been a believer in multilateral tools,” Ardern told the assembly, adding that “without reform, we risk irrelevancy.”

“There is perhaps no greater example of this than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Ardern said. “Let us all be clear: Russia’s war is illegal. It is immoral. It is a direct attack on the UN charter, and the international rules-based system and everything that this community should stand for. Putin’s suggestion that it could at any point deploy further weapons that it has at their disposal reveals the false narrative that they have based their invasion on. What country who claims to be a liberator, threatens to annihilate the very civilians they claim to liberate? This war is based on a lie.”

Later in her speech, Ardern returns to the theme that Russia’s war is “based on a lie” to argue for the censorship of online speech which supports the idea that Russia is fighting for legitimate reasons in Ukraine.

Using the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack as a segue to talk about the perils of online radicalization, Ardern then smoothly transitions to the subject of “mis- and disinformation” on the internet.

“This will also be important in understanding more about mis- and disinformation online: a challenge that we must as leaders address,” Ardern said.

“As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even those most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech we value so highly,” Ardern added, an acknowledgement of the grave human rights concerns inherent in having ‘leaders’ participate in the regulation of public speech. “But while I cannot tell you today what the answer is to this challenge, I can say with complete certainty that we cannot ignore it. To do so poses an equal threat to the norms we all value.”

Then it gets even creepier.

“After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble?” asks the prime minister. “How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology? The weapons may be different, but the goals of those who perpetuate them is often the same. To cause chaos and reduce the ability of others to defend themselves. To disband communities. To collapse the collective strength of countries who work together. But we have an opportunity here to ensure that these particular weapons of war do not become an established part of warfare.”

Ardern’s remarks are currently getting a lot of criticism in right-wing circles due largely to her suggestion that online discourse about climate change needs to be regulated so that the issue can be properly addressed. And to be sure that is an absolutely insane thing for her to say; I believe climate change is real and anthropogenic and I find the idea of silencing people who disagree with me about that unthinkably nightmarish. This is a line of thinking that can only arise from a profoundly tyrannical mind.

But what isn’t getting enough attention at this time is the fact that Ardern is calling for an increase in the already outrageous amount of online censorship we are seeing with regard to the war in Ukraine. She explicitly said the war is “based on a lie”, and then went on to argue that people need to be stopped from circulating speech which lends credibility to that lie, even if such freakishly authoritarian measures may be “misinterpreted” as being hostile to free speech.

Ardern argues that online speech claiming that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is legal and noble makes it harder to attain peace, but of course she doesn’t really believe that, and neither does anyone else. The idea that free speech about the war could somehow hamper peace negotiations between governments is self-evidently absurd and completely nonsensical.

In reality, this war is just the latest in a string of excuses we’ve been given by the western political/media class to censor the internet, with earlier justifications including Covid-19, election security, domestic extremism, and Russian propaganda again after the 2016 US election. But asserting that it’s important to stop people from thinking wrong thoughts about a war is a major escalation from all those other justifications, because they’re no longer pretending that it’s being done for our own good. Our wrongthink is the justification, in and of itself.

Which is a problem, because this is in fact an extremely dangerous proxy war being waged against Russia by the US and its imperial member states. It was absolutely deliberately provoked, it’s showing no sign of ending anytime soon, and its continual escalation threatens the life of everyone on this planet. The US has lied about every war it has ever been involved in, and if ever there was a war to bring scrutiny and skepticism to, it’s the one that is bringing us closer to a nuclear exchange than at any other time in history.

This notion that it is the job of “leaders” to involve themselves in regulating the ideas and information we’re allowed to share with each other online needs to be stomped out, dissolved in acid, and flushed down the toilet. That’s not their place. They shouldn’t even be looking in that direction, much less talking amongst themselves at the United Nations about how best they can go about doing it. It’s a profoundly dangerous notion that needs to be rejected with unadulterated aggression....

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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/09/28/a-state-of-undeclared-hegemon-usa-dominated-nato-war-on-russia/

A State of Undeclared Hegemon USA-Dominated NATO War on Russia

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, the risk of war on Russia by the self-declared master of the universe and its NATO vassals was never greater than now.

Things have been incrementally heading in this direction for years, notably since the Obama/Biden regime’s 2014 Kiev coup — replacing democratic government with Nazified tyrannical rule.

Since that time, things have been heading toward direct confrontation between the world’s leading nuclear powers.

A giant step toward what’s unthinkable occurred after Russia began its liberating SMO — an act of self-defense in response to its threatened security by US-dominated NATO regimes.

On September 26, reported damage to Russia’s Nord Stream I and II gas pipelines was the latest shoe to drop.

It occurred while Donbass and Kherson/Zaporozhye Regions were voting overwhelmingly to join Russia — their predominantly Russian-speaking populations wanting freedom from the scourge of Nazified Ukraine control.

Leaks rendering both pipelines inoperable also occurred as militantly-hostile-to-Russia Poland announced the inauguration of a new pipeline to deliver 10 billion cubic meters of gas annually to the country through Norway, Denmark and the Baltic Sea.

Yet while deliveries are expected to begin on October 1, about 80% of the pipeline’s capacity won’t be reached until January.

And 10 billion cubic meters of gas annually will only supply Poland with around half of what’s needed for its enterprises and consumers.

The announced inauguration of the pipeline to Poland at the same time as reported damage to Russia’s Nord Stream I and II were clearly not coincidental.

Most likely caused by one or more Unmanned Underwater Vehicles, laden with powerful explosives, three leaks rendered both pipelines inoperable until repairs are completed. 

Damage to both pipelines occurred within hours on the same day beneath the Baltic Sea — its waters controlled by US-dominated NATO at a time when Pentagon warships were in the area where what happened was reported.

Make your own judgment.

On Tuesday, Nord Stream AG, operator of the pipelines, reported the following:

“The significant pressure drop caused by…gas leak(s) on both lines of the gas pipeline registered yesterday leads to a strong assumption of…physical damage” by sabotage.

“(C)auses of (what happened) will be clarified as a result of the investigation.”

Damaged locations of the pipelines were identified.

They’re northeast of Bornholm in Swedish and Danish economic zones.

Resources are being mobilized to assess damage in preparation for repairs to be made.

At this time, it cannot be determined how long it will take.

According to Swedish seismologists, two explosions occurred along routes of the pipelines on Monday, causing sharp drops in pressure needed to transport gas.

On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the following:

“Obviously, there is some kind of destruction of the pipeline.”

“(T)his is an issue related to the energy security of the entire continent.”

“This is a completely unprecedented situation that requires urgent investigation.”

“We are extremely concerned about this news.”

Make no mistake.

What happened had Biden regime dirty hands all over it, an act of war on Russia — either directly, what’s most likely, or by one or more of its vassals.

On Tuesday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said the following about damage to Nord Stream I and II:

Former Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, thanked the empire of lies and forever wars for what happened.

His public remark is “an official (admission) of a (state-sponsored) terrorist attack” on Russia.

Even so-called EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, admitted the following:

“All available information indicates those leaks (to Nord Stream I and II) are the result of a deliberate act.” 

“Any deliberate disruption of European energy infrastructure is utterly unacceptable and will be met with a robust and united response.”

German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and Spiegel magazine called what happened a “deliberate act of sabotage.”

In early February, reciting pre-scripted lines, Biden said the following:

If Russia acts against (Nazified) Ukraine, “there will be no longer a Nord Stream II. We will bring an end to it.”

“I promise you. We will be able to do that.”

What can be done to one underwater pipeline can be done to others.

The empire of lies and forever wars  wants European economies harmed to benefit US enterprises.

Its diabolical scheme includes making the continent dependent on 40% higher cost US LNG over much lower-priced Russian natural gas — as well as being dependent on maximum amounts of US oil and other commodities.

All of the above is ongoing at a time when hegemon USA and its NATO vassals keep pouring more arms and equipment into Nazified Kiev for perpetual war on Russia to the last Ukrainian.

Sabotaging Nord Stream I and II pipelines also occurred days before Donbass and Kherson/Zaporozhye Regions become Russian republics.

Hegemon USA is waging unannounced war on Russia.

By allying with their US master instead of opposing what’s going on in their own self-interest, European regimes are heading their economies for collapse.

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/federal_bureau_of_intimidation_the_governments_war_on_political_freedom

Federal Bureau of Intimidation: The Government’s War on Political Freedom

“In so many of the little places of everyday life in which life is lived out, somehow democracy doesn't exist. And one of the creeping hands of totalitarianism running through the democracy is the Federal Bureau of Investigation… Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of people… They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things.”—Howard Zinn, historian

Discredit, disrupt, and destroy.

That is how the government plans to get rid of activists and dissidents who stand in its way.

This has always been the modus operandi of the FBI (more aptly referred to as the Federal Bureau of Intimidation): muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

Indeed, the FBI has a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures.

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the FBI’s targets were civil rights activists, those suspected of having Communist ties, and anti-war activists. In more recent decades, the FBI has expanded its reach to target so-called domestic extremists, environmental activists, and those who oppose the police state.

Back in 2019, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism, without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach.

That misguided pledge sheds a curious light on the FBI’s latest nationwide spree of SWAT team raids, surveillance, disinformation campaigns, fear-mongering, paranoia, and strong-arm tactics.

For instance, just before dawn on Jan. 25, 2019, the FBI sent 29 heavily armed agents in 17 vehicles to carry out a SWAT-style raid on the Florida home of Roger Stone, one of President Trump’s longtime supporters. Stone, charged with a political crime, was taken away in handcuffs.

In March 2021, under the pretext of carrying out an inventory of U.S. Private Vaults, FBI agents raided 1400 safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills, seizing “more than $86 million in cash as well as gold, jewelry, and other valuables from property owners who were suspected of no crimes.”

In April 2021, FBI agents raided Rudy Giuliani’s home and office, seizing 18 electronic devices. More than a year later, Giuliani has yet to be charged with any crimes.

In June 2022, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official under the Trump Administration, was led out of his home in pajamas while federal law enforcement officials raided his home.

In the summer of 2022, FBI agents wearing tactical gear including body armor, helmets and camouflage uniforms and carrying rifles raided multiple homes throughout Little Rock, Ark., including a judge’s home.

In August 2022, more than a dozen FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago, the winter home of Donald Trump.

And in September 2022, 25 to 30 armed FBI agents raided the home of an anti-abortion activist, pointing guns at the family and terrorizing the man’s wife and seven children.

Politics aside, the message is clear: this is how the government will deal with anyone who challenges its authority.

You’re next.

Unfortunately, while these overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear, none of this is new.

The government has been playing these mind games for a long time.

As Betty Medsger, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, noted in 1971, the FBI was engaged in practices that had never been reported, probably were unconstitutional, and were counter to the public’s understanding of the agency’s purpose.

The objective: target anti-government dissenters for wide-scale harassment, widespread surveillance and intimidation in order to enhance their paranoia and make them think there was an “FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

Medsger, the recipient of stolen government files that provided a glimpse into the workings of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, would later learn that between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed COINTELPRO, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents.

The explicit objective, according to one FBI memo: “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

As Congressman Steve Cohen explains, “COINTELPRO was set up to surveil and disrupt groups and movements that the FBI found threatening… many groups, including anti-war, student, and environmental activists, and the New Left were harassed, infiltrated, falsely accused of criminal activity      .”

Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, John Lennon, and hundreds more.

Among those most closely watched by the FBI was King, a man labeled by the FBI as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” All told, the FBI collected 17,000 pages of materials on King.

With wiretaps and electronic bugs planted in his home and office, King was kept under constant surveillance by the FBI with the aim of “neutralizing” him. He even received blackmail letters written by FBI agents suggesting that he either commit suicide or the details of his private life would be revealed to the public. The FBI kept up its pursuit of King until he was felled by a hollow-point bullet to the head in 1968.

John Lennon, a vocal peace protester and anti-war activist, was another high-profile example of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.

Lennon was singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files illegally collected on his activities and associations.

For a while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.

Years after Lennon’s assassination, it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics.

J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, directed the agency to spy on the musician. There were also various written orders calling on government agents to frame Lennon for a drug bust. “The FBI’s files on Lennon … read like the writings of a paranoid goody-two-shoes,” observed reporter Jonathan Curiel.

As the New York Times notes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”

Indeed, all of the many complaints we have about government today—surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc.—were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics.”

The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, echoed these concerns about the government’s abuses:

“Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.”

The report continued:

“Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.”

Fifty years later, we’re still having this same debate about the perils of government overreach.

For too long now, the American people have allowed their personal prejudices and politics to cloud their judgment and render them incapable of seeing that the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.

The lesson to be learned is this: whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now, rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

All of the excessive, abusive tactics employed by the government and its henchmen today will eventually be meted out on the general populace.

At that point, when you find yourself in the government’s crosshairs, it will not matter whether your skin is black or yellow or brown or white; it will not matter whether you’re an immigrant or a citizen; it will not matter whether you’re rich or poor; it will not matter whether you’re Republican or Democrat; and it certainly won’t matter who you voted for in the last presidential election.

At that point—when you find yourself subjected to dehumanizing, demoralizing, thuggish behavior by government bureaucrats who are hyped up on the power of their badges and empowered to detain, search, interrogate, threaten and generally harass anyone they see fit—remember you were warned.

Frankly, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are long past the point where we should be merely alarmed.

These are no longer experiments on our freedoms.

These are acts of aggression by a government that is no friend to freedom.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/putin-address-russian-people-september-21-2022/5794513

Putin’s Address to the Russian People: “Abandoning Hope For Peaceful Coexistence”?

Introduction by Paul Craig Roberts

The Western media is a collection of liars in a propaganda ministry, and its so-called “Russian experts” are for the most part Russophobes operating on grants from the US military/security complex.  

Consequently, Westerners have no valid understanding of the conflict in Ukraine, how it arose, and how the West’s involvement together with extraordinary provocations, has  created in the Russian leadership the conviction that the goal of the West is to destroy Russia. 

As this conviction hardens, the Russian leadership is abandoning hope of peaceful coexistence with the Western world and is preparing for war.

In his speech Putin begins the preparation of the Russian people for the hard reality.  Putin doesn’t like the hard reality and did his best to avoid it by ignoring provocations and insults until it became impossible because, as Putin says,  “the West has crossed every line.”

The West, of course, is Washington.  The rest of the Western world reports to Washington as I learned from a US Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. “How,” I asked him, “do we get the other countries to do what we want?”  “Money,” he replied. “You mean foreign aid?”  “No, we give the leaders bagfuls of money.  They report to us.  We own them.”

This means that there are no independent Western voices in Britain, Germany, France or elsewhere to moderate Washington’s drive for world hegemony.  There is no one to say, “do you know what you are doing?”

There is no one to warn Washington that the US is pushing Russia too hard.  There is no one to warn us against believing our own propaganda. Consequently, Washington has pushed the Russian leadership out of the accommodation mode into the prepare for conflict mode.

This clearly demonstrates how dangerous is the neoconservatives’ unilateralism.  There is no one to talk back to Washington but Washington’s chosen enemies, whose words, if reported at all, are always reported out of context following the propaganda line that it is Russia and China, never Washington, who is the threat and cause of conflict.

I recommend you read the translation of Putin’s address to the Russian Nation.  Possibly Tass or the office of the Russian President will provide a better translation, but his one is sufficient to see how the Russian leadership views a situation that has been misreported by Western presstitutes in a fashion that supports the West’s propaganda picture of Russia’s evil intent.

The fact of the matter is that the problem is Washington’s evil intent.

Military historians understand that once mobilization starts, war follows.  Putin is trying to avoid this irreversible course by ordering a limited, not full mobilization, which he hopes, together with the self-determination under the UN Charter of the four liberated areas to be reunited with the Russian Federation, will convince the West that the war cannot continue unless the West supports military attacks directly on Russian territory. 

I have been writing for 8 years that Washington, despite its arrogance, will not go so far as to initiate war with a superior Russian military force.  This was true in 2014.  I hope it is still true today.

You will not hear Putin’s closing words to the Russian nation from the West’s presstitutes.  Putin puts the idiot West on notice that the West’s survival is unlikely unless Washington gives up its demand for hegemony:

Putin’s address to the Russian people 

The topic of my speech is the situation in the Donbas and the course of a special military operation to liberate it from the neo-Nazi regime, which seized power in Ukraine in 2014 as a result of an armed coup d’état.

I appeal today to you, to all citizens of our country, to people of different generations, age and nationality, to the people of our great Motherland, to all those who are united by the great historical Russia, to the soldiers and officers, volunteers who are now fighting on the front line, are on combat duty, to our brothers and sisters – residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, other areas liberated from the neo-Nazi regime.

We will talk about the necessary, urgent steps to protect the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Russia, about supporting the desire and will of our compatriots to determine their own future and about the aggressive policy of a part of the Western elites, who are trying with all their might to maintain their dominance, and for this they are trying to block and suppress any sovereign independent centers of development in order to continue to rudely impose their will on other countries and peoples. impose their pseudo-values. 

The goal of this West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are already directly saying that in 1991 they were able to split the Soviet Union, and now the time has come for Russia itself, that it must disintegrate into many deadly warring regions and regions.

And they have been hatching such plans for a long time. They encouraged gangs of international terrorists in the Caucasus, promoted NATO’s offensive infrastructure close to our borders. They have made total Russophobia their weapons, including for decades purposefully cultivating hatred of Russia, primarily in Ukraine, to which they were preparing the fate of an anti-Russian bridgehead, and turned the Ukrainian people themselves into cannon fodder and pushed them to war with our country, unleashing it, this war, back in 2014, using armed forces against the civilian population, organizing genocide. blockade, terror against people who refused to recognize the power that arose in Ukraine as a result of a coup d’état.

And after the current Kiev regime actually publicly abandoned a peaceful solution to the problem of Donbass and, moreover, declared its claims to nuclear weapons, it became absolutely clear that a new, next, as it was before twice, large-scale offensive in the Donbas is inevitable. And then, just as inevitably, there would be an attack on Russia’s Crimea – on Russia.

In this regard, the decision on a pre-emptive military operation was absolutely necessary and the only possible one. Its main goals – the liberation of the entire territory of Donbass – have been and remain unchanged.

The Lugansk People’s Republic has already been almost completely cleansed of neo-Nazis. Fighting in the Donetsk People’s Republic continues. Here, in eight years, the Kiev occupation regime has created a deeply layered line of long-term fortifications. Their assault in the forehead would have resulted in heavy losses, so our units, as well as the military units of the Donbass republics, act systematically, competently, use equipment, protect personnel and step by step liberate the Donetsk land, clear cities and towns from neo-Nazis, provide assistance to people whom the Kiev regime has turned into hostages, into a human shield.

As you know, professional servicemen serving under a contract take part in a special military operation. Together with them, volunteer formations also fight shoulder to shoulder: people of different nationalities, professions, ages are real patriots. At the call of their hearts, they stood up to defend Russia and Donbass.

In this regard, I have already instructed the Government and the Defence Ministry to determine in full and as soon as possible the legal status of volunteers, as well as fighters of units of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. It should be the same as that of career servicemen of the Russian army, including material, medical support, social guarantees. Particular attention should be paid to the organization of supplying volunteer formations and detachments of the people’s militia of Donbass with equipment and equipment.

In the course of solving the main tasks of protecting Donbass, our troops, based on the plans and decisions of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff on the general strategy of action, liberated significant territories of Kherson and Zaporizhia regions, as well as a number of other areas, from neo-Nazis. As a result, a long line of combat contact was formed, which is over a thousand kilometers.

What do I want to say publicly for the first time today? Already after the start of the special military operation, including the talks in Istanbul, representatives of Kiev reacted to our proposals very positively, and these proposals primarily concerned ensuring Russia’s security and our interests. But it is obvious that the peace solution did not suit the West, therefore, after reaching certain compromises, Kiev was actually given a direct instruction to disrupt all agreements.

Ukraine began to be pumped even more with weapons. The Kiev regime has unleashed new gangs of foreign mercenaries and nationalists, military units trained according to NATO standards and under the de facto command of Western advisers.

At the same time, the regime of repression throughout Ukraine against its own citizens, established immediately after the armed coup of 2014, was strengthened in the most severe way. The policy of intimidation, terror and violence is taking on increasingly massive, terrible and barbaric forms.

I want to emphasize that we know that the majority of people living in the territories liberated from neo-Nazis, and these are primarily the historical lands of Novorossiya, do not want to be under the yoke of the neo-Nazi regime. In Zaporozhye, Kherson region, Lugansk and Donetsk have seen and see the atrocities committed by neo-Nazis in the occupied areas of the Kharkiv region. The heirs of the Banderites and Nazi punishers kill people, torture them, throw them in prisons, settle scores, massacre and torture civilians.

More than seven and a half million people lived in the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions before the outbreak of hostilities. Many of them were forced to become refugees, to leave their homes. And those who remain – about five million people – are now subjected to constant artillery and rocket fire from neo-Nazi militants. They hit hospitals and schools, arrange terrorist acts against civilians.

We cannot, do not have any moral right to give the people close to us to the torment of the executioners, we cannot but respond to their sincere desire to determine their own destiny. The parliaments of the people’s republics of Donbass, as well as the military-civil administrations of Kherson and Zaporizhia regions, decided to hold referendums on the future of these territories and appealed to us, to Russia, with a request to support such a step.

I would like to emphasise that we will do everything we can to ensure safe conditions for holding referendums and so that people can express their will. And we will support the decision on our future, which will be made by the majority of residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions.

Dear friends!

Today, our Armed Forces, as I have already said, operate on the line of combat contact, which exceeds a thousand kilometers, resist not only neo-Nazi formations, but in fact the entire military machine of the collective West.

In this situation, I consider it necessary to make the following decision – it is fully adequate to the threats we face – namely, to protect our Motherland, its sovereignty and territorial integrity, to ensure the security of our people and people in the liberated territories, I consider it necessary to support the proposal of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff to conduct partial mobilization in the Russian Federation.

Let me repeat that we are talking about partial mobilization, that is, only citizens who are currently in the reserve, and above all those who served in the Armed Forces, have certain military specialties and relevant experience, will be subject to conscription for military service.

Those called up for military service before being sent to the units will necessarily undergo additional military training, taking into account the experience of a special military operation.

The decree on partial mobilization has been signed.

In accordance with the legislation, the chambers of the Federal Assembly – the Federation Council and the State Duma – will be officially informed about this by letters today.

Mobilization measures will begin today, from September 21. I instruct the heads of the regions to provide all the necessary assistance to the work of military commissariats.

I would like to emphasise that Russian citizens called up for military service upon mobilization will receive the status, payments and all social guarantees of servicemen undergoing military service under contract.

I would like to add that the Executive Order on Partial Mobilization also provides for additional measures to implement the state defence order. The heads of defence industry enterprises are directly responsible for solving the tasks of increasing the production of weapons and military equipment and deploying additional production facilities. In turn, all issues of material, resource and financial support of defense enterprises should be resolved by the Government immediately.

Dear friends!

In its aggressive anti-Russian policy, the West has crossed every line. We constantly hear threats against our country, our people. Some irresponsible politicians in the West are  talking about plans to organize the supply of long-range offensive weapons to Ukraine – systems that will allow strikes on Crimea and other regions of Russia.

Such terrorist strikes, including those using Western weapons, are already being carried out on border settlements in the Belgorod and Kursk regions. In real time, using modern systems, aircraft, ships, satellites, strategic drones, NATO carries out reconnaissance throughout the south of Russia.

Washington, London and Brussels are directly pushing Kiev to transfer military operations to our territory. Without hiding their intention any longer, they say that Russia must be defeated at all costs on the battlefield  leading to  the loss of all Russian sovereignty,  the complete plundering of our country, and the destruction of Russian political, economic, and cultural existence.

Nuclear blackmail is also used. We are talking not only about the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which threatens an atomic catastrophe, but also about the statements of some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction against Russia – nuclear weapons.

For those who allow themselves such statements regarding Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and in some components – more modern than those of NATO countries. And when the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we certainly will use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.

Russian citizens can be sure that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be ensured, I stress this again, by all the means available to us. And those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the same can happen to them.

It is in our historical tradition, in the fate of our people, to stop those who are striving for world domination, who threaten to dismember and enslave our Motherland, our Fatherland. We will do it now, and so it will be.

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https://scheerpost.com/2022/09/26/chris-hedges-the-return-of-fascism/

The Return of Fascism

As in the 1930s, a bankrupt liberalism, grotesque social inequality and declining living standards are empowering fascist movements in Europe and the U.S.  

Energy and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation, wages are in free fall. Billions of dollars are diverted by Western nations at a time of economic crisis and staggering income inequality to fund a proxy war in Ukraine. The liberal class, terrified by the rise of neo-fascism and demagogues such as Donald Trump, have thrown in their lot with discredited and reviled establishment politicians who slavishly do the bidding of the war industry, oligarchs and corporations.

The bankruptcy of the liberal class means that those who decry the folly of permanent war and NATO expansion, mercenary trade deals, exploitation of workers by globalization, austerity and neoliberalism come increasingly from the far-right. This right-wing rage, dressed up in the United States as Christian fascism, has already made huge gains in Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Bulgaria and France and may take power in the Czech Republic, where inflation and rising energy costs have seen the number of Czechs falling below the poverty line double.

By next spring, following a punishing winter of rolling blackouts and months when families struggle to pay for food and heat, what is left of our anemic western democracy could be largely extinguished.

Extremism is the political cost of pronounced social inequality and political stagnation. Demagogues, who promise moral and economic renewal, vengeance against phantom enemies and a return to lost glory, rise out of the morass. Hatred and violence, already at the boiling point, are legitimized. A reviled ruling class, and the supposed civility and  democratic norms it espouses, are ridiculed.

It is not, as the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill points out, as if fascism ever went away. “The U.S. did not defeat fascism in WWII,” he writes, “it discretely internationalized it.” After World War II the U.S., U.K. and other Western governments collaborated with hundreds of former Nazis and Japanese war criminals, who they integrated into western intelligence services, as well as fascist regimes such as those in Spain and Portugal. They supported right-wing anti-communist forces in Greece during its civil war in 1946 to 1949, and then backed a right-wing military coup in 1967. NATO also had a secret policy of operating fascist terrorist groups. Operation Gladio, as the BBC detailed in a now-forgotten investigative series, created “secret armies,” networks of illegal stay-behind soldiers, who would remain behind enemy lines if the Soviet Union made a military move into Europe. In actuality, the “secret armies” carried-out assassinations, bombings, massacres and false flag terror attacks against leftists, trade unionists and others throughout Europe.

See my interview with Stephen Kinzer about the post-war activities of the CIA, including its recruitment of Nazi and Japanese war criminals and its creation of black sites where former Nazis were hired to interrogate, torture and murder suspected leftists, labor leaders and communists, detailed in his book Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, here.

Fascism, which has always been with us, is again ascendant. The far-right politician Giorgia Meloni is expected to become Italy’s first female prime minister after elections on Sunday. In a coalition with two other far-right parties, Meloni is forecast to win more than 60 percent of the seats in Parliament, though the left-leaning 5-Star Movement may put a dent in those expectations.

Meloni got her start in politics as a 15-year-old activist for the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, founded after the World War II by supporters of Benito Mussolini. She calls EU bureaucrats agents of “nihilistic global elites driven by international finance.” She peddles the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that non-white immigrants are being permitted to enter Western nations as part of a plot to undermine or “replace” the political power and culture of white people. She has called on the Italian navy to turn back boats with immigrants, which the far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini did in 2018. Her Fratelli d’Italia, Brothers of Italy, party is a close ally of Hungary’s President, Viktor Orban. A European Parliament resolution recently declared that Hungary can no longer be defined as a democracy.

Meloni and Orban are not alone. Sweden Democrats, which took over 20 percent of the vote in Sweden’s general election last week to become the country’s second largest political party, was formed in 1988 from a neo-Nazi group called B.S.S., or Keep Sweden Swedish. It has deep fascist roots. Of the party’s 30 founders, 18 had Nazi affiliations, including several who served in the Waffen SS, according to Tony Gustaffson a historian and former Sweden Democrat member. France’s Marine Le Pen took over 41 percent of the vote in April against Emmanuel Macron. In Spain, the hard-right Vox party is the third largest party in Spain’s Parliament. The far-right German AfD or Alternative for Germany party took over 12 percent in federal elections in 2017, making it the third largest party, though it lost a couple percentage points in the 2021 elections. The U.S. has its own version of fascism embodied in a Republican party that coalesces in cult-like fashion around Donald Trump, embraces the magical thinking, misogyny, homophobia and white supremacy of the Christian Right and actively subverts the election process.

Economic collapse was indispensable to the Nazis’ rise to power. In the 1928 elections in Germany, the Nazi party received less than 3 percent of the vote. Then came the global financial crash of 1929. By early 1932, 40 percent of the German insured workforce, six million people, were unemployed. That same year, the Nazis became the largest political party in the German parliament. The Weimar government, tone deaf and hostage to the big industrialists, prioritized paying bank loans and austerity rather than feeding and employing a desperate population. It foolishly imposed severe restrictions on who was eligible for unemployment insurance. Millions of Germans went hungry. Desperation and rage rippled through the population. Mass rallies, led by a collection of buffoonish Nazis in brown uniforms who would have felt at home at Mar-a-Lago, denounced Jews, Communists, intellectuals, artists and the ruling class, as internal enemies. Hate was their main currency. It sold well. 

The evisceration of democratic procedures and institutions, however, preceded the Nazis’ ascension to power in 1933. The Reichstag, the German Parliament, was as dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress.  The Socialist leader Friedrich Ebert, president from 1919 until 1925, and later Heinrich Brüning, chancellor from 1930 to 1932, relied on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to largely rule by decree to bypass the fractious Parliament. Article 48, which granted the president the right in an emergency to issue decrees, was “a trapdoor through which Germany could fall into dictatorship,”  historian Benjamin Carter Hett writes.

Article 48 was the Weimar equivalent of the executive orders liberally used by Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, to bypass our own legislative impasses. As in 1930s Germany, our courts  — especially the Supreme Court — have been seized by extremists. The press has bifurcated into antagonistic tribes where lies and truth are indistinguishable, and opposing sides are demonized. There is little dialogue or compromise, the twin pillars of a democratic system.

The two ruling parties slavishly serve the dictates of the war industry, global corporations and the oligarchy, to which it has given huge tax cuts. It has established the most pervasive and intrusive system of government surveillance in human history. It runs the largest prison system in the world. It has militarized the police. 

Democrats are as culpable as Republicans. The Obama administration interpreted the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force as giving the executive branch the right to erase due process and act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Two weeks later, a U.S. drone strike killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar’s 16-year-old son, who was never linked to terrorism, along with 9 other teenagers at a cafe in Yemen. It was the Obama administration that signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force. It was the Obama administration that bailed out Wall Street and abandoned Wall Street’s victims. It was the Obama administration that repeatedly used the Espionage Act to criminalize those, such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who exposed government lies, crimes and fraud. And it was the Obama administration that massively expanded the use of militarized drones.

The Nazis responded to the February 1933 burning of the Reichstag, which they likely staged, by employing Article 48 to push through the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State. The fascists instantly snuffed out the pretense of Weimar democracy. They legalized  imprisonment without trial for anyone considered a national security threat. They abolished independent labor unions, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press, along with the privacy of postal and telephone communications.

The step from dysfunctional democracy to full blown fascism was, and will again be, a small one. The hatred for the ruling class, embodied by the establishment Republican and Democratic parties, which have merged into one ruling party, is nearly universal. The public, battling inflation that is at a 40-year high and cost the average U.S. household an additional $717 a month in July alone, will increasingly see any political figure or political party willing to attack the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. These sentiments are true here and in Europe, where energy costs are expected to rise by as much as 80 percent this winter and an inflation rate of 10 percent is eating away at incomes.

The reconfiguration of society under neoliberalism to exclusively benefit the billionaire class, the slashing and privatization of public services, including schools, hospitals and utilities, along with deindustrialization, the profligate pouring of state funds and resources into the war industry, at the expense of the nation’s infrastructure and social services, and the building of the world’s largest prison system and militarization of police, have predictable results.

At the heart of the problem is a loss of faith in traditional forms of government and democratic solutions. Fascism in the 1930s succeeded, as Peter Drucker observed, not because people believed its conspiracy theories and lies but in spite of the fact that they saw through them. Fascism thrived in the face of “a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” He added, “nobody would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.”

As in the past, these new fascist parties cater to emotional yearnings. They give vent to feelings of abandonment, worthlessness, despair and alienation. They promise unattainable miracles. They too peddle bizarre conspiracy theories including QAnon. But most of all, they promise vengeance against a ruling class that betrayed the nation. 

Hett defines the Nazis as “a nationalist protest movement against globalization.” The rise of the new fascism has its roots in a similar exploitation by global corporations and oligarchs. More than anything else, people want to regain control over their lives, if only to punish those blamed and scapegoated for their misery. 

We have seen this movie before

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/09/26/the-best-journalists-are-persecuted-and-despised-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

The Best Journalists Are Persecuted And Despised: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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The best western journalists are overwhelmingly despised while the worst are acclaimed millionaires. Western civilization is built on lies, dependent on lies, powered by lies. Don’t seek widespread approval. It’s worthless.

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Live long enough and you’ll learn that the people who’ll really hurt you and screw you over aren’t the obvious, overt monsters but the sly manipulators who smile to your face. The US empire is a sly manipulator smiling and posturing as the good guy by contrasting itself with overt monsters.

As our consciousness has expanded it’s become unacceptable to be seen as an overt tyrant by the public, but that just meant the emergence of a sneakier form of tyranny. The age of the brute gave way to the age of the manipulative bitch. This manipulative bitch of an empire has been instigating and orchestrating violence at mass scale and then using its unrivaled narrative control machine to blame the violence on other powers. And its provocations are only getting more and more aggressive and more and more dangerous.

If humanity meets its end, it will come not at the hands of the overt monsters but the sly manipulators. The trajectory toward the horrifying global conflict we appear to be fast approaching was set by the manipulative bitch of the US-centralized empire.

If there’s one thing sly manipulators hate, it’s people who continuously highlight whenever they are being manipulative. That’s what drives the ongoing push to silence, censor and marginalize critics of empire. Julian Assange is in prison because he spotlighted the manipulative bitch.

Manipulators can only manipulate when their manipulations are invisible to their subjects. A grassroots push to bring public awareness to the empire’s manipulations would hamstring the empire. The empire knows this, hence the push to neutralize empire critics in myriad ways.

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Friendly reminder to the English-speaking world that Iran is none of your fucking business and any kind of intervention from your government literally always makes things worse.

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Remember, it’s crazy and conspiratorial to say the CIA likely is involved or will soon become involved in domestic uprisings in a US-targeted nation. The sane position is to believe that the CIA never does anything, and its officers are all sitting in their Langley offices watching Netflix. The responsible, correct view is that the CIA’s extensively documented role in fomenting domestic uprisings around the world is strictly a thing of the past, and that the agency now receives billions and billions of dollars each year to do nothing whatsoever.

If you lived with someone who always steals things you’d suspect them anytime one of your valuables goes missing, but you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist if you think domestic uprisings in a US-targeted nation might involve the CIA. We learned the CIA was literally plotting to assassinate Julian Assange five years ago and people still act like it’s crazy and outlandish to suggest that they’re doing evil things in the world currently.

If you don’t want people speculating about CIA involvement whenever there’s unrest in a nation the US government doesn’t like, you should be calling for the dismantling of the CIA. Otherwise you’re just supporting the CIA as it works to foment those kinds of uprisings and yelling at people who don’t like it.

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People don’t “serve” in the military, they work in the military. It’s a job. And if it’s a job with the US or any of its imperial member states, it is one of the most unethical jobs that anyone can possibly have.

 

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People who defend the US empire from criticism aren’t actually defending the empire, they’re defending their worldview. They’re staving off the flood of cognitive dissonance they’d experience if they saw that everything they believe about the world is a propaganda-induced lie.

That’s why so many of them say things like “Of course our government does bad things BUT-” and then make up some nonsensical gibberish like “you think Putin is an innocent little flower” or whatever. They don’t love the empire, they’re just flailing around protecting their worldview. Their arguments consistently lack robustness because they’re not invested in defending some globe-spanning power structure (people don’t usually do that unless they’re paid to), they’re just throwing up any walls they can that will protect their worldview.

 

Still, though. Imagine being such an embarrassing, sycophantic bootlicker that you’re emotionally incapable of handling the fact that there are a few fringe people on the internet who spend their time criticizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth. Imagine actually seeing that as a problem. There are actual people who sincerely see the existence of empire critics anywhere online as a problem that needs to be solved. How far gone do you have to be to live like that? How much bullshit must you have poured over your mind and heart for that to seem sensible?

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Most people get that you can’t win a nuclear war, but not enough people understand that you also can’t even remain fully in control in a nuclear standoff. There are too many small moving parts, too many things that can go wrong. Google “nuclear close calls” if you doubt this.

Our rulers are ushering us into a nuclear standoff of steadily increasing escalation, and they cannot, cannot, cannot control its outcome. They’re gambling everyone’s life hoping to win the prize of planetary domination, and their game is getting more dangerous by the day.

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https://scheerpost.com/2022/09/25/patrick-lawrence-in-the-terrain-of-word-war-iii/

In the Terrain of Word War III

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) advanced decisively into Russian-held territory in northeastern Ukraine two weeks ago, exposing the weakness, incompetence, and cowardice of Russian soldiers and officers. The tide of this war has turned. The Russian army is on the way to defeat, and President Vladimir Putin could go down with it.

 Was it that way? Or was it this way:

The Armed Forces of Ukraine, with the aid of U.S. intelligence, identified a region from which the Russians had more or less withdrawn, leaving its defense to cursorily trained militias from Luhansk, the northernmost of Ukraine’s two breakaway republics. The AFU thus advanced against next to no resistance. The course of the war has not fundamentally changed.

We do not know precisely or certainly what happened, and how, in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine during the first two weeks of September. I incline to the latter version of events, but never mind that. None of this matters as much as it did even a few days ago.

Suddenly, abruptly, we know something vastly more important: Recent Ukrainian advances, under whatever conditions they were achieved, now prove a tripwire, over which the U.S. and Russia, possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, have stumbled into the gravest threat of world war at least since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and probably since the victories over Japan and Europe 17 years earlier.

A pair of speeches on Sept. 21—Putin to his nation, President Biden to the U.N. General Assembly hours later—bring us face to face with this grim new reality. They are “must” to read or hear  for anyone concerned with the direction geopolitical events now take. As to a negotiated passage through this dangerous impasse, Biden doesn’t seem to be bothering with even the back-channel contacts President Kennedy used to defuse a potentially nuclear confrontation over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.  

Let us “think with history” at this critical moment, to borrow a phrase from Carl Schorske, the late and distinguished Europeanist. And let us find causality and responsibility in it. It will then be readily evident that the sobering, sit-up-straight dangers confronting us are the perversely logical outcome of a long succession of deluded and reckless policies Washington has insisted on pursuing and imposing on its European allies over many years—and most actively over the past eight.

David Stockman just published a forceful piece in antiwar.com asserting that the Putin and Biden speeches mark the start of “a disastrous endgame.” He asks, “What in hell were those bloody-minded Washington/NATO neocons thinking?” It is a good question. My answer: They weren’t, and, with exceptions such as the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China, they haven’t for seven and some decades. It is America’s hegemonic hubris and an egotistical will to power that land us in a global crisis that could have been avoided at many turns by resort to the mahogany table. In the war planners, technocrats, rational-choice charlatans, and game theorists who “reasoned” the world into this mess, we find what I call the irrationality of hyper-rationality. 

Following the AFU’s recent advances, we had a surfeit of comment to the effect that the fortunes of the Ukrainian forces had changed and that the Putin government could collapse in consequence. “It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory: The liberation of Russian-occupied territory might bring down Vladimir Putin”: This was the headline atop a piece Anne Applebaum published September 11 in The Atlantic. “Instead of showcasing Moscow’s newfound might, the Ukrainian war—now in its seventh month—is laying bare Russia’s weaknesses”: This was Yaroslav Trofimov’s take as published in The Wall Street Journal five days later.

It took less time than I had expected for these irresponsible predictions to dissolve. Ukraine’s successes were indeed a psychological shock and indeed shook the Kremlin leadership—these and other commentators had this much right—but they otherwise got it perfectly upside-down. The criticism Putin has faced lately, and there appears to have been some or much, was leveled most forcefully by hawks unhappy with the Russian high command’s restraint in Ukraine and its reliance on the Luhansk and Donetsk republics to man the front lines. Putin put Russia and the West on notice in his speech Wednesday that both halves of this strategy are now cast aside.

The important elements of that speech are two: Russia will now begin to mobilize and deploy up to 300,000 trained reservists in Ukraine. And referendums are to be held in four regions of Ukraine—the two republics and the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia  regions—to determine whether their residents favor Russian sovereignty over Ukrainian.

In the time it took for Putin to speak, these steps transformed a “special military operation” initially intended to demilitarize and de–Nazify Ukraine into something much larger, more consequential, and more fraught—into, this is to say, a war.

We have read incessantly over the past seven months of Russian incompetence, disorganization, demoralization, and so on: The running theme has been the Russians do not have it in them to prevail. This now seems to me mere cover for those unwilling to acknowledge that Russian forces were not operating at anything like maximum force. As the cliché police have taken a day off, I will say this directly: Putin and his high command have just taken the gloves off. I leave it to readers to think through where this conflict is now likely to head on the ground.

The four referendums have greatly larger implications. We already read that they are a “sham”—the approved term. I do not know where Western officials, reporters, and commentators get this, as these polls have not yet been held. To me we are getting a preemptive dismissal because it is almost assured that those in all four regions will decide they wish to be reintegrated into Russia.

These are Russian-speaking people who have been betrayed since a small minority in the west of the country overthrew their elected president in 2014. These are people whose language was immediately outlawed after the U.S.–cultivated coup. Many of these people—those in the two breakaway republics—were denied the federalist autonomy called for in the two Minsk Protocols of 2014 and 2015 because the Kyiv regime refused to take those commitments seriously. This same many then suffered eight years of shelling, at a cost of roughly 11,000 civilian lives, by those valorous, upright, clean-living Ukrainian forces.

Will these ballots be fixed? I do not know anyone who is in a position to say, but it appears evident in view of the above, and the history of these regions, there is little reason for any such chicanery. The vote tallies in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions may not prove so decisive as in the two republics, but those in all four regions are likely to say, Kyiv’s made a mess of Ukraine. Let’s go home. 

John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinians and who is now a writer, cast a useful light on the legal questions the referendums raise in a piece  published the day Russian began its intervention: “There is an inherent, indeed irreconcilable conflict between two fundamental principles of international law—the territorial integrity of states and the self-determination of peoples.” It is implicit in the referendums themselves that Moscow rests its case on the self-determination argument.

Post-referendums, assuming the result is as anticipated, the AFU will be waging war against Russians on Russian territory—not, grotesque as it has been to watch, against its own people. This will change more or less everything. These votes will preclude any prospect of negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv. And the U.S. and NATO will thenceforth be arming the Kyiv regime in a war against the Russian Federation.

Now we approach World War III territory. In this, Putin seems to have taken the gloves off on the diplomatic side, too. Even as he announced plans for the imminent referendums, he redefined the Ukraine conflict into a defense of Russia against an existential threat posed by the U.S. and its allies:

The purpose of this West is to weaken, divide, and ultimately destroy our country. They are already directly saying that in 1991 they were able to split the Soviet Union and now the time has come for Russia itself, that it should disintegrate into many mortally hostile regions…

It is against this background that Putin made his most-noted remark:

And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff. 

This has been widely reported to be another one of Moscow’s threats to deploy a nuclear weapon. I do not think this interpretation is any more certain than it was on earlier occasions. I tend to put Putin’s statement in the same file with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s earlier in the Ukraine conflict: They are at bottom warning against further threats from the U.S. and the West.

We come to the stiff speech Biden delivered at the U.N. shortly after Putin spoke. It was as if the two were conversing, which seems to me a useful way to consider these two addresses. What did Biden say and what did he not say? These are equally important.

On the “said” side, Biden identified Russia as the primary threat to world order and pledged America’s continuing engagement in the Ukraine conflict:

Russia has shamelessly violated the core tenets of the United Nations Charter—no [sic] more important than the clear prohibition against countries taking the territory of their neighbor by force. 

… If nations can pursue their imperial ambitions without consequences, then we put at risk everything this very institution stands for. Everything.

… We chose liberty. We chose sovereignty…. We stood with Ukraine.

… So, we—each of us in this body who is determined to uphold the principles and beliefs we pledge to defend as members of the United Nations — must be clear, firm, and unwavering in our resolve.

… We do not seek conflict. We do not seek a Cold War. We do not ask any nation to choose between the United States or any other partner. 

It is difficult to take seriously any American political figure who complains about another nation pursuing “imperial ambitions without consequence,” but we must: This is the voice of the world’s most powerful nation.

To begin with, the world is advised that the U.S. has no intention of stepping back from its current course, or even altering it in response to changed circumstances. Implicit here is a recommitment to the delusions of a Ukrainian victory that led to this crisis. The weapons shipments will continue. The wasteful deaths and destruction will continue. The silence between Moscow and Washington will continue.

“We do not seek conflict. We do not seek a Cold War.” Biden has said this many times, and we must conclude at this point the man doth protest too much. The many years of provocations since the 2014 coup, the NATO deployments eastward toward the Russian frontier, the covert disruption of negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv in Istanbul last March— take out the two “nots” in these sentences and you arrive at the truth of things. If Biden is to be taken seriously on this point, why isn’t he on the telephone with Putin as we speak? As things stand, it starts to look as though Washington wants a Cold War well on the way to a hot one.

Not to be missed, there is “We chose sovereignty. We stood with Ukraine.” Here Biden is taking a position on the question John Whitbeck raises. Biden places a higher value on the nation-state and its power than he does on self-determination for the millions of Donbas residents the Kyiv regime has violently alienated for the past eight years with the West’s blessing. Jefferson must be spinning.

The sheer pabulum of which Biden’s speech is mostly made is indicative of what he would not say. This cannot have been lost on the assembled heads of state, the majority of whom do not stand with the U.S. on Ukraine–and the majority of whom know all about Washington’s intolerance should they choose to associate with “partners” the U.S. does not like.

The U.S. takes no cognizance of Moscow’s longtime and continuing security concerns, Biden said by leaving these unmentioned. They are still the “nonstarters” they were called when Moscow put them on paper last December. The U.S. does not care if Russians and the Russian leadership feel under threat. It has no intention of opening diplomatic channels with a view to negotiating a settlement not only of the Ukraine conflict but also of the wider question of a stable European order.

Once again, the world’s most powerful nation, ever boastful of its virtues, has nothing to say to others. 

Roger Cohen, in a piece in The New York Times published after the two speeches Wednesday, asserted that Vladimir Putin is now  in a state of desperation. “Mr. Putin cornered is Mr. Putin at his most dangerous,” he wrote. 

This is more of the incautious bunkum we had after the AFU’s advances. I do not think Putin is cornered. I think he is fed up, altogether rightfully. And I think he is frightened now, as we all must be. As I have argued for many months, he faces an imperium that has decided Ukraine is its make-or-break moment—its O.K. Corral, its big roll of the dice in defense of its declining power.

It is a strange thing to think about. In 1847, the French historian and critic Charles Augustin Sainte–Beuve wrote these words in a notebook:

There are now but two great nations—the first is Russia, still barbarian but large, and worthy of respect…. The other nation is America, an intoxicated, immature democracy that knows no obstacles. The future of the world lies between these two great nations. One day they will collide, and then we will see struggles the like of which no one has dreamed of.

The question of the West and why it had recently coalesced as a political construct in response to the rise of czarist Russia was much in the air by Sainte–Beuve’s time. Jules Michelet, the honored historian, and de Tocqueville had sounded similar themes by then. I have never figured out why the French were onto these thoughts so early. For now we must remark on their exceptional prescience.  

I wonder, as of last week, whether Sainte–Beuve’s “one day” has arrived and we are on the brink of those undreamt struggles in consequence of the irresponsible dreams of the irresponsible people who have brought us to this day.

....

antiwar.com

What In the Hell Was Washington Thinking?

What in the hell were those bloody-minded Washington/NATO neocons thinking? At any time in the last nine months they could have had a diplomatic settlement with Russia that would have:

• Avoided/ended the war in Ukraine, thereby saving tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives and hundreds of billion of economic cost and destruction;
• Allowed the Russian speaking population of the Donbas a substantial degree of self-governance and autonomy from the hostile government in Kiev;
• Permitted the historic Russian territory of Crimea to remain under Russian control per the wishes of the overwhelming share of its Russian-speaking population;
• Kept NATO out of Ukraine and its missiles away from Russia’s doorstep;
• Removed NATO missile bases from the the old Warsaw Pact countries, where NATO had expanded in breach of Washington’s solemn promise made at the time of the German reunification to not extend NATO "one inch to the east" .

Would this have furthered the national security of the US and Europe, permitted Europe’s then flourishing peaceful commerce with Russia to continue and avoided the current global plague of soaring energy and food prices caused by the Sanctions War?

Yes, it would have. In spades!

So the question recurs. What alternative path did Washington/NATO envision and how could the likely consequences have improved upon either the above summarized settlement, which has been possible all along or, far worse still, the disastrous end game which is now unfolding?

The fact is, after Putin’s speech of yesterday the phrase "disastrous end game" is barely adequate to describe the scenario ahead. That’s because it signaled that the relative restraint of Russia’s "Special Military Operation" (SMO) is now over, and what lies ahead is full scale political and military warfare that can only end in calamity for Ukraine, NATO and indeed the world:

The heart of the matter is that Putin is now :

• Mobilizing Russia’s entire GDP, which is at least 15X greater than what’s left of Ukraine’s;
• Mustering 300,000 fresh reserves or double the number of Russian forces now deployed in the SMO;
• Abandoning the policy of not attacking Ukraine’s civilian electric power grid and railroad system, which has been crucial to Ukraine’s survival to date and the West’s massive supply of weapons across the western border and through the interior rail network;
• Preparing to annex the two breakaway Donbas republics in the east and the Kherson and  Zaporizhzhia regions in the south after hurriedly called referendums, which will transform the war into an explicit NATO-enabled attack on Russia proper.

To be sure, Kiev and Washington are screaming loudly that these referendums are "shams", and it’s probably the case that the ballot counting will be no better than what occurred in the state of Georgia in 2020.

But the fact is, these regions are populated by Russian-speakers who have no love for or loyalty to the anti-Russian government in Kiev; who have already lined-up for Russian citizenship in large numbers; and who, in any case, fear the retribution of the Ukrainian military and secret service far more than they fear the Russians.

Stated differently, the populations of the Donetsk (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republics (LPR) and those of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions are not begging to be "liberated" by Ukrainian armies, which are every bit as brutal and vindictive as the Russian military has been alleged to be, and surely don’t give a whit about Washington/NATO’s hypocritical malarkey about the rule of law and the sanctity of borders.

In fact, the overwhelming share of the populations (75-90%) of these regions have voted for the pro-Russian candidate in every presidential election held in the Ukraine since the Soviet Union’s mailed fist was lifted from their governance in 1991.

That is to say, they have implicitly voted for partition of a country that never existed until it was nailed together by the tyrannical rule of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev after 1922. So doing, they effected an arbitrary rearrangement of borders that plopped what had been "New Russia" for upwards of 200 years into the commie designed Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine for no better reason than it suited their whims and convenience of rule.

But now, within a matter of weeks, Ukraine’s borders will be restored to the pre-WWI status quo ante. Whether fair and square or not, the vote will be overwhelmingly in favor of separation and upon the request of the peoples of "Novorussiya", Putin has indicated that these regions will once again become formal Russian territories.

What that means, in turn, of course, is that NATO’s war in support of the Kiev regime will become an explicit war on the territory of Russia. And that surely portends a bloody and disastrous end game because the only way it does not end up in an armistice after untold more deaths and destruction, followed by secession of the new "Russian" territories , anyway, is if Ukraine wins the war.

That’s not going to happen. Not in a blue moon.

Once Moscow takes the gloves off and savages Ukraine’s electric power grid and railway system it will be all over except the shouting. The massive flow of western armaments, which has kept Kiev in the game to date, will be drastically curtailed; and the civilian population in the Kiev-controlled areas will be left high and dry, preparing to shiver in the dark as the severe Ukrainian winter approaches.

Nor does the alleged surprise victory of Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv area in recent weeks change the scenario. What that actually accomplished was the sacrifice of thousands of Ukrainian troops in the apparent faint attack on Kherson in the south in order to regain a few thousand square miles of lightly populated open steppe around Kharkiv.

Even then, the alleged hastily retreating Russian army was not that at all. The area had been mostly occupied and defended by the lightly trained volunteers of the Republic of Luhansk, not the trained professionals of the Russian armed forces.

Now that the Ukrainian army has driven out the Luhansk volunteers and occupied the open steppe lands, it remains for Russian dominance of the air and artillery war to encircle the alleged victors and pulverize them from the air and via long-range artillery that is even now being brought into position.

That is to say, in a few weeks the Ukrainian "victory "will disappear from the MSM, just as have so many other alleged setbacks to the Russian cause.

Instead, the news will be about the brutality of the Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure; the roadblocks it will put in front of what has been the demolition derby of US/NATO supplied weaponry to the battle front; and the fact that without massive new aid from Washington beyond the $50 billion already authorized, civilian life in the Kiev-controlled portions of the country will be on the verge of collapse and the regime in Kiev will be on virtual life-support from Washington.

In short, the end game in lieu of the diplomatic settlement which could have been had long ago will be either a more unfavorable partition of Ukraine, leaving Kiev and the western regions as a bankrupt landlocked rump state and ward of the west, or an escalation that involves direct military engagement by NATO and leaves the world teetering on the edge of nuclear war.

So much for using Ukraine as cannon fodder to drastically "weaken Russia" and to force the demonized Vlad Putin from power. To the contrary, by the time Europe’s cold and dark winter is underway, it will be European governments, which slavishly did Washington’s bidding, that will be falling like dominoes.

More importantly, it will also be the new Republican majority on Capitol Hill asking our opening question of Biden’s infinitely foolish national security team: Indeed, what in the hell were you thinking?!