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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/12/01/nato-exists-to-solve-the-problems-created-by-natos-existence/

NATO Exists To Solve The Problems Created By NATO’s Existence

NATO has doubled down on its determination to eventually add Ukraine to its membership, renewing its 2008 commitment to that goal in a meeting between the foreign ministers of the alliance in Bucharest, Romania this past Tuesday.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes:

The Romanian city was where NATO initially made the promise to Ukraine back in 2008, and at the time, US officials acknowledged that attempting to bring the country into the alliance could spark a war in the region.

“We made the decision in Bucharest in 2008 at the summit,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday. “I was there … representing Norway as Prime Minister. I remember very well the decisions. We stand by those decisions. NATO’s door is open.”

In a joint statement, the NATO foreign ministers, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said that they “reaffirm” the decisions that were made at the 2008 Bucharest summit.

It has become fashionable among the mainstream western commentariat to claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansion, but as recently explained by Philippe Lemoine for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, that’s a completely false narrative that requires snipping past comments made by Putin out of the context in which they were made. Many western experts warned for years in advance that NATO expansion would lead to a conflict like the one we’re seeing today, and they were of course correct.

The recent push to expand NATO in Ukraine along with nations like Finland and Sweden as justified by “Russian aggression” is a good example of what professor Richard Sakwa has called the “fateful geographical paradox: that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.” As the late scholar on US-Russia relations Stephen Cohen explained years before the Ukraine crisis erupted in 2014, Moscow sees NATO as an “American sphere of influence,” and the expansion of NATO and NATO influence as expansion of that sphere. It reacts to this with hostility just as the US would react to China or Russia building up aggressive military alliances on its borders, and arguably with vastly more restraint than the US would.

Other future examples of Sakwa’s fateful geographical paradox are likely to include the push to reconfigure NATO into an alliance dedicated to “restraining” China, which of course means halting China’s rise on the world stage and working to constrict, balkanize and usurp it. A recent Financial Times article titled “Washington steps up pressure on European allies to harden China stance” gives new detail to this agenda:

The US is pushing European allies to take a harder stance towards Beijing as it tries to leverage its leadership on Ukraine to gain more support from Nato countries for its efforts to counter China in the Indo-Pacific.

According to people briefed on conversations between the US and its Nato allies, Washington has in recent weeks lobbied members of the transatlantic alliance to toughen up their language on China and to start working on concrete action to restrain Beijing.

US president Joe Biden identified countering China as his main foreign policy goal at the start of his administration, but his efforts have been complicated by the focus on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

But with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion in its 10th month, Washington was making a concerted effort to push China back up Nato’s agenda, the people said.

The “North Atlantic” Treaty Organization added China to its security concerns for the very first time this past June, and ever since it’s seen a mad push from Washington to ramp up aggressions against Beijing. Another Financial Times article titled “Nato holds first dedicated talks on China threat to Taiwan” details a meeting between alliance members this past September:

They also discussed how Nato should make Beijing aware of the potential ramifications of any military action — a debate that has gained significance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amid questions about whether the west was tough enough in its warnings to Moscow.

The US has been urging allies, particularly in Europe, to focus more on the threat to Taiwan, as concerns mount that Chinese president Xi Jinping may order the use of force against the island.

Senior US military officers and officials have floated several possible timelines for military action, with some eager to increase the sense of urgency to ensure Washington and its allies are prepared.

Some are noticing that Washington’s eagerness to “increase the sense of urgency” on this front can easily wind up having a provocative effect which serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told Bloomberg a month ago that Washington’s haste to prepare everyone for another major conflict could “end up provoking the war that we seek to deter.”

“NATO should be renamed ASFP: the Alliance for Self Fulfilling Prophecies,” tweeted commentator Arnaud Bertrand of the alliance’s discussions about Taiwan.

“A defensive alliance doesn’t look to pick fights with a country on a different continent,” tweeted Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “This is some classic mission creep from NATO – or, more accurately, Washington.”

When you ignore all the empty narrative fluff and really boil it down to the raw language of actual behavior, NATO’s existence really does seem to be premised on the circular reasoning that without NATO there’d be nobody to protect the world from the consequences of NATO’s actions. It goes out of its way to threaten powerful nations and then justifies its existence by their responses to those threats. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone, or, if you prefer, a self-licking boot.

And this is all happening as news comes out that European nations are beginning to notice they’re bearing a lot more of the cost of Washington’s proxy warfare in Ukraine than the US is, while the US reaps all the profits. In an article titled “Europe accuses US of profiting from war,” Politico reports:

Top European officials are furious with Joe Biden’s administration and now accuse the Americans of making a fortune from the war, while EU countries suffer.

“The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,” one senior official told POLITICO.

The explosive comments — backed in public and private by officials, diplomats and ministers elsewhere — follow mounting anger in Europe over American subsidies that threaten to wreck European industry.

Washington is taking extreme risks and angering allies at this time because it’s getting to do-or-die time as far as preserving US unipolar hegemony is concerned. As Antiwar’s Ted Snider explains in a recent article, the US proxy war in Ukraine has never really been about Ukraine, and hasn’t even ultimately been about Russia. In the long run this standoff has always been about China, and about the desperate campaign of the US empire to preserve its unrivaled domination of this planet.

“The war in Ukraine has always been about larger US goals,” writes Snider. “It has always been about the American ambition to maintain a unipolar world in which they were the sole polar power at the center and top of the world.”

“Events in Ukraine in 2014 marked the end of the unipolar world of American hegemony,” Snider says. “Russia drew the line and asserted itself as a new pole in a multipolar world order. That is why the war is ‘bigger than Ukraine,’ in the words of the State Department. It is bigger than Ukraine because, in the eyes of Washington, it is the battle for US hegemony.”

“If Ukraine is about Russia, Russia is about China,” Snider writes. “The ‘Russia Problem’ has always been that it is impossible to confront China if China has Russia: it is not desirable to fight both superpowers at once. So, if the long-term goal is to prevent a challenge to the US led unipolar world from China, Russia first needs to be weakened.”

Snider quotes Lyle Goldstein, a visiting professor at Brown University, who says that “In order to maintain its hegemonic position, the US supports Ukraine to wage hybrid warfare against Russia…The purpose is to hit Russia, contain Europe, kidnap ‘allies,’ and threaten China.”

As the world becomes more multipolar and securing total control looks less and less likely, the empire is fighting more and more like a boxer in the later rounds who’s been down on the scorecards the entire fight: taking more risks, throwing wild haymakers, preferring the possibility of a knockout loss over the certainty of losing a decision.

We’re at the most dangerous point in humanity’s abusive relationship with US unipolar domination, for the same reason the most dangerous point in a battered wife’s life is right when she’s trying to escape. The empire is willing to do terrible and risky things to retain control. “If I can’t have you no one can” is a line that can be said to a wife, or to the world.

The importance of opposing these megalomaniacs, and their games of nuclear chicken, has never been higher.

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https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2022/11/22/it-was-never-about-ukraine/

It Was Never About Ukraine

In his March 21 press briefing, State Department spokesman Ned Price told the gathered reporters that “President Zelenskyy has also made it very clear that he is open to a diplomatic solution that does not compromise the core principles at the heart of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.” A reporter asked Price, “What are you saying about your support for a negotiated settlement à la Zelenskyy, but on whose principles?” In what still may be the most remarkable statement of the war, Price responded, “this is a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine.”

Price, who a month earlier had discouraged talks between Russia and Ukraine, rejected Kiev negotiating an end to the war with Ukraine’s interests addressed because US core interests had not been addressed. The war was not about Ukraine’s interests: it was bigger than Ukraine.

A month later, in April, when a settlement seemed to be within reach at the Istanbul talks, the US and UK again pressured Ukraine not to pursue their own goals and sign an agreement that could have ended the war. They again pressured Ukraine to continue to fight in pursuit of the larger goals of the US and its allies. Then British prime minister Boris Johnson scolded Zelensky that Putin "should be pressured, not negotiated with." He added that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, the West was not.”

Once again, the war was not about Ukraine’s interests: it was bigger than Ukraine.

At every opportunity, Biden and his highest ranking officials have insisted “that it's up to Ukraine to decide how and when or if they negotiate with the Russians” and that the US won’t dictate terms: “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” But that has never been true. The US wouldn’t allow Ukraine to negotiate on their terms when they wanted to. The US stopped Ukraine from negotiating in March and April when they wanted to; they pushed them to negotiate in November when they did not want to.

The war in Ukraine has always been about larger US goals. It has always been about the American ambition to maintain a unipolar world in which they were the sole polar power at the center and top of the world. 

Ukraine became the focus of that ambition in 2014 when Russia for the first time stood up to American hegemony. Alexander Lukin, who is Head of Department of International Relations at National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow and an authority on Russian politics and international relations, says that since the end of the Cold War Russia had been considered a subordinate partner of the West. In all disagreements between Russia and the US up to then, Russia had compromised, and the disagreements were resolved rather quickly. 

But when, in 2014, the US set up and supported a coup in Ukraine that was intended to pull Ukraine closer into the NATO and European security sphere Russia responded by annexing Crimea, Russia broke out of its post Cold War policy of compliance and pushed back against US hegemony. The 2014 “crisis in Ukraine and Russia’s reaction to it have fundamentally changed this consensus," Lukin says. "Russia refused to play by the rules." 

Events in Ukraine in 2014 marked the end of the unipolar world of American hegemony. Russia drew the line and asserted itself as a new pole in a multipolar world order. That is why the war is “bigger than Ukraine,” in the words of the State Department. It is bigger than Ukraine because, in the eyes of Washington, it is the battle for US hegemony.

That is why US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on November 13 that some of the sanctions on Russia could remain in place even after any eventual peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. The war has never just been about Ukraine: it is about US foreign policy aspirations that are bigger than Ukraine. Yellen said, “I suppose in the context of some peace agreement, adjustment of sanctions is possible and could be appropriate.” Sanctions could be adjusted when negotiations end the war, but, Yellen added, “We would probably feel, given what’s happened, that probably some sanctions should stay in place.” 

That is also why the US announced a new army headquarters in Germany “to carry out what is expected to be a long-term mission” while it simultaneous began pushing Ukraine toward peace talks. The military pressure on Russia and support for Ukraine will survive the war.

It is also why on June 29, the US announced the establishment of a permanent headquarters for US forces in Poland that Biden boasted would be “the first permanent U.S. forces on NATO’s eastern flank."

It is again why, on November 9, the State Department approved the sale of nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of High Mobility Artillery Rocket System to Lithuania. They are not to be used by NATO in the Ukraine war. But they will, according to the State Department, “support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by helping to improve the military capability of a NATO Ally that is an important force for ensuring political stability and economic progress within Eastern Europe.” At the same time, the State Department approved the potential sale of guided multiple launch rocket systems to Finland to bolster “the land and air defense capabilities in Europe's northern flank.”

Presumably, the delivery of upgraded B61-12 air-dropped gravity nuclear bombs to NATO bases in Europe is also not in the service of current US goals in Ukraine.

Though to the US, the war in Ukraine is “bigger than Ukraine,” it is also “in many ways bigger than Russia.” Although the recently released 2022 National Defense Strategy identifies Russia as the current “acute threat,” it “focuses on the PRC,” or the People’s Republic of China. The Strategy consistently identifies China as the “pacing challenge.” The long-term focus is on, not Russia, but China. 

The National Defense Strategy clearly states that “The most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security is the PRC’s coercive and increasingly aggressive endeavor to refashion the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to suit its interests and authoritarian preferences.”

If Ukraine is about Russia, Russia is about China. The “Russia Problem” has always been that it is impossible to confront China if China has Russia: it is not desirable to fight both superpowers at once. So, if the long-term goal is to prevent a challenge to the US led unipolar world from China, Russia first needs to be weakened. 

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently said that "China will firmly support the Russian side, with the leadership of President Putin . . . to further reinforce the status of Russia as a major power." 

According to Lyle Goldstein, a visiting professor at Brown University and author of Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry, an analysis of the war in Ukraine published in a Chinese academic journal concludes that “In order to maintain its hegemonic position, the US supports Ukraine to wage hybrid warfare against Russia…The purpose is to hit Russia, contain Europe, kidnap ‘allies,’ and threaten China.”

The war in Ukraine has never been just about Ukraine. It has always been “bigger than Ukraine” and about US principles that are bigger than Ukraine and “in many ways bigger than Russia.” Ukraine is where Russia drew the line on the US led unipolar world and where the US chose to fight the battle for hegemony. That battle is acutely about Russia but, in the long-term, it is about China, “the most comprehensive and serious challenge” to US hegemony.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57356.htm

No Way Out for the USA

On the surface, it would appear that the US is in the catbird seat: Since Bretton Woods in 1944, the US has been able to dictate the economy to its trading partners and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world. Those countries that got on board the Bretton Woods Choo-Choo would be the world’s leaders in commerce, and the rest would take second shrift.

This was possible because, at the end of the war, the US had been supplying the allies with most of their armaments and materiel and had insisted on being paid in gold. By 1944, they held the great majority of the world’s gold and had the most productive manufacturing facilities. They were in a position to call all the shots, and the countries that subsequently made up the First World went along for the ride.

But by the 1970s, the US went off the gold standard and was paying for imports with US Treasuries. This was seen to be a boon at the time, as the Treasuries could be created from thin air, and the demands by the US became boundless. The US became the biggest house on the block, but it was, in fact, a house of cards, which was only as good as the currency it was built upon – not true money but debt.

To paraphrase Norm Franz, “Gold is the money of kings… debt is the money of slaves.”

The US was, from 1971 on, in the business of enslaving its partners. Along the way, it became more economical to outsource manufacturing, and, over the ensuing decades, the production of most goods came from countries other than the US.

But a wrinkle occurred in recent decades: some of the overseas suppliers of goods, and in particular, energy were now building up their ability for world trade to the point that the US itself was no longer essential. Indeed, better business could often be created between countries without going through the US, and the US was becoming an obstacle to the economic advancement of other nations.

In recent decades, China and Russia have emerged as the most essential providers of goods and energy, respectively, precisely at the time that the US had planned to establish globalism – dominance over the entire world by the US, with the backup support of the other First World countries, most notably, Europe.

As long as the other First World countries continued to endorse American diktat to the world, US hegemony would not only continue but expand.

But then, Russia threw a rather major wrench into the works: the Nord Steam pipeline already supplied much of the natural gas to Europe, allowing it to heat its homes and run its factories. With the addition of Nord Stream II, a tipping point was reached: the great majority of Europe’s essential energy, which it was unable to produce itself, could be gotten from Russia and at a price that no other supplier could match.

What’s often overlooked in the discussion of the importance of Nord Stream II is that, from the first day that the tap was to be turned on to supply Europe, US hegemony would end. Although the US had succeeded in dominating European policy over the last half-century, that situation had now reversed. In a choice between pleasing the US and pleasing the eastern suppliers of goods and energy, Europe’s default position would now be with Asia, not the US.

In this one seemingly minor change in supply, the hegemony of the US would cease. And, more troublingly, US power had been a house of cards for decades. It was no longer a manufacturing titan; in fact, it now produced little besides debt. It had once used its manufacturing capacity to bully its trading partners, but now this power had become a mere remnant.

In recent decades, the US has been operating on its past laurels and the assumption that it was the big boy on the block and must be obeyed, no matter how unreasonable its demands were.

When US federal and corporate leaders realised their dilemma, they understood that they had only one last-ditch option: war.

Historically, this is always the last play of a dying empire: when you’re about to lose everything, a major war must be created as a distraction to buy time.

A small war is only a temporary respite. A major war serves to upset the world as a whole. If the world can be turned upside down, perhaps there’s a chance that the dying empire can actually survive with some of its power intact.

If not, the empire goes the way of the dodo. It slips away into insignificance or even extinction.

And this is where the US now finds itself. The shift to the Asian century is well underway. Quietly, one nation after another is shifting its trade and its deference to the Asian leaders. Those countries like Saudi Arabia, that can make dramatic shifts and do so safely, will be bolder in their shift. Less powerful countries will be a bit more subtle, tiptoeing away from their former master. And that, too, is now underway.

But again, the key ally of the US – the one without which it could not be an empire – has been Europe.

The EU is already on the ropes; it was a misconceived experiment from the start and has now begun to splinter. Although no major breakup has begun, the rot is already beyond any possible salvage, and the dictates of Brussels are encountering refusals by some member countries.

With the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, it has become quietly apparent in Germany and other EU countries that they will be facing extreme hardships as a result. They can no longer back out of their support for the US push to create warfare in Ukraine. Additionally, they face the US attempt to draw all the NATO countries into war with Russia – a suicidal prospect for Europe.

The US, in its desperation to escalate the war, has begun to suggest that a “limited nuclear war” might be advisable, but Europe understands that a limited nuclear war is akin to being “a little bit pregnant.”

Europe would not survive such a war.

And so, Germany has begun the pull away from the US. President Olaf Scholz has personally gone to Beijing to broker peace. In doing so, he also makes a clear statement: Germany is acknowledging that it is moving over to a new master.

To be sure, the US will not take this lightly.

There will be collective nail-biting in the First World countries as the average man wonders and worries whether the US will do the sane thing and back away from warfare. What the average man does not understand is that, whilst this may be the best choice for the average man and the world in general, it would be the end for those who rule the US. The US would slide inexorably into a lesser state, or even fragment, leaving the US elite with no empire to rule.

This, above all, cannot be tolerated. And, so, it’s important to understand that, to the rulers of the US empire, this is an all-or-nothing game.

And to be clear, it’s a game that cannot be won. The US no longer produces much; it no longer has a meaningful balance of trade; it’s the most indebted nation in world history; it’s broke, and it can no longer win a protracted war.

And, to reiterate, the US has no other option at this point. It has destroyed all its other options and has no way out of its dilemma – its a modern-day Thucydides Trap. As such, it will not go quietly. Much like a cornered rat, it will make a last attempt to take down as many others as it can on its way out.

That should give us pause. Those who wish to avoid becoming collateral damage as the behemoth falls would be advised to extricate themselves, economically and even geographically, from the dying empire.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57371.htm

Vladimir Putin’s Vision of a Multipolar World

 In history books as well as in politics every story is shaped by where one chooses to begin the tale. The current fighting in Ukraine, which many observers believe to already be what might be considered the opening phase of World War 3, is just such a development. Did the seeds of conflict arise subsequent to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s consent to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 after having received a commitment from the United States and its allies not to advance the West’s military alliance NATO into Eastern Europe? That was a pledge that was quickly ignored by President Bill Clinton, who intervened militarily in the former Yugoslavia before adding new NATO members from amidst the ruins of the Warsaw Pact.

Since that time NATO has continued its expansion at the expense of Russian national security interests. Ukraine, as one of the largest of the former Soviet republics, soon became the focal point for potential conflict. The US interfered openly in Ukrainian politics, featuring frequent visits by relentlessly hawkish Senator John McCain and State Department monster Victoria Nuland as well as the investment of a reported $5 billion to destabilize the situation, bringing about regime change to remove the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich and replace it with a regime friendly to America and its European allies. When this occurred it inevitably led to a proposed invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, a move which Moscow repeatedly warned would constitute an existential threat to Russia itself.

Finally, Moscow tried assiduously to negotiate a solution to the developing Ukraine crisis in 2020-2021 but the US and its allies were not interested, allowing the corrupt Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelensky to refuse any accommodation. So Russia itself has perceived that it has been misled or even lied to repeatedly by the US and its allies. It has been particularly vexed by the looting of its natural resources by mostly Western oligarchs operating under protection afforded by the feckless President Boris Yeltsin between 1991 and 1999, a puppet installed and sustained through US and European interference in the Russian elections. Just when Russia was on its knees, perhaps intentionally, there arrived on the scene in 1999 former KGB officer Vladimir Putin who, as Prime Minister and later president, proceeded to clean house. Ever since that time, Putin has very carefully explained himself and what he has been doing, making clear that he is no enemy of the West but rather a partner in a relationship that respects the interests and cultures of all players in a global economy that maximizes freedom and individuality.

Given the danger of dramatic escalation of the current situation in Ukraine, with talk coming from both sides about the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons, an October 27th speech made by President Vladimir Putin at the 19th meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, held near Moscow, should be required reading for the Joe Bidens and Jens Stoltenbergs of this world. The theme of the meeting was A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for Everyone. The four day-long session included 111 academics, politicians, diplomats and economists from Russia and 40 foreign countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Turkey, Uzbekistan and the United States. In his speech, Putin laid out his vision of a multipolar world in which there is no concept of a politically hegemonic “rules based world order” which substitutes “rules for international law.” And, he observed, the rules have themselves been regularly dictated by one country or group of countries. Putin instead urged a transition into a willingness to accept that all countries have interests and rights that should be respected.

Interestingly enough, Putin, since assuming leadership of his country, has been unwavering in his demand that all countries in the world be granted respect, by which he means that local interests and cultures must be considered legitimate and worthy of acceptance by all as long as they permit individual freedom and are similarly respectful of the interests and national traits of others.

A relaxed and jocular Putin spoke for over an hour in his opening remarks and then fielded questions for another two and a half hours from the audience. In response to a question, he assessed the sanity of White House advisers who would “spoil relations with China at the same time they are supplying billions-worth of weapons to Ukraine in a fight against Russia… Frankly, I do not know why they are doing this…Are they sane? It seems that this runs completely counter to common sense and logic… This is simply crazy!”

The Russian president emphasized several points which elaborated his views. First, he observed that US/Western hegemony “denies the sovereignty of countries and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and disregards any interests of other states… [The] rules-based world order” only empowers those making the “rules.” Everyone else must obey or face the consequences.

Putin also decried the West’s tendency to make rules and then ignore them when circumstances change. He noted how economic sanctions and “cancel culture” are being used cynically to weaken local economies while also demeaning the cultures and national traits of foreign adversaries. He observed, for example, how Russian writers and composers are being banned purely to send a political message and punish Moscow for its foreign policy.

Putin explained that Russia is an “independent, original civilization” which “has never considered itself an enemy of the West.” Moscow “simply defends its right to exist and develop freely. At the same time, we ourselves are not seeking to become some kind of new hegemon.” He then provided his analysis of what it developing, saying that the world is confronting a global storm which no one can ignore. “We are standing at a historic milestone, ahead of what is probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time important decade since the end of World War II. The West is not able to single-handedly manage humanity, but is desperately trying to do it, and most of the peoples of the world no longer want to put up with it.” We can decide “either to continue to accumulate a burden of problems that will inevitably crush us all, or to try together to find solutions, albeit imperfect, but working, capable of making our world safer and more stable.”

So, Vladimir Putin is issuing a call to arms for a transition to a multipolar world, which will inevitably change the playing field both in international relations and in the global economy. No longer will the United States and its allies be able to claim “rule of law” when using coercive force to punish competitors. The drift away from using dollars as the world’s reserve currency, mostly for energy transactions, is already taking place as major trading partners like India, China and NATO member Turkey have ignored restrictions while continuing to buy up Russian energy exports, negating to a certain extent the sanctions put in place by Washington and Europe. The death of dollars as the reserve currency will make it more difficult for the US Treasury to print money without any backing as many nations will no longer be willing to accept what will be increasingly seen as a fiat currency produced by a government that is actually drowning in debt.

Putin might, of course, be proven wrong and the current global system might well be able to limp along for the foreseeable future. But if he is right, those developments transitioning into a multipolar world would mean a de facto decline and fall of the United States as the world hegemon while anything even remotely like a dollar collapse would have catastrophic effect on the US import driven economy as well as on ordinary Americans. Some kind of partial default on US Treasury debt is not unimaginable. And Putin might well be right in his prediction that the change is coming and there is nothing that the United States and its friends can do to stop it.

In any event, the political and economic adjustments that are certainly coming in one way or another will certainly play out as the Ukraine conflict continues to simmer. The tragedy is that what is developing is self-inflicted, completely avoidable and unresponsive to any actual United States interest, but that is another story. If Ukraine turns to open warfare with more direct US involvement and economic dislocation, international pressure to dismantle the post-World War 2 status quo will inevitably increase. No matter how it develops, what is occurring right now will force the perennially tone-deaf politicians in and around the White House to begin to rethink America’s place in the world and its options as a major power. No one can predict how that will go and the process will make compelling theater as America’s two major political parties take up positions to make the case that the other party is solely at fault. It is impossible to foresee how far that bloodletting will go.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57363.htm

Is NATO falling apart?

Something quite amazing has just happened.  Following the terrorist attack in Ankara which killed 34 people and injured another 125, Turkish authorities first declared that they will not accept US condolences.  Then the Turks launched a military operation against “Kurdish terrorists in northern Syria“.  Turkey then claimed to have neutralized 184 terrorists.

What is not mentioned in those articles is that the target of the Turkish strike was the US-run center for the training and education of PKK militants in Rojava.  There are rumors that the Turks gave the US enough warning time to evacuate most of its personnel.

Does that sound familiar?

If it does, it is because it is very similar to what the Iranians did when they hit US bases in Iraq following the murder of General Solemani in a US drone strike.

If the above is true, and rumors are very much “if” and cannot be considered as proven fact, then that means that a NATO member state (Turkey) just attacked a US base and, like Iran, got away with it: the “The Finest Fighting Force in the History of the World” just got whacked hard and humiliated for a second time and could do absolutely nothing to defend itself or even save face.

How big a slap in the face did Uncle Shmuel get this time?  According to the Turkish defense minister, Hulusi Akar,

Terrorists’ shelters, bunkers, caves, tunnels, and warehouses were successfully destroyed,” Akar said, adding that “the so-called headquarters of the terrorist organization were also hit and destroyed.” Overall, the Defense Ministry claimed that the strikes hit nearly 90 targets, which it said were connected to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG).

Even allowing for some “patriotic exaggeration”, it is pretty clear that Ergodan’s revenge strike was both quite substantial and, apparently, rather effective.

So, what do we have here?  A NATO member state all but accused the US of a major terrorist attack against its capital city, and then that NATO member state openly attacked a US-run facility (let’s not call it a base, that would be inaccurate).

Is Erdogan’s claim even credible?  Absolutely!  Not only has the US already attempted to overthrow and kill Erdogan, who was saved in extremis by Russian special forces (same with Ianukovich), but we also know that the US overthrew General de Gaulle in 1968-1969 and that NATO covert forces were used to stage false flag attacks against NATO allies (especially Italy) in the so-called GLADIO operation.

NATO is not a defensive alliance – it never was –  but it is a tool of US colonial domination.

This was always true, hence the famous words spoken  in the now faraway 1950s when the first NATO Secretary General, British General Hasting Ismay, bluntly admitted that real the purpose of NATO was to keep the “Russians out, Americans in, Germans down“.  Let’s take these elements one by one, starting with the last one:

• “Keep the Germans down”: here the word “Germans” is a placeholder for any and all European leaders or countries who want true sovereignty and agency.  Translation: enslave the Europeans
• “Keep the Americans in”: in order to crush any European liberation movement. Translation: place US overlords over all the EU nations.
• “Keep the Russians out”: make sure that Russia does not liberate Europe.  Translation: demonize Russia and do anything and everything to prevent peace on the European continent.  If possible, break-up, subjugate or otherwise destroy Russia.

Need proof?  How about the undeniable act of war against Germany (and, I would argue, the entire EU) when the Anglos blew up NS1/NS2?  Is that not proof enough?

Against that background, we have to ask yourselves: what does it even mean to be a NATO member state in 2022?

The truth is that NATO was a pure creation of the Cold War and that in the real world of 2022 it is a total anachronism.  Being a NATO member state really means very little.  Not only are some “more equal than others” in NATO, but there are also non-NATO states which are far more “NATOized” than actual NATO members states (I think of Israel or, of course, the Nazi occupied Ukraine).  And being a member of NATO does not protect you from anything, not from external attacks and not against internal ones either.

According to Col (Ret) MacGregor, the war in the Ukraine might well bring about the collapse of both NATO and the EU.  I very much agree with him.  I would say that such a collapse will not so much be the result of embarrassing defeats as it will be due to the deep internal contradictions inside both organizations.

By the way, this is not our topic today, but I think that the CSTO has much of the same problems and contradictions as NATO.  So is what we observe a “NATO problem” or a problem of artificial and generally obsolete alliances?  I would argue for the latter.

But let’s leave a discussion of the CSTO for another day.

In the case of Turkey this problem is made even worse by a total incompatibility between Islam and the Woke ideology now openly promoted (and enforced) by the US and NATO.

Then there is geography.  Turkey has some pretty powerful regional neighbors, including not only Greece or Israel, but also Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Syria and, course, Russia.  Can Turkey count on any type of US/NATO “protection” from such powerful neighbors?

Ask the Saudis how much the US/NATO helped them against the Houthis!

Ask the Israelis how much the US/NATO helped them against Hezbollah?

If anything, the Iranian strikes on CENTCOM bases have demonstrated that the US does not have the stomach to take on Iran.  In sharp contrast, the Russian and Iranian intervention in Syria defeated the US plans for a “New Middle East” or, shall we say, it did bring about a “new Middle-East”, but most definitely not the one the US Neocons were hoping for!

Add to this is major deterioration in the relationship between the US and MBS’ Saudi Arabia and we get an amazing picture: the USA and NATO (which the US dragged into the region) are gradually becoming irrelevant in the Middle-East.  Instead, new “big actors” are gradually filling the void, including Russia and Iran who are now even gradually allowing Saudi Arabia to participate in a much needed regional dialog about the future of the region.

The phenomenal weakness of the US/NATO/CENTCOM is best illustrated by the US reaction to the Turkish strikes: Uncle Shmuel endorsed (no kidding!!!) the Turkish strikes :-)

How absolutely pathetic is that for a wannabe superpower?

Will this process have an impact on the NATO war against Russia?

Well, let’s imagine that Russia would really strike some target inside Poland (which is what the Ukies claimed, as did the Poles until Uncle Shmuel told them to cool it).  What would happen next?

Does anybody still remember what happened when Erdogan flew to Mons to beg for NATO protection against Russia (following the downing of a Russian Su-24 over northern Syria by a joint US-Turkish operation, possibly executed without Erdogan’s knowledge, at least that was his claim).  What did NATO promise or give the Turks?  Absolutely *nothing* (other than “consultations”).

Now the Poles might be delusional enough to think that a US President might order a retaliatory attack on Russia if Russia strikes Poland, but those of us who know the USA and its ruling elites know that this is nonsense.  Why?  Simply because a US/NATO counter-strike on Russian forces would result in an immediate Russian response.

And then what?

The truth is very stark in its simplicity:

• The US/NATO do not have the manpower or firepower needed to take on Russia in a conventional combined arms war.
• Any use of nuclear weapons will result in an immediate retaliation most likely resulting into a unwinnable full-scale nuclear war.

So here is the deal: whether western politicians understand that or not, military professionals all know the truth – NATO can’t defend ANY of its members against a truly modern military.   Why?

Let’s look at what capabilities the US/NATO truly have:

• The USN has a superb submarine force (both SSNs and SSBNs) capable for firing large numbers of relatively obsolete cruise missiles (and plenty of SLBMs)
• A still very capable, if rather old, nuclear triad
• A quantitative (only!) conventional advantage over Russia
• Superb (but very vulnerable!) C4ISR capabilities
• A printing press allowing for the quasi infinite printing of dollars
• A comprador elite ruling over all the NATO/EU countries
• The most formidable propaganda machine in history

So what does NATO lack to be a credible military force?

Obviously, “boots on the ground”.   And I don’t mean a few subunits from the 101st or 82AB or US special forces or even a so-called “armored brigade” which, in reality, lacks adequate TO&E to qualify as such.  I am talking about a “land warfare” force capable of fighting a modern and extremely determined enemy.

[Sidebar: if this is a topic of interest to you, may I recommend my article “Debunking popular clichés about modern warfare” written in 2016 but which is still mostly relevant]

The USA, Israel and the KSA all fell into the same trap: the delusion that by spending billions and billions of dollars on massively over-priced and massively under-performing military hardware will allow you to defeat an enemy assumed to be “less sophisticated”.  Hence the need to use:

• Proxy forces
• PMCs
• PSYOPS
• Corruption

All of the above are a normal part of any modern war, but in the case of the US/NATO they are not just part of a bigger plan, they are central to any US/NATO operation, thereby dramatically decreasing the true capabilities of the US/NATO.  In sharp contrast, countries like Russia or Iran can deploy “boots on the ground”, and very capable ones at that (remember that the Iranians are those who trained Hezbollah!).

What does all this mean practically?

It means that even if the Russians decided to strike at a NATO country, the tensions would go through the roof, but it is highly UN-likely that any US President would allow any action which could result in a full-scale nuclear war!  Remember, for Russia, this is an existential war, no less than WWII, whereas no Anglo leader would ever dare launch a suicidal attack on Russian forces which would most likely result in the full obliteration of the US/UK and any other country participating (for example by hosting forward deployed standoff weapons) in such an attack.

Does that mean that we have to anticipate a Russian strike on Poland, Romania or the UK?

No, not at all.  In fact, it would be very dangerous for the Russians to only leave a stark choice to the Hegemony: admit defeat or commit suicide.  And since the Russians do have escalation dominance (that is to say that they have balanced capabilities from the small-arms fire level to a full intercontinental nuclear war, and with all the stages in between these two extremes) they, unlike the US/NATO. are not stuck between the choice of surrender or suicide.

That being said, it would also be misguided to assume that Russia “would never dare strike a NATO member state”.  The Poles might be willing to wager their future and even existence on such a invalid inference, but not the folks at the Pentagon or elsewhere in the decision centers of the Hegemony.

Conclusion:

Douglas MacGregor is right, the NATO war against Russia might very well result in the collapse of both NATO and the EU which, in turn, will place an official “last nail”, into the coffin of an already long-deceased Hegemony which currently still exists only because of its momentum and its propaganda machine.

I would argue that NATO is already falling apart before our eyes, a process which the economic, social, political, economic and spiritual crises which are plaguing the entire EU will only accelerate.  And, of course, the most amazing thing about this is that this collapse is not the result of some Machiavellian plan cooked up by the Russians, the Chinese or the Iranian, but a direct consequence of decades of truly suicidal policies: they did it to themselves!

Now, the Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians are mostly waiting, watching (probably smiling) and planning for the Hegemony-free multi-polar world they want to bring about, with or without the participation of the USA and Europe.

....

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/11/27/covid-roundup/

Covid Roundup

Dear Readers,  I have presented you with enough information over the last couple of years for you to have learned that the Covid virus was not the threat it was presented to be and that the “vaccine” was neither effective nor safe.  The Covid virus did not come from a bat cave but from NIH funding first at the University of North Carolina and then Wuhan, China. The “pandemic” was an orchestration for profit, power, and, it appears from the deaths, disabilities, infertility, and stillbirths caused by the “vaccine,” population reduction.  In effect, whether intended or not, the mRNA “vaccines” are bioweapons.

The Pfizer documents released by court order show that Pfizer knew in advance from its testing that the “vaccine” caused miscarriages and stillbirths, heart problems, neurological  problems, and death.  Yet the company and the public health agencies responsible for protecting public health went ahead and created a climate of fear, based on the lie that there was no available treatment, and injected 70% of the US population with an untested substance on an “emergency use authorization.”  

To put it clearly, the pharmaceutical companies, NIH, CDC, FDA, WHO, politicians, presstitutes, medical societies and medical boards coerced a majority of the US population with fear and mandates to play Russian roulette with a “vaccine” that could end or destroy their lives.  

Despite this enormous crime, so far the only demand for accountability is civil law suits.  

Was this enormous evil merely a mistake?  Absolutely not.  As the Pfizer documents that Pfizer wanted locked up for 75 years make clear, the pharmaceutical companies knew of the outsized danger of the “vaccine.”  

Was the vaccine intended as a population reduction measure?  The circumstantial evidence is substantial that it was.  The multi-decade agitation for population reduction by Bill Gates and a passel of elites and organizations and a decade or longer of research to develop the Covid virus suggest that the “vaccine” had an intent that is not acknowledged, but we will never know unless someone confesses.

The process of defrocking doctors, medical scientists, and nurse whistleblowers who provide facts unwelcome by authorities continues.  The whore media has done everything possible to cover up the crime that has been inflicted on humanity.  The evil is so satanic that it will be a miracle if challenging the official Covid narrative is not made illegal.  This outcome seems unavoidable, because if the truth gets out confidence in government collapses.  

It is possible that the public is not sufficiently strong mentally and emotionally to accept the facts.  Government, having got away with the murders of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, 9/11 used to launch two decades of war in the Middle East and North Africa, and a number of other crimes, is counting on the belief that “our government wouldn’t do this to us.”  Such belief dooms humanity to control by The Matrix.

Below are some more reports on the “vaccine”:

Previously Suppressed Research Confirms Vaccine Dangers

by Dr. Russell Blaylock

Experts have observed that very little of the information that appears in medical journals is reliable. The manipulation of scientific journals is a growing problem I have addressed in the past, including research influenced or directly controlled by pharmaceutical companies appearing as ghostwritten medical articles.

The goal, of course, is to induce practicing doctors to use the drugs made by these companies.

In addition, pharmaceutical companies heavily influence the research, medical education, and physician training at major medical centers through massive donations and by manipulating federal agencies such as the CDC, FDA, and NIH.

This influence spreads to virtually all medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the AMA, and most others.

Lastly, pharmaceutical manufacturers use their massive wealth to influence media outlets, even local news programs.

See the Full Letter Here:  http://newsletters.newsmax.com/blaylock/issues/D-20-1024D/1222_BWR.pdf?ns_mail_uid=4db8c050-1e80-490d-a783-3fe0649129c7&ns_mail_job=DM404742_&s=acs&dkt_nbr=9898-1 

Was Profit the Only Reason for Intentionally Injecting 70% of the US Population with a Deadly Substance? What percent of Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa?

Can so many governments, medical authorities, and media scum  involved be held accountable for the worst genocide in human history?

The Covid “Killer Vaccine”. People Are Dying All Over the World. It’s A Criminal Undertaking

 https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-covid-killer-vaccine-people-are-dying-all-over-the-world-its-a-criminal-undertaking/5800358 

Video: Warning: ‘Vaccine Is Worse than We Feared, Could be Looking at Hundreds of Thousands More Dead’

https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-warning-vaccine-worse-than-feared-could-looking-hundreds-thousands-more-dead/5770054 

“The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity” by Michel Chossudovsky

https://www.globalresearch.ca/new-pdf-ebook-the-worldwide-corona-crisis-global-coup-detat-against-humanity-by-michel-chossudovsky/5791054 

The Corrupt Biden Regime Served as Marketer for the Death Jab

Pfizer annual revenue expected to reach $101.3 billion in 2022, thanks to COVID jab, which doesn’t prevent infection or spread

Pfizer annual revenue: In a November 4, 2022, article,9 clinical and public health physician Dr. David Bell discusses the art — and price — of lying, noting that the more divorced a lie is from reality, the more likely it is to succeed, thanks to the quirks of human nature and normal psychology:

“In a former role I had a boss who lied a lot. The lies were pure fantasy, but massive in scope and delivered with sincerity. They were very successful.

“This success was based on the reluctance of most people to consider that someone in a position of authority in a humanitarian organization would completely ignore all semblance of reality.

“People assumed the claims must be true as fabricating information to that extent in those circumstances seemed to defy logic.

“The principle of Really Big Lies is based on the lies being so divorced from reality that the listener will assume their own perception must be flawed, rather than doubt the claims of the person telling the lies.

“Only an insane or ridiculous person would make such outlandish claims, and a credible institution would not employ such a person.

“Therefore, given that the institution is apparently credible, the statements must also be credible, and the listener’s prior perception of reality was therefore flawed.

“Lesser lies, by contrast, are likely to be perceived as sufficiently close to known reality to be demonstrably wrong. Inventing truth can be more effective than bending it.”

I believe this is precisely the strategy employed by Big Pharma, health agencies, government officials and the deep state propaganda arm over the past three years.

Their claims have been so far from any semblance of reality, anyone aware of the facts has been left feeling more than a little crazy.

Unfortunately, while most humans have a moral and ethical compass, few end up following it when confronted by psychopaths in authority and the peer pressure to conform. As noted by Bell, good team players almost always end up supporting false narratives, and those who refuse to go along with what are clearly lies tend to be but a tiny minority.

Profit Through Deception

Read more:   https://hannenabintuherland.com/usa/pfizer-annual-revenue-expected-to-reach-101-3-billion-in-2022-thanks-to-covid-jab-which-doesnt-prevent-infection-or-spread/

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https://peakoil.com/publicpolicy/climate-crackup-why-the-cop27-summit-failed

Climate Crackup: Why the COP27 Summit Failed

Just before he left for the United Nations COP27 climate conference in Egypt, President Joe Biden tweeted: “The global leaders of the COP27 must reach out and take the future in our hands to make the world we wish to see and that we know we need.” This reminded me of one of my favorite spy movies, Our Man Flint. In the movie, the enemy is not a rival power like the Soviets or Red China or an evil criminal organization like Specter or THRUSH. It is an idealistic group of scientists who can control the weather. Derek Flint is sent to eliminate this threat. When confronted, the scientists explain they intend to coerce the nations of the world to disarm and pursue peaceful endeavors under their benevolent direction. They invite Flint to join them, with their leader declaring that “ours would be a perfect world!” Flint refuses, “because it’s your idea of perfection, gentlemen—not mine!”

It is because there is no universally shared vision of the world that Biden’s words fell on deaf ears. COP27 failed, as have the previous twenty-six conferences to place imagined climate control above tangible national interests.

Emerging nations pushed back against continually citing the goal of preventing global warming from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels. “1.5 is a substantive issue,” Wael Aboulmagd, a senior Egyptian negotiator, said, adding that China was not the only country that had raised questions about the target. This pushback challenged the very foundation of the UN climate effort, which claims “that only a fraction of proven fossil fuel reserves can be burned if we are to keep temperature rise to 1.5°C.” Most of the world finds this goal unacceptable. A compromise adopted in 2015 raised the formal target to 2 degrees Celsius while keeping 1.5 degrees Celsius as the ideal. Many governments want this reference to an ideal of 1.5 degrees Celsius ended.

The target for net zero—the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions to as close to zero as possible, with any continued emissions being reabsorbed by carbon “offsets”—is now 2050. However, each country is to pursue this goal in its own way. For instance, India says it will not reach net zero until 2070. Policy goals set generations into the future lack credibility.

If the UN’s statement that “fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, are by far the largest contributor to global climate change” is true, then replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy should be the top priority. But it wasn’t made COP27’s top priority, for the obvious reason that it is impossible to accomplish this at a bearable cost. And the green activist demand that fossil fuels simply be eliminated regardless of what replacements are available would impose a dramatic drop in the standard of living of billions of people. Indeed, Europeans will discover the discomfort of an energy shortage this winter. National leaders know this is not an approach their people will tolerate.

Last year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projected that while renewable energy sources will grow rapidly, they will be used primarily to increase total global energy output, not to replace existing sources. “By 2050, global energy use in the Reference case increases nearly 50% compared with 2020—mostly a result of non-OECD economic growth and population, particularly in Asia. In the Reference case, global emissions rise throughout the projection period, although slowed by regional policies, renewable growth, and increasing energy efficiency.” This means the hope that emissions would peak in 2025 (or 2030) has been dashed.

The driving ambition of the developing world is to develop, which means generating more energy by all available means, including oil, the use of which is expected to continue to grow through 2050. In October of this year, the EIA issued a new projection for nuclear power, a relatively clean energy source the greens are loath to talk about. The agency predicted a doubling of nuclear power generation worldwide by 2050, with the rethinking of security concerns in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War being one of the drivers.

Coal, which generates one-third of the world’s electricity, has been the main target for cuts. At COP26, 200 countries signed a pledge to “phase down” (but not eliminate) coal use. Yet a global record for the use of coal was set last year. New coal-fired power plants are under construction around the world because they meet the practical requirements of being reliable, affordable, and secure. Half of the world’s new coal plants are being built in China, even though Beijing’s fourteenth five-year plan claims coal will be “demoted” as a power source in coming decades. China claims that by 2025, 20 percent of its energy will come from renewables. Beijing is rapidly expanding its use of solar power and electric vehicles, but the driving force seems to be security rather than fear of climate change, which it has never taken seriously. As tensions rise in the Indo-Pacific, China is well aware of its vulnerability to sanctions or a blockade of oil and gas imports during a conflict. Coal also provides a security blanket, as China has the world’s fourth-largest proven coal reserves. But other Asian countries, notably India, Indonesia, and South Korea, are still building substantial coal plants as well.

Attempts at COP27 and previous UN meetings to add other fossil fuels to the coal “phase down” failed. Indeed, for the first time, oil and gas companies were invited to participate in the conference. In his speech at COP27, Biden never uttered the words “fossil fuels,” “coal,” or “oil,” though he calls for ending their use when addressing American audiences. Biden knew his international audience, so he repeatedly used the term “diversified energy” in recognition that countries will continue to make policy choices based on practical matters of reliability, affordability, and security, not fear of climate change, and will thus continue to use coal and oil along with natural gas, nuclear, solar, and wind.

The discussion has evolved from stopping climate change to adapting to it. Adaptation—targeting specific incidents of climate-related distress, if and when they appear—is a much more practical approach than trying to radically transform entire societies in ways contrary to popular desires. Since 2016, there has been a push to incorporate climate “resilience” into the estimated $90 trillion in infrastructure investments needed worldwide, particularly in developing countries, over the next fifteen years. As the UN puts it, “if all of this sounds expensive, it is—but the important thing to remember is that we already know a lot about how to adapt. More is being learned every day.” The argument for including climate as a design element in infrastructure projects is based on the same logic as any investment and will be evaluated on its merits. A call for climate features to be required in major projects was rejected at COP.

The 2015 Paris Agreement, signed at COP21, called for $100 billion a year to be raised to aid developing countries, half of which would be used for adaptation. These funds have not materialized, so the attempt to double this commitment lacks credibility, as does the call for another $300 billion to be raised annually for adaptation. Yet the real battle at COP27 was over how to get more money flowing from developed economies to developing economies to cover “loss and damage” from fires, floods, and other natural disasters allegedly spawned by climate change. The logic is that if human action is aggravating climate change, those countries that have been most active in building the modern world are liable for any damage suffered by the rest. This is just the old principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” which means all burdens, restrictions, and costs are to fall on the developed countries, while the rest remain free in their “right to develop.”

The original offer from the European Union to provide some aid to “the most vulnerable” countries set off a clamor for everybody to be able to make claims. The United States had opposed such a fund precisely for this reason, but it shifted in favor of it as the issue took the conference into overtime on November 19. However, it was not determined who would provide the money, who would administer it, and which countries and kinds of damage would be eligible. Instead, these questions would be topics for COP28. Still, this empty gesture was hailed as the greatest accomplishment of COP27, perhaps the greatest since the Paris Agreement! No wonder the meeting was quickly called a failure for advancing “climate ambitions,” with national ambitions holding sway instead.

Comment to article:

" Yes, yes, Russia’s losing the war, dying, etc. Ukraine is winning, winning, winning.  Just ask Zelensky or the Anglophone puppet media.  The oil “price cap” will somehow work and bring Russland to its knees.

Meanwhile, in Realityland, Germany is on the verge of full collapse due to the fact that the U.S. has prohibited Deutschland from importing Russian gas (and orchestrated the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines through the UK), and even Britannia-Rule-the-Waves, too, is slowly sinking beneath the economic waves.  And all of western Europe can expect another millions-strong wave of destitute Ukrainian refugees.  Thank you, USA.

At the same time, European leaders, in the grip of mass formation psychosis, refuse to reject their American lord and master.  After all, what would they do without all of the bribes and threats from superduperland with its Uniparty of Republicrats?  Better to let their own countries die, as the World Economic Forum wants them to.  Those leaders themselves, enormously enriched, will escape to the indispensable nation at the last moment, and will avoid the fate to which they are subjecting their underlings. "

....

https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/03/what-is-to-be-done-6/

What is to be Done?

Not an original title for a piece that will assert we are in a unique moment in world history?  No, Lenin used it to expose the cruelty and villainy of the empire that ruled Russians like a slave master.  Claiming we are in a “unique moment” is not original, either.  We Americans, with our caudal appendage, Europe, have been told time and again we are in “unique moments”, unmatched in peril, so that it’s now routine to say it of every asinine Presidential election.

I have spent a lifetime reading and listening to the best minds in journalism and reportage bemoan, attack, mourn, and decry the encyclopedia of lunacies and disasters our system has inflicted on our country, the world, and ourselves, its naive, ignorant people.

Since the Gulf War, and the rolling chain of shameful absurdities that followed—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, et.al.—in the idiotic dirty joke of the bumbling “War on Terror”, I have seen the mainstream press devoured by the Capitalist Monster to the point where all voices of integrity have been marginalized and expelled, then denounced and vilified by the diseased whores who slunk into their places.

Now, with America’s ridiculous, transparent, and contemptible falsity so obvious in every aspect of governance at home and abroad, I have seen the entire press converted into an organ of crude and ridiculous propaganda for the Capitalist War Machine that is coldly, inhumanly  dictating our demise.  The viciously dishonest and relentlessly stupid storm of juvenile horseshit disseminated by all mainstream outlets— print, tv, and internet—is an ethical crime of diabolical dimensions.  Our government, with its cadre of vacuous, degraded simpletons, men and women of no intellectual size, depth, or scope, profoundly ignorant yet arrogant in their smarmy inadequacy, is restricting and distorting knowingly all truth that conflicts with the malign intentions of the War Lobby to pursue nuclear war with Russia until they get it.  And, of course, they need a second enemy and so must tell China what it can and can’t do. Where do these moronic fuckers get the brass to try that shameless madness with Xi and his power?

And this is done while the few strong voices of courage and integrity that, against all the power of money and corruption of The Empire, continue to try to provide an educating effect through reason and evidence, are exiled and suppressed from platforms of influence.

I have long wondered at their dedication and staying power in the face of the cynical, unwarranted abuse they get, including, of course, from their supposed colleagues who, collectively, aren’t worth the powder to blow them to hell, as my Dakota Grandpa used to say.  I can only assume they are held together, in place, by the unbreakable fiber of integrity in them that they have no choice but to honor.

And yet, though those few and proud speak out against false America and denounce it where denunciation is richly warranted, I feel, even in their most blistering analyses that there is a conviction, a certainty, an honest, incontestable statement of truth, that is missing.  I had hoped to hear it expressed by those who have great credibility, and great reputations, profiles and followings, but I have been disappointed.

My list of heroes is not long.  I acknowledge them as the heirs to the great ones before: Ed Murrow, Eric Sevareid, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, Sy Hersh, David Halberstam.  I include among the present greats Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Aaron Mate, Michael Brenner, Max Blumenthal, Jeffrey St. Clair, Patrick Lawrence, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange.

All of them have done honest, deeply informed work to counter the rampant imbecility and cruelty of the American government and its stenographers, the press.  The one conclusion none has plainly stated, that all have suggested, is neither obscure nor complicated.

It is this: America can not be reformed or improved under Capitalism. Its corrupt, rotten burlesque democracy must and will be destroyed.  Not by any action of the torpid, gelded, stupid people.  It will come, and soon, by financial chaos and meltdown, or by nuclear war.

We are told that unless bold action is taken, unless we find the moral courage to act, unless we come together, get money out of politics, vote for better candidates, unless we do this, that, or the other thing, disaster will follow.  Sadly, that is all nonsense.   In fact, it makes no difference what we do: America, as a viable state, is finished.

This is intolerably painful to admit.  Every instinct of self-preservation, every human yearning for safety and justice rejects it.  All our training, our education, our immersion in bullshit propaganda screams against it but, admitted or not, it is fact, it is truth, and collapse of America’s baselessly arrogant, obscene, punishing oppression of the compliant world, already tenuous and strained, is coming.   And soon…

It is said to be easier for people to imagine the end of the world, than the end of Capitalism.  This will end soon when it will no longer be necessary to imagine either, because both will have happened.  In the same way that socio-political truth has been screened out by official deceit, environmental truth has been obscured and denied by our own and the world’s rulers.   What Capitalism has done to humans is trivial beside what it’s done to the earth and all living things.  In this, too, we are told that if we can just do this or that the world will recover and all will be well.  It won’t.   No matter what we do.  And that will almost certainly be what we have done up to now: nothing.

Humans, mostly, are large, dull children.  They have a great need to feel loved, protected, pardoned, saved.  That’s why they were given religions by elites that have always owned them.  All dogmatic religions are bullshit by definition, their fatuous fraud shown up by every advance of knowledge from Galileo to the Webb Telescope.

I, like all my kind, wish for mercy and grace, but I don’t look for it in a ludicrous infantile fantasy, or in deluded hope where there is clearly none.  Both religion and science, in the hands of priests and hustlers, have set us up for unavoidable misery and suffering, and arranged for the suicide of our species and the murder of the living world.  There is nothing you can do about this.  We have the ability to love those we hold dear, and the world we have known.  Let that be enough, for it is all you will ever have.

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https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/25/patrick-lawrence-why-do-nations-erase-the-past/

Why Do Nations Erase the Past?

A recent  report by the German news agency DPA has had me thinking ever since about various small, inconsequential matters: war, nationalism, identity, history, memory. It seems the people who manage the German gravesites of those who fell fighting the German army during World War II propose to draw distinctions among the Red Army’s dead buried in German cemeteries. They will no longer be designated simply “Soviet” or “Russian,” as has been the practice until now. If a Red Army soldier came from Ukraine—which was a Soviet republic during World War II and for 46 years afterward—they will now be written into the record as “Ukrainian.” 

“We’re starting to differentiate,” Christian Lübcke, who directs the Hamburg chapter of the German War Graves Commission, said in an interview the DPA published November 14.

Let me try to get this straight. Red Army soldiers who fought the Third Reich as Soviet citizens are to be retroactively assigned an imagined nationality if they came from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic? How does that work?

No one other than the German wire service and RT, the Russian equivalent of the BBC, appears to have covered the story. Maybe most media judged it of little consequence. Or maybe a development such as this, discriminating among the bones of soldiers and prisoners of war 75 years dead on the basis of a distinction that did not exist until 1991, came over in most newsrooms as too preposterous, too embarrassing, to write about.

In explaining himself, Lübcke cited the war in Ukraine and a Russian civil society group, the Immortal Regiment, that honors the Red Army soldiers who died in the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call World War II. The Soviet Union’s sacrifices as it defeated the Nazi regime–more than 20 million perished–are, of course, a big deal for Russians every Victory Day, May 9. But Lübcke objects that the Immortal Regiment, when honoring Soviet graves at one of Hamburg’s cemeteries, exhibits “nationalistic and partly historical revisionist undertones”—a strange thought, as I will consider shortly.

The numbers involved are not large. Red Army soldiers who died in battle or in Nazi POW camps come to roughly 1,400 out of 62,000 war dead in Hamburg’s various cemeteries. Their graves were all marked Soviet or Russian when they were buried—properly enough, given that is what they were. I cannot quite tell from the German reporting what Lübcke now has in mind–whether he proposes to alter cemetery documents or to alter the documents and chisel new gravestones. But it is clear he intends to impose a falsified past  on those Soviet fallen who came from the Ukrainian republic. He also wants to go national with his idea.

Preposterous, yes, and embarrassing, yes again. But this is why it is also extremely important to consider what causes an organization dedicated to honoring war dead to think it is right to impose an ahistorical distinction between some sacrificed lives and other sacrificed lives when they fought side by side in the same army to defeat their common enemy. What sentiments, what political forces, what propaganda project, animate this stunningly disrespectful proposal? What ideological drive causes Christian Lübcke to pimp dead soldiers who, were they alive, would have no idea of the point he wishes to make?

I recall posing similar questions back in June 2015, when John Kerry and other Allied leaders joined veterans from their armies on the Normandy beaches to mark the 70^th anniversary of D–Day and the impending Nazi defeat. Obama’s secretary of state thought nothing of speechifying grandly about the heroes of the war while pointedly excluding the Russians from the ceremonies. Kerry et al. had by then refused to attend the May 9 events in Moscow marking the same anniversary. Considering the very essential role and exceptional sacrifices the Red Army made to the Allied cause, this seemed to me a bottomlessly shameful thing to do.

All that was a year after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Ukraine, we should note—a year into Washington’s strategy of using the regime it installed in Kyiv as the front edge of its campaign to threaten the Russian Federation up to its western frontier.

By then I had heard the old Soviet joke many times, as some readers may have. The future is set, Soviet citizens used to say. It is the past that is always uncertain. This was a reference to all the airbrushing of photographs, the rewriting of texts, and the corrupting of archives that went on during the Stalin years.

Taking my date from the exclusion of Russian veterans and officials from the Normandy ceremonies, we have watched these past seven years as the West has become more and more Soviet in its disrespect and abuse of the past. Since the Russian intervention in Ukraine last February, this kind of inexcusable conduct has been rampant—made all the worse as Western leaders and institutions indulge in it with no compunction, no conscience, and certainly no embarrassment. It is as if human history and the historian’s discipline are deserving of no common respect and so are available as an instrument to revile others, or airbrush them out of the picture.

Last summer Latvia demolished the largest Soviet-era monument in Riga, the capital, commemorating the victory over Nazism—this as the Russian-speaking minority had to stand by and watch. Estonia soon followed suit, an exercise in its case involving hundreds of statues and other sorts of memorials. Kaja Kallas, the Estonian prime minister, explained it this way: “It is clear that Russian aggression in Ukraine has torn open wounds in our society that these communist monuments remind us of, and therefore their removal from public space is necessary to avoid additional tensions.”

I have no clue what Kallas meant with these remarks. They appear simply to reflect muddled thinking, or none. No clear thought, no clear language, I always say. So we have Christian Lübcke explaining that his obviously nationalist and historically revisionist desire to vandalize history by falsifying records and–again, I cannot tell–chiseling new gravestones is to be done in the name of opposing nationalism and historical revisionism. We have Kaja Kallas ripping wounds into the Latvian body politic in the name of salving wounds.

To state the obvious, we have to look further than Christian Lübcke, Kaja Kallas, and other such officials overseeing these projects to understand their point. And so I return to those stray thoughts I mentioned earlier, having to do with nationalism, identity, history, and memory.

Ernest Renan, the French historian, biblical scholar, philosopher, philologist, critic, and so on—people did a lot of different things before our civilization packed knowledge into silos—delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882 that has come down to us and is still quoted from time to time. He called it Qu’est-ce que une nation?—“What Is a Nation?” Among its notable passages is this:

“Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation…The essence of a nation is that all of its individual members have a great deal in common and also that they have forgotten many things.”

Renan had particular reasons for advancing these surprisingly forthright thoughts. By the 1880s, France was busily making itself a modern nation. Its regional identities and dialects—Brittany and Breton, Alsace and Alcacien, Occitanie and Languedoc, and so on—were pre-modern impediments to the project. They had to be subdued and over time removed from the national discourse, as if they were undesirable statues.

I have always found Renan’s thoughts on nationality disagreeable and diabolically true all at once. It leads us to the essential point of all the official erasures and disfigurements I have mentioned and the many more I have not. It is that histories are very often destroyed in the creation of nations and identities.

What was the point of all the old airbrushing and erasing of the Soviet Union, especially, but I gather not only, during the Stalin years? It was to construct a national story with very clean, easy-to-read lines having to do with an imaginary version of socialist harmony with which Soviet citizens could identify.

What were Kerry and the other Western leaders present in Normandy seven years ago—French, British, German, Polish, and so on—trying to accomplish? They proposed to give their peoples a version of World War II that was compelling, inspiring of national pride, and—greatly above all—devoid of the true past, the past wherein Russia and Russians were decisively present.

This is the West’s shared project now, one that rests to an unfortunate extent on forgetting. I take some comfort from the voice of Katharina Fegebank, Hamburg’s deputy mayor, who spoke on Volkstrauertag, Germany’s day of national mourning, which fell this year on November 13:

“It is our task today and every day to think of these and millions of people who have fallen victim to war and violence. We stand together here to stand up for peace and freedom, against racism, anti-Semitism and exclusion.” 

Will the Katharina Fegebanks of our time prevail against the forgetting that is effectively being forced upon us, we of the West? This is our question, and I would rather not answer it just now.

In Ernest Renan’s day, a Breton or a speaker of Languedoc was supposed to become no longer a Breton or an Occitanie but a Frenchman or Frenchwoman. This project, which was in some respects forced, was a very long one and was at times bitter and bitterly resisted. In 1975 a writer and actor named Pierre–Jacques Hélias published a very fine memoir about the Breton identity, Le cheval d’orgueil, in English The Horse of Pride. It is filled with affectionate sentiment for a world that had been but was, by then, no more. Hélias wrote as a Frenchman, in French: This was in its way the unwritten coda to his story, if I read the book correctly.

The forgetting of our time is of a different order, it seems to me. It is much more insidious. The objective is to create a new consciousness, as it was in Renan’s time, but in our 21^st century case this is to be done by way of a radical narrowing of our minds, a radical impoverishment of thought in the name of a neoliberal hegemony, in this way a radical stripping away of possibilities, a radical confinement within the walls of another bifurcated world order wherein neither side can see over these walls into the other side. In this world, if we collectively accept it without resistance, the future will be set and the past always uncertain.

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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/11/23/the-whos-health-destroying-pandemic-treaty/

The WHO’s Health-Destroying Pandemic Treaty

At a time when no flu/covid pandemic exists — not now or earlier — the aim of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty has nothing to do with protecting public health.

It’s all about destroying it worldwide by kill shots, masking and lockdowns, along withn eliminating what little remains of greatly eroded freedoms.

Scheduled to be finalized by spring 2024 — or perhaps earlier if the timetable is advanced — a public health threat was invented in pursuit of the above diabolical aims.

According to the World Council of Health (WCH) — a coalition of scientists, doctors, lawyers, and civil society advocacy organizations — the WHO’s proposed Pandemic Treaty threatens the rights and well-being of ordinary people everywhere.

If adopted, it’ll increase the Pharma-controlled WHO’s “suffocating power to declare unjustified pandemics, impose dehumanizing lockdowns, and enforce expensive, unsafe, and ineffective treatments against the will of the people.”

Any WHO agreement in cahoots with the imperial tool UN and World Economic Forum “will be unlawful, illegitimate…invalid” and health-destroying.

It’ll assure hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide.

Time and again, the WHO caused irreparable harm instead of protecting public health.

Last December, the WHO’s World Health Assembly (WHA) — its decision-making body — turned truth on its head as follows, saying:

“In a consensus decision (sic) aimed at protecting the world from future infectious diseases crises (sic), the (WHA) today agreed to kickstart a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the (WHO) to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (sic).”

Pharma-linked fraudster/depopulation promoting WHO director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a conman committed to the destruction of public health lied, how he operates on the public stage.

The nonexistent flu/covid pandemic is a diabolical US/Western scam — the mother of all state-sponsored ones.

Yet according to Ghebreyesus’ bald-faced Big Lie with the worst of evil intentions in mind:

The “pandemic (sic) has shone a light on the many flaws in the global system to protect people from pandemics (sic).”

Flu/covid jabs are health-destroying kill shots.

The “global threat” Ghebreyesus   cited doesn’t exist.

What he falsely called a “global accord to keep future generations safer from the impacts of pandemics” is all about irreparably destroying public health, not protecting and preserving it as he falsely claimed.

Abolishing the WHO should be prioritized — along with the WEF and UN in its current form.

According to Article 19 of WHO’s Constitution, it’s empowered adopt conventions or agreements on any matter within its (alleged) competence.”

Pandemic Treaty negotiations began last March with little public attention.

If dark forces prevail, kill shots, masking, and all else related to flu/covid may be mandated at their discretion.

According to WCH member Shabnam Palesa Mohamed:

If adopted, a Pandemic Treaty will empower the WHO to control what relates to public health for ill, not good.

It’ll be able to circumvent national sovereignty.

Refusniks would be considered social pariahs — perhaps to be denied employment and restricted access to public places.

On Monday, former Pfizer chief scientist for allergy and infectious diseases, Dr. Michael Yeadon, said the following:

“(T)otalitarian tyranny and most likely de-population are in the minds of the evil bunch of people who are running the (flu/covid pandemic) scam…”

MSM are complicit in what’s going on.

They’ll “never tell you the truth.”

“(I)f enough of us simply refuse, cross our arms, and (say) we’re not doing that, then they will not be able to succeed, but they will make things inconvenient.”   

“(R)efuse” flu/covid jabs.

“What I am doing is unequivocally condemning” them.

Jabbed individuals are highly vulnerable to contracting any one or more life-threatening illnesses.

They comprise the vast majority of flu/covid outbreaks, hospitalizations and deaths — from kill shots, not the viral illness.

On Tuesday, the Gateway Pundit reported the following:

After taking off from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, American Eagle pilot Patrick Ford collapsed while talking to air traffic control.

After his co-pilot aborted the flight and landed the aircraft safely, Ford was hospitalized and pronounced dead, no cause immediately cited.

It’s not the first time that an airline pilot was incapacitated in flight.

Nearly all major airlines mandate flu/covid jabs for flight crew.

If jabbed pilot and co-pilot become incapacitated in flight, all aboard will likely perish — followed by coverup of why it happened.

The risk should give airline passengers pause ahead of boarding their next flight.