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https://scheerpost.com/2022/12/28/patrick-lawrence-a-war-of-rhetoric-reality/

A War of Rhetoric & Reality

Passing through Austin, Texas, the other night, we had drinks with a distinguished observer of global affairs and took the opportunity to ask how he thought the war in Ukraine would conclude. It is a common question these days. While no answer can be definitive, it is always interesting to discover what wise heads see out front.

“Either Russia prevails on its terms,” came the answer, “or there is a nuclear exchange.”

I do not think this stark assessment would have necessarily held up even a month ago. I may not have agreed with it, in any case. But the war has escalated markedly over the past week or two. And our Austin companion’s either/or prediction seems now to be the terrible truth of new circumstances.

There are numerous indications that Russia is preparing to launch a major offensive in coming weeks or months. With Volodymyr Zelensky’s circus-like visit to Washington last week, the Biden administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress have drastically, recklessly increased their investment in the Ukrainian president’s regime — a good-money-after-bad judgment if ever there was one.

This now shakes out as a war between rhetoric and reality. And the former, a war waged with immense volumes of Western weaponry in defense of ideological bombast, is far more dangerous than the latter, a war waged on the ground with clearly defined objectives.  

As John Mearsheimer and Jack Matlock, two astute students of this conflict, have argued, neither side can afford to lose in Ukraine. But what is at stake for Russia and the West — Ukraine being the latter’s proxy — is very different.

A Russian defeat in Ukraine would be a direct threat to its security, sovereignty, and altogether its survival. These are legitimate causes. What people would not defend themselves against such a threat — especially given Washington’s long record of subterfuge in nations, not least the Russian Federation, that insist on their independence.

Near-Cosmic Confrontation

The Biden administration’s rhetoric since the Ukraine crisis sharpened prior to the outbreak of hostilities in February has cast this conflict as a near-cosmic confrontation between liberalism and authoritarianism. I do not see that this is very different from Bush II’s biblical baloney about Gog and Magog as it prepared to invade Iraq, or Mike Pompeo’s unhinged end-times talk when he was whipping up war fever against Russia and China while serving as Donald Trump’s secretary of state.

This irresponsible rhetoric has painted every breathing, walking-around American into a corner from which the only escape is capitulation. That is why it is dangerous. Russia can win battles and wage extensive artillery and rocket campaigns and remain open to negotiation at any opportunity conditions present. Putin made this point clear once again on Sunday.

It is difficult to see, by contrast, how our addled president can find his way to talks given how he and the third-rate neoconservatives who control his foreign policies have cast this conflict. And it is too easy to imagine these people reaching for the nuclear buttons once their follies become evident.

Two conclusions are due at this point.

One, on the terms our Austin friend offered, we must hope Russia eventually prevails in Ukraine on its terms. This is the only available path to a stable, enduring global order once the guns go silent.

Two, I must return to my original assessment of Moscow’s “special military operation.” The Russian intervention was regrettable but necessary. Let us not forget the nomenclature here. This is a sovereign nation defending itself against an imperium that will not stop aggressing until it is forced to stop. Thirty years of ignoring Moscow’s repeated requests to negotiate a mutually beneficial post–Cold War security order are demonstration enough of this.

Braggadocio & the Battlefield

The braggadocio coming out of Kiev and Washington, always faithfully reproduced in corporate-owned media, seems to grow more preposterous in direct proportion to the diminishing prospects of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the AFU, on the ground. This war is going very badly for the Ukrainian side and its backers, never mind the pabulum you read in the major dailies. We read of battlefield victories that are not victories. We read that Russia is running out of matériel when there is no shred of evidence that this is so. As Alexander Mercouris noted in a podcast the other day, Kiev’s response to wave upon wave of punishing rocket and drone attacks amounts to fables to the effect that almost all the drones and rockets are shot down.

At this point the hollow hyperbole begins to turn menacing. Zelensky recently announced that Kiev’s campaign to retake Crimea has begun. He subsequently struck the pose of a benign Great Man: Vladmir Putin’s life will be spared, he declared — presumably when Ukrainian forces take Moscow. The Russian president must be hugely relieved.

The orgy of rhetoric escalated to new heights when the Pentagon flew Zelensky to Washington to meet Biden in the Oval Office and address a joint session of Congress. Zelensky continued to carry on about his regime’s coming victory while comparing the AFU with American revolutionaries fighting the British and American GIs battling the Nazi Wehrmacht. He even tossed in a Putin-is–Hitler remark.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who appears these days to be as mentally diminished as Biden, compared Zelensky with Churchill and called his remarks to Congress, which his hosts evidently wrote for him, one of the greatest speeches ever delivered on Capitol Hill.

I do not think I have ever seen a state visit so thoroughly Hollywood-ized. But it is important to get beyond mere derision. This garish display was timed to ease passage of a defense authorization bill that provides Ukraine with $44 billion more in weaponry during the coming year.

Washington put us all on notice when Zelensky got to town: It has no intention to seek a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis and every intention to recommit indefinitely to its ideological war no matter how steadily Ukraine marches toward defeat. Biden, in this last connection, announced during his Oval Office encounter with Zelensky that the U.S. intends to ship a Patriot missile-defense battery to Ukraine. Cost: about $1 billion.

Meanwhile, in Moscow

Alexander Mercouris, a very close follower of events in and around Ukraine, recently listed the exceptional series of meetings Putin has held over the past couple of weeks with the entire, not to say sprawling military and national security establishment. In Moscow, the Russian leader met with all of his top military commanders and national security officials, often individually, before conferring with Sergei Surovikan, the general he put in charge of the Ukrainian operation earlier this year, at Surovikan’s headquarters inside the conflict zone.

Putin subsequently flew to Minsk with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for exchanges with the Belarus political and military leadership. Then it was onward to meet with the leaders of the two republics, Donetsk and Lugansk, that were incorporated via referenda into the Russian Federation last autumn.

It is impossible to avoid concluding that these back-to-back meetings, barely covered in the Western press, portend a new, near- or medium-term military initiative in Ukraine. As Mercouris put it, “Something very big is on the way.”

Among the most interesting encounters in all of this took place in Beijing last week, when Dmitry Medvedev, currently deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council and long close to Putin, had talks with Xi Jinping.

The Chinese readout of the meeting was somewhat anodyne, but I hazard a confident guess that Medvedev, whatever else he had to say and whatever was in the letter from Putin he brought with him, briefed the Chinese president on Russia’s military planning.

Four days after the Medvedev–Xi encounter, the Chinese Defense Ministry issued a statement directly related to the Taiwan crisis but pointedly broad in its implications. It read in part:

“Facts have proved more than once that the U.S. is the direct threat to the international order and the culprit of the regional turbulence.” 

Let us not miss the import here. In my read, China has just signaled that it shares Russia’s assessment that its adversary in Ukraine is neither Ukraine nor the Ukrainian people; its adversary is the West as led by the American imperium. This is what getting the nomenclature right means. Name something correctly and understanding is bound to follow.

At some point in the not-distant future, the war of hollow rhetoric in behalf of imperial hubris will weaken and drift toward collapse. This degree of Surreal detachment from reality simply cannot be sustained indefinitely — not in the face of a new Russian initiative, whatever the form it turns out to take.

I am sure some or all of these following conclusions will come over bitterly among some readers, but here are mine. I do not want those waging war by rhetoric and display to win. I do not want the war waged by fanatical neoconservative ideologues to win. I do not want the imperium to win. I do not want the West to win so long as it insists intolerantly that the rest of the world observe its diktats.

Ukraine, as noted previously in this space, is the soil upon which these forces have chosen to wage their go-for-broke war not only against Russia, but also against the emergence of non–Western nations as influential powers in a new world order. To turn back these forces in Ukraine will be the most important victory and the most important defeat so far in our century, and very possibly for the rest of it.

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https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/12/28/murder-they-wrought/

Murder They Wrought

As readers know, I am concerned that the neoconservatives’ drive for US hegemony is the road to nuclear war.  But we also face demise from other directions.  In this column I share thoughts on the use of orchestrated pandemics to destroy economic independence and civil liberty and to reduce the world population, a declared goal of Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab.  In subsequent columns I will address other threats that go unattended.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky, emeritus professor at the University of Ottawa and Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, has made an important point.  The injection of a dangerous substance into a large percentage of the world population was not a mistake, but an intentional act of murder.  https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-pfizers-secret-report-on-the-covid-vaccine-beyond-manslaughter-the-evidence-is-overwhelming-the-vaccine-should-be-immediately-withdrawn-worldwide/5780561 

Pfizer and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), charged with protecting public health, knew in February 2021 that the Covid “vaccine” that went into use in mid-December 2020 was deadly and under law should have been recalled.  Pfizer’s own internal documents recorded 1,200 deaths from the vaccine and tens of thousands of adverse health effects including cardiac disorders and spontaneous abortions over a two month period.  Understand, the report, which was to be locked up for 75 years, was a forced release resulting from a federal court order to the FDA. It is Pfizer’s own internal report.  It is not a report by independent medical scientists that some pretend “fact checker” can label as “misinformation.”

The report is now public.  Under law, as Pfizer and the FDA knew the “vaccine” was dangerous to life and health and did not recall it, they committed murder.  

The issue before us is the missing indictments for murder of the Pfizer executives and FDA officials who are responsible for the deaths and injuries of millions of people.

As the presstitutes are totally complicit in the mass murder, don’t expect any attention from the media to the released Pfizer report, backed up by the extraordinary increase in excess deaths in every vaccinated country following the vaccination campaign.  Dr. Michael Yeadon, formerly Pfizer Vice President and Chief Science Officer has said that in addition to the deaths, infertility, and injuries from the “vaccine,” the effect of the “vaccine” is also to seriously impair the immune system, thereby making everyone injected susceptible to morbidity from diseases.

Don’t expect Congress or the Executive Branch to do anything.  Members of the House and Senate are dependent on campaign contributions, and Big Pharma are heavy contributors. The FDA is a marketing agent for Big Pharma.

Don’t expect the medical profession to do anything.  Big Pharma is responsible for 70% of medical research grants.  Medical scientists are not going to bite the hand that feeds them. Former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet have said that they have no confidence in the research reported in the journals because 70% of the articles are financed by Big Pharma.  Big Pharma is also a large donor to medical schools.  The FDA, like all regulatory agencies, is captured and run by those they are supposed to be regulating.

Peter Koenig, formerly of the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO) concludes that we are faced with “a clear eugenics agenda, mass depopulation, unprecedented.”  https://www.globalresearch.ca/plan-who-ten-years-infectious-diseases-2020-2030-leading-world-tyranny/5803048 

We should be terrified that Bill Gates, WHO, and the bought-and-paid-for Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security recently completed (October 23, 2022) two months ago a simulation of the next pandemic. https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/2022-catastrophic-contagion/  

Remember the “Covid Pandemic” was preceded by a similar simulation just prior to the release of the Covid virus.  A Dutch expert has revealed that the plan is in place for 10 years of infectious pandemics to pave the way for the Great Reset.

Keep in mind that the Covid virus was the product of years of research funded in part by Fauci at NIH.  

Keep in mind that Covid test kits were produced years in advance of the Covid pandemic. Obviously, someone knew in advance that a pandemic was coming.

Keep in mind that Fauci and Bill Gates predicted a couple of years in advance that there would soon be an infectious disease pandemic.  Keep in mind that there is no way of knowing in advance that a new infectious virus is going to appear and be sufficiently contagious to result in a pandemic. 

Before you do what you have been brainwashed to do and dismiss facts as a conspiracy theory, ask yourself how it is possible for so many pieces that fit together to be a coincidence.

As there is no media, few independent politicians, and a gullible and unaware population, what is to stop the coercion by fear of the world’s population into the serfdom and slavery of the Great Reset?  Elites committed to an ideology have decided that they have the moral right to take over our lives.  The elites know that the sheeple  will submit. Fear will govern them.

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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/12/26/the-risk-of-nuclear-armageddon/

The Risk of Nuclear Armageddon

All things related to Russia and Ukraine were made-in-the-USA.

Puppet Zelensky — a detached from reality buffoon — was a US creation, installed as an empire of lies front man for perpetual war on Russia.

Ignored by the fake Biden, US lawmakers and their MSM press agents is the growing risk of greater direct confrontation than already between the world’s leading nuclear powers.

On Christmas Day, Russia’s Deputy Security Council Chairman, Dmitry Medvedev, warned of the growing risk, stressing:

“The only thing that stops stops our enemies (so far) is the understanding that Russia will be guided by (its publicly stated doctrine of) nuclear deterrence.” 

If there’s “a real threat (to the nation’s security), we will act” in self-defense as international law allows.

US-dominated Western regimes are teetering “between a burning desire to maximally humiliate, dismember and destroy Russia, on the one hand, and the desire to avoid a nuclear apocalypse, on the other.”

Unless Russia’s security is guaranteed, things will “teeter on the brink of World War III and nuclear catastrophe.”

Is the dominant criminal class in the empire of lies, its Western vassals and Ukrainian Nazis “ready…to unleash a full-fledged war against us, including a nuclear war?”

There’s “no one” in the West or Kiev for Moscow to “negotiate” with.

“Our world (ominously) changed, forever.”

“And the main question remains…what kind of future begins today?”

“New disarmament agreements are currently unrealistic and unnecessary.”

“(N)ormaliz(ation) requires guaranteed security for Russia, a notion the empire of lies rejects.

And wherever its ruling regimes go, Western vassal states follow, even at the expense of their own security and other vital interests.

Last month, Medvedev slammed the scourge of perpetual NATO aggression, saying that Russia is “capable of destroying a mighty enemy or alliances of enemies by ourselves.”

And he stressed that Russia “is forming (a) new equitable world order” with peace, stability and cooperative relations among nations its cornerstone principles.

Commenting on the degrading spectacle of “the detestable (Ukrainian) warmongering clown” at the White House and before Congress last week, David Stockman denounced his recitation of “lies and hideously false promises” on bended knee for more US handouts — “even as its soldiers…are being slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands” for a lost cause.

US-orchestrated, directed and funded cross-border war began after the Obama/Biden regime’s 2014 coup in Kiev — by replacing a “duly elected Russian-friendly president” with the scourge of Nazism in central Europe.

Separately on Christmas Day, Vladimir Putin stressed the following:

“(P)olicies of our geopolitical opponents, aimed at splitting up Russia, are at the roots of Ukrainian conflict.”

“We are ready to negotiate with all participants to this process (to find) acceptable resolutions, but it is their business.”

“It is them and not us who refuse to negotiate.”

“(W)e are acting in the right direction.”

“We protect our national interests, interests of our citizens, our people.”

“And we have no choice but to protect” them.

And this on Monday from Russia’s upper house Federation Council Deputy Speaker, Konstantin Kosachev, stressing the following:

“Two things are enshrined in all of Ukraine’s military doctrines.”

“The first one is gaining NATO membership and the second is using new opportunities to return the territories the country lost.”

“This creates the prospect for a military attack and use of military force against our country not only by Ukraine but by the entire (US-dominated Western) bloc.”

“It is an absolutely unacceptable threat.”

“All possible and impossible means will be employed to nip it in the bud.”

Separately on Monday, Russian air defenses downed a Ukrainian UAV as it approached a Saratov region military base, located 900 km from the regime’s border.

In foiling its terrorist attack, three Russian service personnel were killed from falling debris.

The attack and earlier similar ones were orchestrated by the empire of lies.

At a time when US-dominated NATO regimes are escalating war on Russia, the risk of unthinkable nuclear war is greatly heightened by accident or design.

And make no mistake.

If occurs, it’ll be made-in-the-USA by its dominant criminal class.

Official US bipartisan policy asserts the unilateral right to use first strike nuclear or conventional weapons against invented enemies.

In response to the ominous threat, Vladimir Putin earlier stressed the following:

“If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people.”

“This is not a bluff.”

The UN Charter affirms the right of self-defense.

It prohibits preemptive use of force, what aggression is all about.

The post-WW II Nuremberg trials condemned it as the supreme international crime.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defined it as “the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a state, of an act of aggression which…constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the UN.”

Yet time and again pre-and-post-WW II, hegemon USA preemptively attacked other nations, ones posing no international threat.

If greater war than already occurs between the world’s dominant nuclear powers, they’ll be no ambiguity about which nation bears full responsibility.