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As the world crumbles around the edges with accelerated attacks in Gaza, military skirmishes in Syria and Iraq, a broken southern border and a US financial system threatening imminent disintegration, a majority of Americans are operating under the assumption that the 2024 election will solve all its problems.
As the conflict in Gaza escalates with increased Palestinian deaths, prominent national political leaders have spoken in support of the Zionist regime as all presidential candidates also support the Zionist campaign to eliminate the indigenous Palestinian people.
Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of the distinguished political family began his quest for the Presidency as an outspoken critic of US foreign policy. In early May, I wrote perhaps the first analysis of his candidacy as he courageously articulated the collapse of US foreign policy with his intent to close eight hundred US bases around the world.
Some months later, well before the October 6th event in Gaza, Kennedy inexplicably flipped. Quite suddenly he was enunciating a policy toward Israel that contradicted almost every foreign policy objective he had previously supported including an unprecedented genocide campaign.
He has now gone full-bore in the role as a first-class champion for the diabolical Zionist regime when, in recognition of Elie Wiesel’s death, Kennedy ‘affirmed the commitment he stood for ‘never again” which may further lock Kennedy in to a military response in the Middle East.
An opponent of the Ukraine war once his son, who served as an international volunteer was home safe, Kennedy has failed to equate the Zionist slaughter of thousands of Palestinian children with the children represented by the Children’s Defense Fund of which he founded and participated as Chair for many years – as “unwavering in defense against any attack on children.”
So now we know he meant only American children – and that presumably he had not yet learned that all God’s children are blessed and sacred.
Nor has Kennedy stepped up to offer his insights with critical commentary or focus on the foreign policy implications of the conflict as it might impact an expanded war with Iran, spreading to the Islamic world until ultimately blossoming as WW III – nor has Kennedy taken the opportunity to propose an alternative to war in the Middle East.
From a Navy family, Kennedy seems totally unfamiliar with Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, its history of terrorism as it blew up the King David Hotel or Israel’s devolution into a sadistic tyrannical state with an exceptional lack of humanity. More recently, Kennedy appeared to absolve Israel of any responsibility regarding Gaza fatalities, questioning whether the number of civilian casualties is accurate.
Skirting direct comments on the Palestinians and its role in the conflict, Kennedy remains focused on Israel, as if Zionists making gardens in the desert is what matter while the real question is where do his loyalties lie? When Kennedy, in explanation for his participation in the Israel Day March waving a Zionist flag said “my family has a long relationship with Israel.” Exactly what does he mean?
It was an interview with Rabbi Shumley Boteach where RFK fully revealed his level of secular conviction yet confirmed he was grossly uninformed about basic truths of life in Israel: daily conquest, harassment and provocation of the population, IDF’s reputation for brutal abuse of Palestinian children and, as an illegal occupied force, theft of Palestinian land during the 1948 war and again during the 1976 war.
There is an alarming trend in the Democratic Party to describe Israel as an apartheid state. This rhetoric is dangerous and inaccurate. @RepDWStweets. It’s time to set the record straight.
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 28, 2023
From there his comments spun common deceptions about Israel as ‘free to practice any religion you want’ as the “only place open to criticism of the government” as he promised to make the “moral case of Israel” which now, 60 days into the Gaza conflict would appear to be not only futile but entirely disingenuous.
Citing ‘freedom of expression for all citizens,’ RFK continues to resist any assertion of Israel as an apartheid state or that oppression of Palestinian as an indigenous population is a regular occurrence.
In sync with Israeli policy, Kennedy supports a no development of nuclear weapons for Iran while Israel has an unconfirmed number of perhaps two hundred nukes. Without ever signing onto the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, Israel is one of a handful of nations with nuclear weapons that has refused to sign onto the NPT.
Did RFK really mean to defend Knesset members like Ben Gvir and Netanyahu who ‘cooperated’ in the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin for enacting the Oslo Accords or excuse the Zionist war criminals or that the Israeli judiciary is the “most humane judiciary in the world”? As his campaign continues to define ‘apartheid’ as ‘absurd’, there is a noticeable decline in its forward-thinking agenda and he may no longer be counted on to speak truth to power.
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Since the Kennedy family suffered so tragically by political assassinations and that the Biden Administration has irrationally refused to provide him with secret service protection, the Israel government’s public announcement that they intend to pursue political assassinations outside of Gaza should raise more attention as it resonates more personally. Are the Zionists assuming the role of revolutionary assassins at the same time they declare themselves to be a functioning democracy?
In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration repeatedly insisted that the American Zionist Council (AZC) register as “agents of a foreign government” which they never did.
In November 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice ordered AZC to register as a foreign agent because of FARA violations, alleging that it was being funded by the Jewish Agency for Israel. They never did register.
Again, in 1963, AIPAC was given 72 hours to register and complete the task. Coincidentally during that time, JFK was assassinated and AIPAC never, to this day, has ever registered as a FARA.
In addition, President John F. Kennedy supported UN Resolution 194 that mandated the displaced Palestinians the “Right of Return” to Palestinian lands that had been taken by the Zionists in 1948.
Presumably, both JFK and RFK may have visited Palestine together. Here is an undated photo of RFK in the streets of Palestine and another in front of the King David Hotel which was blown up by Irgun extremists in July, 1946. Also an undated portion of a letter from JFK to his father, former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy sometime in the last 1940’s describing Palestine-Zionist negotiations that was found in the Kennedy library.
Kennedy on King David Street in 1948. Behind him is a British military checkpoint at the intersection of what is today Agron Street. (Source: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)
The shocking bottom line seems obvious that RFK, Jr. once a strong advocate for peace and children, has lost his fervor with no emotional energy to care about Palestinian suffering or the fate of 16,000 civilian fatalities, 70% of them women and children.
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Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC.
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The results of a statistical analysis below, published in the Social Science Research Network, point quantitatively to prior knowledge among certain actors of the impending October 7 attack who, working on apparent inside knowledge, engaged in the short-selling of various stocks to a windfall of millions of dollars.
(“Short selling,” for the uninitiated, is the act of “borrowing” a stock from a broker and selling it with the expectation that the price will drop and then buying and returning it at a lower price for profit. In simpler times, it had a simpler name: usury. Jesus tossed with extreme prejudice the “money-changers” out of the temple because he recognized them are degenerate scum who produce nothing of value to society but parasitically suck up its capital with their various sordid schemes. Were I coronated, these people would be the first on the wall, which is why they’d have me killed before I got close to power. Alas, this tangent is a story for another day.)
“Recent scholarship shows that informed traders increasingly disguise trades in economically linked securities such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Linking that work to longstanding literature on financial markets’ reactions to military conflict, we document a significant spike in short selling in the principal Israeli-company ETF days before the October 7 Hamas attack. The short selling that day far exceeded the short selling that occurred during numerous other periods of crisis, including the recession following the financial crisis, the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, we identify increases in short selling before the attack in dozens of Israeli companies traded in Tel Aviv. For one Israeli company alone, 4.43 million new shares sold short over the September 14 to October 5 period yielded profits (or approximates avoided losses) of millions on that additional short selling for one out of hundreds of securities traded on the TASE…
Our findings suggest that traders informed about the coming attacks profited from these tragic events, and consistent with prior literature we show that trading of this kind occurs in gaps in U.S. and international enforcement of legal prohibitions on informed trading. We contribute to the growing literature on trading related to geopolitical events and offer suggestions for policymakers concerned about profitable trading on the basis of information about coming military conflict.”
It should be noted that the authors of this study, Robert J. Jackson, Jr. and Joshua Mitts, are the Former Commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a respected scholar at Columbia Law School — hardly what one might call your typical “right-wing domestic terrorist conspiracy theorist” or whatever.
Given the damning implications, the narrative control coming out of Israel appears frenzied and contradictory.
“The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange said on Tuesday a report by U.S. researchers suggesting there were investors in Israel who may have profited from prior knowledge of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack was inaccurate and its publication irresponsible.”
The Times of Israel, alternatively, suggests that all of the short-selling was conducted by Hamas-affiliated operatives:
“A recent study found that the Hamas terror group may have tried to profit off its October 7 assault on Israel, using advance knowledge of the attack to short-sell Israeli companies in the days leading up to the massacre.”
Even if one accepts the narrative that Hamas and its allies let in on the plan were entirely responsible for the nearly unprecedented short-selling (surpassing that of various other crises in recent history, as explained by Jackson and Mitts) — even though there’s no evidence of that — one would expect that Israeli intelligence, were it vigilant, would have pricked its ears up in the many days of the short-selling bonanza starting as early as September 14.
Instead, there are no reports of any investigations into the short-selling leading up to October 7, nor any official inquiry since.
The totality of evidence, as it mounts, which I have diligently chronicled, continues to make mincemeat of the official story that the Israeli government — home of arguably the most vaunted national security apparatus on Earth, engaged in constant, near-total surveillance of the Gaza Strip — was caught unawares on October 7.
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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Armageddon Prose.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
A coalition of passionate citizens and prominent organizations, spearheaded by CODEPINK and the American Palestinian Women’s Association, staged a gripping day of action within the hallowed halls of the Senate on Wednesday. Their mission: to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and challenge Congress’s controversial proposal of an additional $14 billion in aid to Israel.
Over 100 individuals converged on the Senate to confront the stark disparity between public sentiment and political action. Despite numerous polls revealing overwhelming support for a ceasefire, only four senators had the courage to voice their endorsement of such a critical measure.
Since the Senate is technically the people’s house, the coalition used “their” building to hold a teach-In inside the Senate cafeteria, shedding light on the toxic influence of AIPAC on American democracy and foreign policy. The group was met with a formidable police presence, determined to stifle their message and even threaten arrest.
Despite being followed by the police, the group pressed forward, navigating the corridors of power with a singular purpose: to question senators, particularly those benefiting from AIPAC’s financial support. Armed with a stark visual display of blood-soaked sheets and bloodied baby dolls, symbolizing the tragic toll of the conflict, they sought to draw attention to the urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
The coalition’s initial target was Senator Lindsey Graham’s office, though they were met with a locked door. Undeterred, they visited the offices of senators such as Marco Rubio, Chuck Schumer, Maggie Hassan, Kristen Sinema, Richard Blumenthal, and others.
The visceral display of symbolic bloodshed underscored the urgency of addressing the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The coalition passionately calls on Congress to reassess its proposed aid allocation to Israel in light of the palpable public demand for an immediate ceasefire.
Not missing an opportunity the coalition confronted senators they encountered who were en route to Intelligence briefings, fearlessly reminding them about their complicity in supporting genocide. Videos capturing these intense interactions are now available upon request.
The group, driven by a commitment to amplify the voices of the majority of American people, stands unwavering in its quest for a just and humane foreign policy. Today’s action was just one of many actions that continue daily across the country during this pivotal moment in the fight for justice and peace for Palestine.
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Prinz Philip: Die wachsende Bevölkerung ist die größte Herausforderung für den Naturschutz.
Interviewer: „Und haben Sie irgendwelche Ideen, was dagegen getan werden sollte?“
Prinz Philip: „Können Sie es nicht erraten?“
🔙 Das ist der Mann, der 1988 in einem Interview mit der Deutschen Presse-Agentur sagte: „Wenn ich wiedergeboren werde, möchte ich als tödlicher Virus zurückkehren, um zur Lösung des Problems der Überbevölkerung beizutragen.“
💬 Er sagte auch gegenüber der Zeitschrift „People“: „Das Bevölkerungswachstum ist wahrscheinlich die größte langfristige Bedrohung für das Überleben.“ Wenn es nicht gestoppt wird, drohen uns schwere Katastrophen – nicht nur für die Natur, sondern auch für die Menschheit.“ Je mehr Menschen es gibt, desto mehr Ressourcen werden sie verbrauchen, desto mehr Umweltverschmutzung werden sie verursachen, desto mehr werden sie kämpfen … Wenn dies nicht freiwillig kontrolliert wird, dann wird es unfreiwillig durch vermehrte Krankheiten kontrolliert. Hungersnot und Krieg.
Wenn man diese und ähnliche Veröffentlichungen liest, hat man das starke Gefühl, dass in vielen westlichen Ländern völlige Psychos an die Macht gekommen sind. Und nun streben sie nach der Macht über die Welt …
„Könnte der Kapitalismus die Produktion nicht der Erzielung eines Maximums von Profit, sondern einer systematischen Verbesserung der materiellen Lage der Volksmassen anpassen, könnte er den Profit verwenden nicht zur Befriedigung der Launen parasitärer Klassen, nicht zur Vervollkommnung der Ausbeutungs-methoden, nicht zur Kapitalausfuhr, sondern zur systematischen Hebung der materiellen Lage der Arbeiter und Bauern, dann gäbe es keine Krisen.
Aber dann wäre auch der Kapitalismus kein Kapitalismus. Um die Krisen abzuschaffen, muß man den Kapitalismus abschaffen.“ – (J. Stalin Werke, Bd. 12, S. 215)
Wohin geht Europa?
Die Wirtschaftskrise wird den sozialdemokratischen Illusionen unter den Arbeitern einen neuen Schlag versetzen. Es werden sich jetzt wenig Arbeiter finden, die nach den durch die Krise ausgelösten Wellen von Bankrott und Ruin gewillt sein werden, an die Möglichkeit der Bereicherung „jedes Arbeiters“ durch Beteiligung an „demokratisierten“ Aktiengesellschaften zu glauben. Es erübrigt sich zu sagen, daß die Krise allen diesen und ähnlichen Illusionen einen vernichtenden Schlag versetzen wird. (…)
Notwendig ist nur, daß die Kommunisten es verstehen, die Lage richtig zu bewerten, und sie in entsprechender Weise ausnutzen. Durch die Entfaltung ihres unversöhnlichen Kampfes gegen die Sozialdemokratie, diese Agentur des Kapitals in der Arbeiterklasse, durch die Zerschlagung aller und jeglicher Abweichungen vom Leninismus, die Wasser auf die Mühle der Sozialdemokratie sind, haben die kommunistischen Parteien gezeigt, daß sie auf dem richtigen Wege sind. Es ist notwendig, daß sie auf diesem Wege endgültig festen Fuß fassen. Können sie doch nur unter dieser Bedingung darauf rechnen, die Mehrheit der Arbeiterklasse zu erobern und das Proletariat erfolgreich auf die kommenden Klassenschlachten vorzubereiten. Kann doch nur unter dieser Bedingung auf ein weiteres Steigen des Einflusses und Ansehens der Kommunistischen Internationale gerechnet werden.
So steht es mit den grundlegenden Gegensätzen des Weltkapitalismus, die sich infolge der Weltwirtschaftskrise aufs äußerste verschärft haben.
Wovon zeugen alle diese Tatsachen?
Davon, daß die Stabilisierung des Kapitalismus ihrem Ende entgegengeht. Davon, daß der Aufschwung der revolutionären Massenbewegung mit neuer Kraft weitergehen wird. Davon, daß die Weltwirtschaftskrise in einer Reihe von Ländern in eine politische Krise umschlagen wird.
Das bedeutet erstens, daß die Bourgeoisie den Ausweg aus der Lage auf dem Gebiet der Innenpolitik in weiterer Faschisierung suchen wird, wozu sie alle reaktionären Kräfte, darunter auch die Sozialdemokratie, benutzen wird.
Das bedeutet zweitens, daß die Bourgeoisie den Ausweg auf dem Gebiet der Außenpolitik in einem neuen imperialistischen Krieg suchen wird. Das bedeutet schließlich, daß das Proletariat im Kampf gegen die kapitalistische Ausbeutung und die Kriegsgefahr den Ausweg in der Revolution suchen wird.
Quelle: J. Stalin „Politischer Rechenschaftsbericht des Zentralkomitees an den XVI. Parteitag der KPdSU (B)“ am 27. Juni 1930. In: J. Stalin, Werke, Dietz Verlag Berlin, 1954, Bd. 12, S. 222f. (Auszug)
Ich schaue und bin entsetzt über die Geschwindigkeit der Zeit.
Die britischen, spanischen, niederländischen und französischen Kolonialreiche starben irgendwie fröhlich im Handumdrehen.
Aber sie haben immer einen Bürgerkrieg in der Metropole vermieden. Daher werden sie in Kolonien mit Ureinwohnern und Sha leicht an die Peripherie gedrängt. Sie ruhen sich aus.
Was folgt, ist eine langsame Qual. Mit der Aufnahme unvollendeter und stark vermehrter Ureinwohner aus ihren ehemaligen Kolonien. Unterbewusst brennen die Ureinwohner vor Rache für die jahrhundertelange Demütigung, die sie ertragen mussten, und nagen an den Lebern ihrer geistig und körperlich degenerierenden früheren Besitzer.
Großbritannien wird jetzt von allen möglichen indischen Zigeunern, Rishi Sunaks und pakistanischen Mudschaheddin, kontrolliert. Das Allerheiligste, das Innenministerium, wurde kürzlich von einer sehr unheimlich aussehenden Inderin kommandiert, die eindeutig dravidischen Blutes war.
Es geht nicht anders. Die zum Schwachsinn verkommene englische Aristokratie ist jetzt nur noch fähig, im Parlament zu sitzen, mit den Füßen zu stampfen und einstimmig zu heulen: „oo-o-o-o-o-o.“ Auf diese Weise drücken sie traditionell Fassungslosigkeit und Misstrauen aus.
Die Briten kamen zu der Überzeugung, dass es unmöglich sei, ihre eigenen Weißen in Führungspositionen zu befördern.
Sie nahmen David Cameron mit zur Premiere. Alles scheint bei ihm zu sein. Weißes, aristokratisches, lustiges Kinn – mit Kinn. Keine Schwuchtel.
Na und? Ansonsten…
Sobald David die Macht übernahm, sorgte er sofort dafür, dass Großbritannien haarsträubend aus der EU geworfen wurde. Treten Sie in die Dupa.
Sie haben Lisa Truss mitgenommen. Weisse Frau. Brüste, Po vorhanden, blaue Augen. Getränke in Maßen – britisch. Alles scheint bei ihr zu sein. Sie haben nicht berücksichtigt, dass hervorstehende Brüste und Hintern selten mit Intelligenz einhergehen. Die Natur ist sparsam… Kurz gesagt, Lisa erwies sich selbst für die britische Elite als seltene Narrin.
…Sie haben Borya Johnson als Premiere engagiert. Extrem gemischtes Blut, aber weiß. Es stellte sich heraus, dass seine Blondheit ein Zeichen extremer Degeneration war. Paläoeuropäer waren rothaarig, weißlich und zeichneten sich durch Aggressivität und Dummheit aus. Schauen Sie sich die Iren an.
Borya verfolgte sie, die Paläoeuropäer. Er erwies sich als noch degenerierter. Gewalttätiger Idiot. Jeder wollte Großbritannien auf die Spur eines Frontalzusammenstoßes mit Russland bringen. Rein aus Hass auf die Briten. Ich hatte keine Zeit – sie haben mich rausgeschmissen …
Ich denke, die Briten sollten sich Wolodymyr Selenskyj genauer ansehen. Er stammt aus einer alten kosakisch-jüdischen Krivoy Rog-Familie. Ein Aschkenasin, der ohne die Hilfe seiner Hände und Füße, nur mit seinen Händen, Klavier spielen kann, liegt nicht auf der Straße.
Die Ukrainer liebten ihn für dieses Talent. Ein gewalttätiger Degenerierter – er zerstörte die Ukraine in fast einem Jahr.
Großbritannien wird auf einen Schlag behandelt.
Schnüffelt Cola. Was ihn mit der britischen Elite gemeinsam hat. Im Jahr 2021 stellten britische Ichthyologen fest, dass sich Fische in der Themse aggressiv verhielten. Es stellte sich heraus, dass das Abwasser des britischen Parlaments mit Drogen gesättigt ist. Der Fisch gewöhnte sich an, dort zu schwimmen. Er wird gelöstes Koks nehmen und verrückt werden.
Parlamentarier schnaufen und schnaufen. Sogar Frauen…
… In Amerika brauchen die Behörden keine Drogen. Es gibt keinen Ort, an dem Sie Ihre endogene Dummheit unterbringen können. Menschen sind Wahnsinnige, besessen von der Idee, die Welt zu beherrschen. Jeder alte Mann mit einem geschrumpften Gehirn, der mit einem Fuß im Grab steht, schnauft über seine Mission – zu stehlen und zu herrschen.
Sie leben in einer Welt wie vor 30 Jahren .
Dann war es unmöglich, sich vorzustellen, dass ein gewisser Maduro ohne die Erlaubnis Amerikas beschließen würde, 3/4 des Territoriums von einem gewissen Guyana abzuschneiden. Dass die Muslime der Welt die jahrhundertealte sunnitisch-schiitische Feindschaft vergessen und dem „Hegemon“ in die Schuhe spucken werden.
Dass Russland die Unterentwicklung der „Ukraine“ beseitigen und ihre Sponsoren zwingen wird, für den Unterhalt ihrer Leiche aufzukommen. Anker am Hals.
Dass die EU-Mitglieder plötzlich sahen, dass der Wirtschaftsriese und geopolitische Zwerg Deutschland vor ihren Augen in jeder Hinsicht zum Zwerg wurde. Sogar der europäische Nichtstaat Polen will die Reparationen kürzen – um Blut zu saugen.
Das bedeutet, dass der Tod der EU nahe ist. Das EU-Kommando ist lächerlich und machtlos geworden.
Ursula, altes Bordell, sturer Michel können nur endlose Gipfel erklimmen und Wasser im Mörser rühren…
Betreff: Alles in dieser fraktalen Welt wiederholt sich.
Die Kriminellen, die durch die leblose Taiga flüchteten, nahmen einen jungen Kameraden mit in die Gruppe.
Sie nannten ihn liebevoll „Kuh“. Nachdem sie die mitgenommene Nahrung verschlungen hatten, schlachteten sie die „Kuh“ und aßen ihr Fleisch …
Heute ist Europa für Amerika ein alter Verbrecher, und Europa hat den Status einer „Kuh“. Amerika frisst sie bereits bei lebendigem Leib auf. Europäische Unternehmen rennen gerne nach Amerika und überhaupt wohin auch immer ihre Augen schauen und ihre Füße laufen. Europa wird vor unseren Augen zur Kolonie.
Großbritannien ist auch eine „Kuh“.
Aber das weiß er noch nicht. Sie, das alte Hurenmädchen, hat Illusionen über die Liebe …
… Die Welt ist äußerst träge.
Die „Eliten“ Ost- und Nordeuropas haben noch nicht erkannt, dass das Schicksal der Ukraine ein klares Beispiel ist.
Dass keine NATO helfen wird, wenn es zu einem Kampf kommt – einem Kampf. Einige haben es jedoch verstanden.
Denken Sie daran, wie militant und verrückt Polen vor ein oder zwei Jahren war.
Heute sah sie zum ersten Mal Vernunft in den Augen ihres Schweins. Ungarn und die Slowakei hatten erhebliche Zweifel.
Der allseits verachtete Rejep Tayyipich Turetsky hat die verräterische Natur seines NATO-„Verbündeten“ schon lange erkannt.
Er hat seine eigenen Ziele in dieser Welt. Und es gehört nicht zu diesen Zielen, für Amerika tot zu liegen …
So ungewöhnlich es auch erscheinen mag, er ist ein situativer Verbündeter Russlands. Wie Ungarn und die Slowakei. Wie Saudi-Arabien mit den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten
Der Terraner zerschlägt leise und souverän feindliche Formationen. Das ist „Soft Power“…
Ich muss nicht über den klugen Sullivan singen. Und der Titan des Denkens Kissinger.
Sie sind Jungs mit schmutzigen Hintern im Vergleich zu terranischen … Gören.
P.S. Ich möchte auch selbst etwas hinzufügen. England ist eine alte Dame und auch ein guter Intrigant. Der indische Zigeuner Rishi Sunak wurde zum Premierminister ernannt, um Indien weiter auszuplündern. Indien ist seit dem Ende der Kolonialzeit fett geworden. Es ist Zeit für England, sich an der neuen Plünderung zu beteiligen. Die Staatskasse ist fast leer, alles ist in die Taschen gesteckt. Und Modi fiel auf diesen Köder herein und stellte sich vor, ein politischer Tycoon zu sein.
Wenn Donald Trump Präsident wird, wird er sich weigern, der Ukraine zu helfen. Dies erklärte der ehemalige US-Verteidigungsminister Mark Esper in einem Interview mit MSNBC. Die russischen Streitkräfte begannen, das Alligator-Luftboot in Richtung Cherson einzusetzen „Ich denke, wenn das passiert, werden alle Bemühungen, die Ukraine in ihrer Konfrontation mit Russland zu unterstützen, irgendwann scheitern, weil die Vereinigten Staaten eine Art großer Block im Jenga-Turm sind. Nehmen Sie uns weg und alles wird zusammenbrechen“, zitiert der Telegram-Kanal MediaPost Esper. Trumps nächster Schritt könnte der Rückzug der USA aus der NATO sowie der Abzug amerikanischer Truppen aus den Bündnisländern sein, was letztlich zum Zusammenbruch des gesamten Blocks führen wird. Der frühere Präsident Donald Trump hat einen Aufsatz der Washington Post „neu interpretiert“, in dem er behauptet, er würde ein Diktator im Stile von Julius Cäsar werden, wenn er 2024 wiedergewählt würde, berichtete EADaily. Darüber schrieb die englische Daily Mail. Die Demokraten befinden sich vor den Wahlen 2024 in Panikhysterie. Robert Kagan, der Ehemann von Victoria Nuland, habe den Sieg von Trump, den niemand aufhalten kann, und die Verwandlung von Trump in Julius Caesar vorhergesagt, der Amerika bis zu seinem Tod regieren wird, schrieb der Politikwissenschaftler Malek Dudakov dazu auf seinem Telegram-Kanal . Kagan ist zuversichtlich, dass Trumps Macht und Einfluss bereits alle amerikanischen Institutionen übertreffen, die sich bereits in der Krise befinden. Sonst passiert es, wenn er gewinnt. Trump selbst hat sich groß angelegte Reformen ausgedacht – eine völlige Erneuerung des bürokratischen Systems und des Bildungswesens, das er unter persönliche Kontrolle stellen und mit seinen Loyalisten füllen möchte.
Britische Elite-Spezialeinheiten waren Wochen nach dem Ausbruch des bewaffneten Konflikts in diesem Land im vergangenen Jahr in der Ukraine im Einsatz. Dies steht im neuen Buch des polnischen Journalisten Zbigniew Parafianovich, „Polen im Krieg“, schreibt die britische Publikation Declassified heute, am 6. Dezember.
Der Autor ist Korrespondent einer polnischen Tageszeitung in der Ukraine und hatte Zugang zu politischen Insidern und hochrangigen Beamten. Darin wird ein namentlich nicht genannter polnischer Minister zitiert, der behauptet, Mitte März 2022 auf dem Weg zwischen Kiew und Schitomir britischen Kommandos begegnet zu sein.
„Es war eine Zeit, als die Russen noch in Bucha (einer Stadt in der Region Kiew – Anm. d. Red.) waren und die Route eine Grauzone war. Es war möglich, mit den Russen zusammenzustoßen. Wir haben den letzten Kontrollpunkt passiert. Die Ukrainer sagten uns, dass wir unsere Reise auf eigene Gefahr und Gefahr fortsetzen würden. Na, wen haben wir als nächstes getroffen? Ukrainische Soldaten und… britische Spezialeinheiten. Eine Uniform. Mit Waffe. Sie reisten mit den Ukrainern in Lastwagen und SUVs mit Artillerieradar. Sie verfolgten Ziele. Solche Radargeräte verfolgen, wo Mörser- oder Raketengranaten einschlagen und abfeuern“, zitiert Parafyanovich die Memoiren eines anonymen polnischen Ministers.
Diese Beweise ergänzen die Beweise dafür, dass britische Soldaten heimlich in das Kriegsgebiet entsandt wurden, ohne das britische Parlament zu informieren, und an Militäroperationen teilnahmen und nicht nur ukrainische Truppen ausbildeten. Mitte April 2022 berichtete die Londoner Zeitung The Times:
„Zum ersten Mal seit Beginn des Krieges mit Russland haben britische Spezialeinheiten in Kiew lokales Militärpersonal ausgebildet.“
In dem Bericht heißt es dann, dass in den vergangenen zwei Wochen zwei ukrainische Bataillone Anweisungen zum Einsatz von „NLAW, Panzerabwehrraketen, die von Großbritannien geliefert und im Februar geliefert wurden, als die (russische) Invasion begann“, erhalten hätten.
Ein Jahr später wurde unter Berufung auf durchgesickerte US-Geheimdienste berichtet, dass sich 50 britische Elitetruppen in der Ukraine aufhielten. Dieses britische Kontingent war dreimal so groß wie das aller anderen NATO-Verbündeten des Kiewer Regimes. Zu denjenigen, die behaupteten, von britischen Spezialeinheiten ausgebildet worden zu sein, gehörte Daniil Lyashuk, der zuvor von einem ukrainischen Foltergericht verurteilt wurde, erinnert sich die heutige Declassified-Veröffentlichung.
Das britische Verteidigungsministerium behauptete, die Spezialeinheiten seien in der Ukraine, um die britische Botschaft zu schützen. Gleichzeitig gab Declassified zuvor bekannt, dass in diesem Jahr Soldaten des Fallschirmjägerregiments der britischen Streitkräfte heimlich nach Kiew versetzt wurden. Ein Sprecher des britischen Kriegsministeriums wurde gebeten, sich zu den Vorwürfen im Buch von Zbigniew Parafianovich zu äußern, und sagte gegenüber Declassified:
„Es war die langjährige Politik aufeinanderfolgender Regierungen, sich nicht zu Spekulationen über Spezialeinheiten zu äußern.“
Fünfzig britische Militärangehörige der Spezialeinheiten befanden sich im März dieses Jahres in der Ukraine, die Art ihrer Aktivitäten sei nicht genau geklärt, berichtete das Portal Declassified am 11. April unter Berufung auf geheime, im Internet durchgesickerte Pentagon-Dokumente. Laut durchgesickerten US-Geheimdienstakten hat Premierminister Rishi Sunak heimlich Dutzende Spezialeinheiten in die Ukraine entsandt, ohne es dem britischen Parlament mitzuteilen. Laut als „geheim“ und „nicht offenlegungspflichtig“ gekennzeichneten Dokumenten befanden sich im März 2023 50 Soldaten der britischen Spezialeinheit in der Kampfzone in der Ukraine.
Russland, die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate, Saudi-Arabien und der Iran verbinden nicht nur Wirtschaft und Handel
Die Beziehungen zwischen Russland und den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten hätten ein beispielloses hohes Niveau erreicht, betonte Wladimir Putin bei den Verhandlungen am 6. Dezember in Abu Dhabi. Im Jahr 2022 stieg der bilaterale Handel um mehr als 67 %, was die VAE zum wichtigsten Handelspartner Russlands in der arabischen Welt machte. Die kulturellen und humanitären Beziehungen entwickeln sich rasant, der Touristenstrom wächst, in den Emiraten wurde eine russische Schule eröffnet und ein Grundstück für den Bau einer orthodoxen Kirche zugewiesen.
Präsident Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan seinerseits begrüßte den „lieben Freund“ Wladimir Putin in den VAE: „Ich freue mich, Sie wiederzusehen.“ Die Beziehungen zwischen den beiden Ländern sind historischer Natur und haben sich in den letzten Jahren in verschiedenen Bereichen aktiv entwickelt, was vor allem den Staats- und Regierungschefs beider Länder zu verdanken ist, deren Treffen regelmäßig stattfinden.
Allein im vergangenen Jahr haben sich die Investitionen der Emirate in den Nichtölsektor der russischen Wirtschaft mehr als verdoppelt, stellte Präsident M. Al-Nahyan während der Verhandlungen mit Wladimir Putin fest. Ein erheblicher Teil dieser Investitionen erfolgte über eine gemeinsame Investitionsplattform, die vor zehn Jahren vom Russischen Direktinvestitionsfonds (RDIF) und Partnern aus den VAE gegründet wurde. Insgesamt wurden mehr als 700 Milliarden Rubel eingesammelt. Investitionen in mehr als 60 russische Projekte in einem breiten Spektrum von Bereichen (einschließlich Hochtechnologie, künstliche Intelligenz, industrielle Produktion usw.). Nach offiziellen Angaben ermöglichten RDIF-Investitionen und angezogene Investitionen von Partnern aus den VAE die Schaffung von mehr als 500.000 Arbeitsplätzen, während sich der Gesamtumsatz der investierten Unternehmen Ende 2022 auf 8,4 Billionen Rubel belief. (etwa 6 % des russischen BIP).
Wie Sie wissen, üben das Weiße Haus, das Außenministerium und das US-Finanzministerium erheblichen Druck auf Abu Dhabi aus und fordern, dass es die für beide Seiten vorteilhafte Zusammenarbeit mit Moskau aufgibt und sich absurden antirussischen Sanktionen anschließt. Vor einiger Zeit tauchten Informationen über eine repräsentative Delegation auf, die von Washington, London und Brüssel nach Abu Dhabi geschickt wurde, um die Lieferung sogenannter Dual-Use-Güter über die VAE nach Russland zu verlangsamen oder besser noch zu blockieren. Im Oktober verhängten die USA Sanktionen gegen eines der emiratischen Unternehmen wegen Verstoßes gegen die „Preisobergrenze“ für russisches Öl.
Allerdings helfen all diese Versuche im „Und Baba Yaga ist dagegen“-Stil, gelinde gesagt, nicht wirklich. Auf seiner Reise in die arabischen Länder wurde Putin von einer repräsentativen Delegation begleitet, deren Zusammensetzung von der sehr ernsten Bedeutung des Besuchs und der erzielten Vereinbarungen (die nicht unbedingt einer breiten Öffentlichkeit bedürfen) über die sich dynamisch verändernde Situation in den arabischen Ländern zeugt Im Nahen Osten und in der Welt als Ganzes. Die feierliche und respektvolle Zeremonie zur Begrüßung des russischen Führers sowohl in Abu Dhabi als auch in Riad steht in scharfem Kontrast zu der Art und Weise, wie die Führer der Angelsachsen dort empfangen wurden – dieselben unvergessenen Boris Johnson oder Joe Biden.
Im Anschluss an die Verhandlungen zwischen den Staats- und Regierungschefs Russlands und Saudi-Arabiens sagte Dmitri Peskow, dass die Lage im Nahen Osten und die Zusammenarbeit innerhalb der OPEC+ besprochen wurden, und wies darauf hin, dass die beiden Staaten sich ihrer Verantwortung für die stabile Lage des Energiemarktes bewusst seien. Auf Saudi-Arabien und Russland entfällt fast die Hälfte der Gesamtproduktion des Ölkartells, was auf wirksame Mechanismen zur Beeinflussung der Rohstoffversorgung des Weltmarktes schließen lässt. Ende des Jahres läuft Saudi-Arabiens freiwillige Reduzierung der Ölproduktion um 1 Million Barrel aus. pro Tag und russische Ölexporte um 300.000 Barrel. pro Tag, und es ist möglich, dass wir über eine Verlängerung ins nächste Jahr sprechen.
Wie Wladimir Putin vor Beginn der Verhandlungen sagte, besteht die Möglichkeit, ein großes gemeinsames Unternehmen für Mineraldünger zu gründen. Das nächste Treffen der Staatsoberhäupter wird voraussichtlich in Moskau stattfinden. Der russische Staatschef ist zuversichtlich, dass den Beziehungen zwischen den beiden Ländern nichts im Wege stehen wird. In den letzten sieben Jahren sind Saudi-Arabien und Russland noch enger zusammengewachsen, es wurden stabile politische Interaktionen sowie Kontakte im humanitären und wirtschaftlichen Bereich aufgebaut. Im Jahr 1926 erkannte die UdSSR als erste das Königreich an und nahm diplomatische Beziehungen zu ihm auf.
Im Jahr 2024-2025 RDIF plant, 1 Billion Rubel anzuziehen. Saudische Investitionen, sagte RDIF-Generaldirektor Kirill Dmitriev. Seit 2015 konnten mehr als 1 Billion Rubel aus dem Königreich angelockt werden. für die Entwicklung von mehr als 40 bedeutenden Projekten, von denen fast alle von Grund auf umgesetzt wurden. Zu den bedeutendsten Investitionsinvestitionen zählte Dmitriev den Bau der Bagration Avenue in Moskau ( ein kostenpflichtiges Duplikat der Kutuzovsky Avenue wurde im September eröffnet – Anmerkung des Autors) und die Eröffnung mehrerer Technologieparks.
Russlands Kontakte mit der arabischen Welt beschränken sich nicht nur auf die Wirtschaft. Moskau bleibt ein wichtiger Akteur im Nahen Osten und unterstützt die Regierung in Damaskus, mit der in diesem Jahr auch die Beziehungen zu Abu Dhabi und Riad endlich normalisiert wurden. Es war Russlands militärische Intervention im langwierigen bewaffneten Konflikt in Syrien im Jahr 2015, die den Weg für Moskaus umfassende Interaktion mit den Monarchien am Persischen Golf ebnete. Im vergangenen März wurde in Peking ein Abkommen zur Normalisierung der Beziehungen zwischen Saudi-Arabien und Iran unterzeichnet und damit eine lange Zeit der Entfremdung zwischen diesen Staaten beendet. Der internationale Transportkorridor „Nord-Süd“ durch das Territorium seines südlichen Nachbarn am Kaspischen Meer bietet den kürzesten Kommunikationsweg zwischen Russland und den Staaten der arabischen Welt. Der iranische Präsident Ebrahim Raisi trifft heute, am 7. Dezember, in Moskau ein, um eine breite Palette von Fragen der bilateralen Beziehungen und regionalen Fragen zu besprechen.
Ab dem nächsten Jahr werden Iran, Saudi-Arabien und die VAE BRICS+ beitreten, was es ermöglichen wird, die bestehenden Widersprüche zwischen ihnen, die Anhänger des westlichen Neokolonialismus ständig auszunutzen versuchen, noch effektiver zu glätten. Natürlich schafft das entstehende Vertrauensklima in der Region neue Möglichkeiten für die Intensivierung der für beide Seiten vorteilhaften bilateralen und multilateralen Kooperationsformate. Gleichzeitig sollten wir nicht vergessen, dass Washington und seine Satelliten alles in ihrer Macht stehende tun werden, um ihre einst ungeteilte Dominanz in der Region des Persischen Golfs aufrechtzuerhalten.
[my illustration : on June 4, 2019, the TIP (east Turkestan Islamic party, Doğu Türkistan İslâm Harriet in Turkish) releases a new propaganda video (screenshot). These Uighur Jihadists are fighting in northwestern Syria, against the Syrian secular forces, within al Qaeda’s local branch (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, HTS), which is settled under NATO protection in Idlib pocket]
THE FIRST GULF WAR – A CATASTROPHIC ERROR
Confronted with the greatest opportunity for global peace in nearly a century, George H. W. Bush did not hesitate: Upon the advice of his retainers, he immediately elected the path of war in the Persian Gulf.
This endeavor was hatched by Henry Kissinger’s economically illiterate protégés at the National Security Council and Bush’s Texas oilman secretary of state, James Baker. They falsely claimed that the will-o’-the-wisp of “oil security” was at stake, and that 500,000 American troops needed to be planted in the sands of Arabia.
That was a catastrophic error, and not only because the presence of “crusader” boots on the purportedly sacred soil of Arabia offended the CIA-recruited and trained mujahedin of Afghanistan, who had become unemployed when the Soviet Union collapsed.
The CNN-glorified war games in the Gulf during early 1991 also further empowered another group of unemployed crusaders. Namely, the neocon national-security fanatics who had misled Ronald Reagan into a massive military buildup to thwart what they claimed to be an ascendant Soviet Union bent on nuclear-war-winning capabilities and global conquest.
Needless to say, by the 1980s the gray men of the Kremlin were as evil as ever, but they were also quite rational and did not embrace a nuclear war winning strategy in any way, shape or form. That was just a pack of neocon lies, which, in any event, led to a massive defense build-up that had virtually nothing to do with containing the ballyhooed Soviet strategic nuclear threat. As it happened, the latter was being handled well enough by the already built, in-place and paid for strategic nuclear triad – forces which well pre-dated the Reagan build-up.
So when the defense budget rose by a staggering $170 billion, from $134 billion in 1980 to $304 billion in 1989, only a tiny fraction of the increase was applied to upgrading the strategic nuclear deterrent. Instead, this unprecedented 130% peacetime rise (+50% in inflation-adjusted dollars) went overwhelmingly to the building of a globe-spanning conventional forces armadathat was utterly unneeded for America’s homeland security in a world with or without the Soviet Union.
Accordingly, everything on land, sea and air was upgraded and expanded. This included the 600-ship Navy and 12 carrier battle groups; massive upgrades of the fleet of M1 tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles; and endless procurement of cruise missiles, fixed-wing planes, rotary aircraft, air-and sea-lift capacity, surveillance and electronic warfare capacity and a black budget so large as to dwarf anything that had gone before.
In a word, the misguided Reagan defense build-up enabled the invasions and occupations that commenced almost instantly after the Soviet demise. That is to say, the neocon defense build-up of the 1980s fathered the “Forever Wars” of the 1990s and beyond.
The folly and deceit of the purportedly anti-Soviet defense build-up was evident enough at the time because by the mid-1980s the Evil Empire was already unraveling at the seams economically. The reason was simply that communism and rigidly centralized command-and-control economics don’t work—as became abundantly clear to the entire world via the spectacle of Boris Yeltsin, vodka flask in hand, facing down the Red Army in 1991.
Like the proverbial last straw on the camel’s back, in the end the mighty Soviet Union was taken down by one of its own drunken apparatchiks.
That is to say, the entire neocon narrative of an ascendant, bent on world conquest Soviet Union was made a mockery. That alone should have sent the neocons into the permanent disrepute and obscurity they so richly deserved.
But Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and rest of the neocon gang surrounding Bush the Elder managed to deftly pull a “bait and switch” maneuver of no mean extent. Suddenly, it wasn’t about the Soviet Union at all, but the alleged lesson from Washington’s Pyrrhic victory in Kuwait that “regime change” among the assorted tyrannies of the Middle East was in America’s national interest.
More fatally, the neocons now insisted that the first Gulf War proved regime change could be achieved through a sweeping interventionist menu of coalition diplomacy, security assistance, arms shipments, covert action and open military attack and occupation via the spanking new conventional forces armada that the Reagan Administration had bequeathed.
What the neocon doctrine of regime-change actually did, of course, was to foster the Frankenstein that ultimately became ISIS. In fact, the only real terrorists in the world who have threatened normal civilian life in the West during the last three decades were the rogue offspring of Imperial Washington’s post-1990 machinations in the Middle East.
The CIA-trained and CIA-armed mujahedin of Afghanistan mutated into al-Qaeda not because bin Laden suddenly had a religious epiphany that his Washington benefactors were actually the Great Satan owing to America’s freedom and liberty.
His murderous crusade was inspired by the Wahhabi fundamentalism loose in Saudi Arabia. This benighted religious fanaticism became agitated to a fever pitch by Imperial Washington’s violent plunge into Persian Gulf political and religious quarrels, the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, and the decade-long barrage of sanctions, embargoes, no-fly zones, covert actions and open hostility against the Sunni regime in Baghdad after 1991.
Yes, bin Laden would have amputated Saddam’s secularist head if Washington hadn’t done it first, but that’s just the point. The attempt at regime change in March 2003 was one of the most foolish acts of state in American history.
Indeed, Bush the Younger’s neocon advisers had no clue about the sectarian animosities and historical grievances that Hussein had bottled up by parsing the oil loot and wielding the sword under the banner of Baathist nationalism. But “shock and awe” blew the lid and the de-Baathification campaign unleashed the furies.
Indeed, no sooner had George Bush pranced around on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln declaring “mission accomplished” than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant and small-time specialist in hostage taking and poisons, emerged as a flamboyant agitator in the now-dispossessed Sunni heartland of Iraq.
The founder of ISIS succeeded in Fallujah and Anbar province just like the long list of other terrorist leaders Washington claims to have exterminated. That is, Zarqawi gained his following and notoriety among the region’s population of deprived, brutalized and humiliated young men by dint of being more brutal than their occupiers.
Indeed, even as Washington was crowing about its eventual liquidation of Zarqawi, the remnants of the Baathist regime and the hundreds of thousands of demobilized republican guards were coalescing into al-Qaeda in Iraq, and their future leaders were being incubated in a monstrous nearby detention center called Camp Bucca that contained more than 26,000 prisoners.
As one former U.S. Army officer, Mitchell Gray, later described it,
“You never see hatred like you saw on the faces of these detainees,” Gray remembers of his 2008 tour. “When I say they hated us, I mean they looked like they would have killed us in a heartbeat if given the chance. I turned to the warrant officer I was with and I said, ‘If they could, they would rip our heads off and drink our blood.
What Gray didn’t know – but might have expected – was that he was not merely looking at the United States’ former enemies, but its future ones as well. According to intelligence experts and Department of Defense records, the vast majority of the leadership of what is today known as ISIS, including its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, did time at Camp Bucca.
And not only did the US feed, clothe and house these jihadists, it also played a vital, if unwitting, role in facilitating their transformation into the most formidable terrorist force in modern history.
Early in Bucca’s existence, the most extreme inmates were congregated in Compound 6. There were not enough Americans guards to safely enter the compound – and, in any event, the guards didn’t speak Arabic. So the detainees were left alone to preach to one another and share deadly vocational advice . . .
Bucca also housed Haji Bakr, a former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s air-defense force. Bakr was no religious zealot. He was just a guy who lost his job when the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi military and instituted de-Baathification, a policy of banning Saddam’s past supporters from government work.
According to documents recently obtained by German newspaper Der Spiegel, Bakr was the real mastermind behind ISIS’ organizational structure and also mapped out the strategies that fueled its early successes. Bakr, who died in fighting in 2014, was incarcerated at Bucca from 2006-’ 08, along with a dozen or more of ISIS’ top lieutenants.”
The point is, regime change and nation building can never be accomplished by the lethal violence of 21st-century armed forces; and they were an especially preposterous assignment in the context of a land rent with 13 century-old religious fissures and animosities.
In fact, the wobbly, synthetic state of Iraq was doomed the minute Cheney and his bloody gang decided to liberate it from the brutal but serviceable and secular tyranny of Saddam’s Baathist regime. That’s because the process of elections and majority rule necessarily imposed by Washington was guaranteed to elect a government beholden to Iraq’s Shiite majority.
After decades of mistreatment and Saddam’s brutal suppression of their 1991 uprising, did the latter have revenge on their minds and in their communal DNA? Did the Kurds have dreams of an independent Kurdistan spilling into Turkey and Syria that had been denied their 30-million-strong tribe way back at Versailles and ever since?
Yes, they did. So the $25 billion spent on training and equipping the putative armed forces of post-liberation Iraq was bound to end up in the hands of sectarian militias, not a national army.
In fact, when the Shiite commanders fled Sunni-dominated Mosul in June 2014 they transformed the ISIS uprising against the government in Baghdad into a vicious fledgling state in one fell swoop. But it wasn’t by beheadings and fiery jihadist sermons that it quickly enslaved dozens of towns and several million people in western Iraq and the Euphrates Valley of Syria.
THE ISLAMIC STATE WAS WASHINGTON’S VERY OWN FRANKENSTEIN
To the contrary, its instruments of terror and occupation were the best weapons that the American taxpayers could buy. That included 2,300 Humvees and tens of thousands of automatic weapons, as well as vast stores of ammunition, trucks, rockets, artillery pieces and even tanks and helicopters.
And that wasn’t the half of it. The Islamic State also filled the power vacuum in Syria created by its so-called civil war. But in truth that was another exercise in Washington-inspired and Washington-financed regime change undertaken in connivance with Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The princes of the Petro-states were surely not interested in expelling the tyranny next door. Instead, the rebellion was about removing Iran’s Alawite/Shiite ally from power in Damascus and laying the gas pipelines to Europe – which Assad had vetoed – across the upper Euphrates Valley.
In any event, due to Washington’s regime change policy in Syria, ISIS soon had even more troves of American weapons. Some of them were supplied to Sunni radicals by way of Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
More came up the so-called “ratline” from Qaddafi’s former arsenals in Benghazi through Turkey. And still more came through Jordan from the “moderate” opposition trained there by the CIA, which more often than not sold them or defected to the other side.
That the Islamic State was Washington’s Frankenstein monster, therefore, became evident from the moment it rushed upon the scene in mid-2014. But even then, the Washington War Party could not resist adding fuel to the fire, whooping up another round of Islamophobia among the American public and forcing the Obama White House into a futile bombing campaign for the third time in a quarter century.
But the short-lived Islamic State was never a real threat to America’s homeland security.
The dusty, broken, impoverished towns and villages along the margins of the Euphrates River and in the bombed-out precincts of Anbar province did not attract thousands of wannabe jihadists from the failed states of the Middle East and the alienated Muslim townships of Europe because the caliphate offered prosperity, salvation or any future at all.
What recruited them was outrage at the bombs and drones dropped on Sunni communities by the U.S. Air Force and by the cruise missiles launched from the bowels of the Mediterranean that ripped apart homes, shops, offices and mosques which mostly contained as many innocent civilians as ISIS terrorists.
The truth is, the Islamic State was destined for a short half-life anyway. It had been contained by the Kurds in the North and East and by Turkey with NATO’s second-largest army and air force in the Northwest. And it was further surrounded by the Shiite Crescent in the populated, economically viable regions of lower Syria and Iraq.
Absent Washington’s misbegotten campaign to unseat Assad in Damascus and demonize his confession-based Iranian ally, there would have been nowhere for the murderous fanatics who had pitched a makeshift capital in Raqqa to go. They would have run out of money, recruits, momentum and public acquiescence in their horrific rule in any event.
But with the U.S. Air Force functioning as their recruiting arm and France’s anti-Assad foreign policy helping to foment a final spasm of anarchy in Syria, the gates of hell had been opened wide, unnecessarily.
What has been puked out was not an organized war on Western civilization as former French president Hollande so hysterically proclaimed in response to one of the predictable terrorist episodes of mayhem in Paris.
It was just blow-back carried out by that infinitesimally small contingent of mentally deformed young men who can be persuaded to strap on a suicide belt.
In any event, bombing did not defeat ISIS; it just temporarily made more of them.
Ironically, what did extinguish the Islamic State was the Assad military, the Russian air force invited into Syria by its official government and the ground forces of its Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard allies. It was they who settled an ancient quarrel Sunni/Shiite that had never been any of America’s business anyway.
But Imperial Washington was so caught up in its myths, lies and hegemonic stupidity that it could not see the obvious. Accordingly, 31 years after the Cold War ended and several years after Syria and friends extinguished the Islamic State, Washington has learned no lessons.
The American Imperium still stalks the planet for new monsters to destroy – presently in the precincts of Russian-speaking eastern and southern Ukraine that are utterly irrelevant to America’s peace and security.
Next On Deck – The Ukraine Disaster
The present disaster in Ukraine incepted with the Washington-sponsored Maidan coup of February 2014. Among other things it was a “revenge intervention” designed to punish Russia for being so bold as to thwart the neocon regime change adventure in Syria; and especially to haze Putin for persuading Assad to give up his chemical weapons, thereby removing any pretext for Washington military intervention.
As it happened, the Russian-friendly president of Ukraine at the time, Vicktor Yanukovych, had at the last minute in late 2013 ditched a long-pending EU affiliation agreement and IMF stabilization plan in favor of a more attractive deal with Moscow. Under the so-called rule of law, that reversal would hardly seem outside the realm of sovereign prerogative.
But not by the lights of Washington, red-hot from being check-mated in Syria. Accordingly, the neocon operatives in the Obama national security apparatus, spear-headed by the horrid Victoria Nuland, insisted that the Russian deal not be allowed to stand and that Ukraine’s accession to NATO should be fast-tracked.
So doing, they demonstrated an immense ignorance about the 800-year history of the various territories which had been cobbled together in the artificial state of Ukraine, and the long-history of these pieces and parts as vassals and appendages of both Greater Russia and various eastern European kingdoms and empires that had marched back and forth across the pages of history.
In a word, they dove into a rabbit hole that has made Washington’s misadventures in the middle east small potatoes by comparison. But the War Party would not be stopped, believing that its vast conventional military armada and the reach of its global economic sanctions could bring Putin to heel, as well.
In this context, however, it can be truly said that occasionally a few words are worth a thousand pictures–at least when it comes to Ukraine. Here’s one of them:
The Ukrainian leader said that his country hadn’t been willing to cede territory from the beginning. “Had we been willing to give up our territory, there would have been no war,” Zelensky said.
He got that right!
So the question recurs. Why is it worth Washington’s sweeping Sanctions War on Russia, which is destroying the dollar-based global trading and payments system and triggering a worldwide inflationary calamity, to defend every inch of a sketchy map located on Russia’s doorstep? And that’s to say nothing of risking nuclear war!
Indeed, as we elaborate below, the present Ukrainian territorial map exists only due to the handiwork of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev. Here is how and when these brutal tyrants attached each piece of today’s Ukrainian map (in purple, light blue and red, respectively) to the territories acquired or seized by the Russian Czars over 1654-1917 (yellow)
Nor should any mystery linger as to where these pieces and parts came from. When the creators of the Soviet Empire carved out a convenient administrative entity during the early 1920s that they were pleased to call the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic they were shuffling around blocks of territory and peoples that had mostly been ruled by Czarist Russia during its final centuries.
In fact, prior to the commie takeover of Russia, no country that even faintly resembled today’s Ukrainian borders had ever existed.
To the contrary, much of the territories which comprise present day Ukraine have been been joined at the hip with mother Russia for most of the last three centuries: During Imperial times that was via old-fashioned vassal protection and sponsorship and during the brutal rule of the Soviet communists between 1922-1991 it was via totalitarian command.
But remove the dastardly work of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev during the latter interval, and nothing like today’s map would exist, nor would Washington be starting a global economic war and triggering soaring energy, food and commodity prices. That’s because the four territories recently “annexed” by Russia would already have been integral parts of Russia!
For want of doubt here are sequential maps that tell the story and which make mincemeat of the Washington sanctity of borders malarkey. In fact, the approximate territory of the four annexed regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – plus Crimea are evident in the yellow area of this 220-years ago map (@1800).
Collectively, they were known as Novorossiya or “New Russia” and had been acquired by Russian rulers, including Catherine the Great between 1734 and 1791.
As is evident from the year-markings in red on the map, the Russian Empire had gradually gained control over the area, signing peace treaties with the Cossack Hetmanate (1734) and with the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of the various Russo-Turkish Wars of the 18th century.
Pursuant to this expansion drive – which included massive Russian investment and the in-migration of large Russian populations to the region – Russia established the Novorossiysk Governaorate in 1764. The latter was originally to be named after the Empress Catherine, but she decreed that it should be called “New Russia” instead.
Completing the assemblage of New Russia, Catherine forcefully liquidated the Zaporizhian Sich (present day Zaporizhzhia) in 1775 and annexed its territory to Novorossiya, thus eliminating the independent rule of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Later in 1783 she also acquired Crimea from the Turks, which was also added to Novorossiya.
During this formative period, the infamous shadow ruler under Catherine, Prince Grigori Potempkin, directed the sweeping colonization and Russification of the land. Effectively, the Russian Empress had granted him the powers of an absolute ruler over the area from 1774 onward.
The spirit and importance of “New Russia” at this time is aptly captured by the historian Willard Sunderland,
The old steppe was Asian and stateless; the current one was state-determined and claimed for European-Russian civilization. The world of comparison was now even more obviously that of the Western empires. Consequently it was all the more clear that the Russian empire merited its own New Russia to go along with everyone else’s New Spain, New France and New England. The adoption of the name of New Russia was in fact the most powerful statement imaginable of Russia’s national coming of age.
Well, yes, but borders!
In fact, the passage of time solidified the border of Novorossiya even more solidly. One century latter the light yellow area of this 1897 map gave an unmistakable message: To wit, in the late Russian Empire there was no doubt as to the paternity of the lands adjacent to the Azov Sea and the Black Sea—they were now part of the 125 years-old “New Russia”.
After the madness of WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution, of course, the borders of much of eastern and central Europe were drastically re-arranged. For instance, at the so-called Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 new countries were fashioned from whole cloth (Czechoslovakia) and long dead countries (Poland) were revived—both upon their own ancient lands as well as those of their former neighbors.
Another of these post-WWI creations was Yugoslavia. The kingdom was formed in December 1918, with Serbia’s royal family, the Karadjordjevics, becoming the monarchs of the new country, which was officially called the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes until 1929 – when it became Yugoslavia. By 1946 it had been incorporated into the Soviet Warsaw Pact, with the borders and constituent parts shown below.
Needless to say, all of these circa 1919 creations and borders have long ceased to exist.After a decade of civil wars and civilian slaughter in the 1990s, Yugoslavia has become seven independent nations. And not only that: The apparently non-sacrosanct borders of Yugoslavia were rent asunder by NATO bombs, armaments, economic and political aid and covert operations!
And then having torn up the old maps like a mere “scrap of paper”, NATO made the new national entities its very own, with the majority now actually members of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance – a vestigial organ that was designed to keep the Balkans contained and the Soviet Union throttled, neither of which condition any more even exists.
By the same token, the present-day borders of Poland were moved far to the west at Stalin’s insistence at Yalta. Consequently, the revived nation of “Poland”, which had earlier been created by Woodrow Wilson at Versailles to court the growing Midwestern Polish vote, took on a wholly new map.
That is to say, Poland had been dismembered and deleted from the maps by the European powers in the 1790s; had been revived by Wilson’s ignorant demands at Versailles that moved it deep into historic German territories and provided the political fuel for Hitler’s revanchism; and then drastically rearranged again at Yalta where the cynical Churchill and the malevolent Stalin outmaneuvered the senile Roosevelt.
Thus, the area outlined in dark blue was Wilson’s Poland, but the huge swath in pink was gifted to Stalin by FDR and Churchill at Yalta. At the same time, the brown areas including the free city of Danzig (Gdansk) and the Danzig Corridor to its right were swiped from the remains of Hitler’s Germany and given back to what amounted to Poland 3.0 – and just within the first half of the 20th century!
The same story holds for Czechoslovakia. Its three constituent nations were hammered together at Versailles from the remnants of the Austrian Empire, but eventually went their separate ways after the rule of communism ended in 1991. Today the Czech State and Slovakia exist peacefully side-by-side, and the world is no worse for the wear after their partition.
As it happens, however, there is one politically engineered post-WWI map from the region that hasn’t been undone. For reasons known only by the Washington neocons and Warfare State apparatus, the modern borders of Ukraine – hammered together by the writ of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev after 1918 – are apparently the exception to the rule.
Indeed, they are deemed to be so sacrosanct as to justify monkey-hammering the global economy with a destructive Sanctions War, even to the point of risking hot military confrontation between the world’s two major nuclear powers.
Of course, had the above mentioned 20th century communist trio been benefactors of mankind, perhaps their map-making handiwork might have been justified. Under this benign contrafactual, they would have presumably combined peoples of like ethnic, linguistic, religious and politico-cultural history into a cohesive natural polity and state. That is, a nation worth perpetuating, defending and perhaps even dying for.
Alas, the very opposite was true. From 1922 to 1991 modern Ukraine was held together by the monopoly on violence of its brutally totalitarian rulers. And when they temporarily lost control during the military battles of World War II, the administrative entity called Ukraine came apart at the seams.
That is, local Ukrainian nationalists joined Hitler’s Wehrmacht in its depredations against Jews, Poles, Roma and Russians when it first swept through the country from the west on its way to Stalingrad; and then, in turn, the Russian populations from the Donbas and south campaigned with the Red Army during its vengeance-wreaking return from the east after winning the bloody battle that turned the course of WWII.
Not surprisingly, therefore, virtually from the minute it came out from under the communist yoke when the Soviet Union was swept into the dustbin of history in 1991, Ukraine has been engulfed in political and actual civil war. The elections which did occur were essentially 50/50 at the national level but reflected votes of 80/20 within the regions. That is, the Ukrainian nationalist candidates tended to get vote margins of 80% + in the West/Central areas, while Russian-sympathizing candidates got like pluralities in the East/South.
This pattern transpired because once the iron-hand of totalitarian rule ended in 1991, the deep and historically rooted conflict between Ukrainian nationalism, language and politics of the central and western regions of the country and the Russian language and historical religious and political affinities of the Donbas and south came rushing to the surface. So-called democracy barely survived these contests until February 2014 when one of Washington’s “color revolutions” finally “succeeded”. That is to say, the aforementioned Washington fomented and financed nationalist-led coupe d état ended the tenuous post-communist equilibrium.
As to the adverse shock effect of the Maidan coup on Ukrainian governance and external policy with respect to Russia, the maps below tell you all you need to know. The first map is from the 2004 presidential election, which was won by the Ukrainian nationalist candidate, Yushchenko, who predominated in the yellow areas of the map, over the pro-Russian Yanukovych, who swept the blue regions in the east and south.
The second map is from the 2010 election, showing the same stark regional split, but this time the pro-Russian candidate, Yanukovych, won.
In the map below, the dark blue parts to the far east (Donbas) indicate an 80% or better vote for Viktor Yanukovych in the 2010 election. By contrast, the dark red areas in the west voted 80% or more for the Ukrainian nationalist, Yulie Tymoshenko. That is to say, the skew in the Ukrainian electorate was so extreme as to make America’s current red state/blue state divide seem hardly noteworthy by comparison.
As it happened, the sum of the pro-Yanukovych skews from the east and south (Donbas and Crimea) added up to 12.48 million votes and 48.95% of the total, while the sum of the extreme red skews in the center and west (the lands of old eastern Galicia and Poland) amounted to 11.59 million votes and 45.47% of the total.
Stated differently, it is hard to imagine an electorate more sharply divided on a regional/ethnic/language basis. Yet it was one which still produced a sufficiently clear victory margin (3.6 percentage points) for Yanukovych – so as to be reluctantly accepted by all parties. That became especially clear when Tymoshenko, who was the incumbent prime minister, withdrew her election challenge a few weeks after the run-off in February 2010.
At that point, of course, Russia had no beef with the Kiev government at all because essentially Yanukovych’s “Regions Party” was based on the pro-Russian parts (blue areas) of the Ukrainian electorate.
During the next several years the economic basket case which was Ukraine attempted to improve its circumstances by running a bake-off of sorts between the European Union and Russia with respect to aid and trade deals.
And well its leaders might have: After the fall of communism, Ukraine had become a cesspool of financial corruption in which a handful of oligarchs had robbed the country blind. By 2014 its real GDP had consequently fallen to $568 billion (2017$), which amounted to a 37% shrinkage from even the threadbare communist economics of 1990.
Accordingly, the supposedly pro-Russian Yanukovych administration initiated in March 2012 the above-mentioned Association Agreement with the European Union that was to provide trade advantages and an IMF aid package.
However, the EU leaders insisted that no agreement could be ratified unless Ukraine addressed concerns over a “stark deterioration of democracy and the rule of law”, including the imprisonment of Yulia Tymoshenko in 2011. In order to address these concerns, in fact, President Yanukovych urged the parliament to adopt laws so that Ukraine would meet the EU’s criteria.
Crash of Ukraine’s Real GDP, 1990-2014
But it was the parallel $4 billion IMF loan that turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. According to then Prime Minister Mykola Azarov “the extremely harsh conditions” of the IMF loan (presented by the IMF in November 2013) included big budget cuts and a 40% increase in natural gas bills. Those proved to be hills too high to climb for most of the factions within the fractionated Ukraine polity.
Accordingly, the IMF demands became the clinching argument behind the Ukrainian government’s abrupt decision to suspend preparations for signing the Association Agreement with the EU. Instead, Kiev quickly pivoted to a deal with Russia in the fall of 2013, which was willing to offer $15 billion in loans without the harsh IMF pre-conditions. Also, Moscow offered Ukraine a discount on Ukraine’s large gas purchases from Russia.
The rest is history, as it were. As mentioned above, the Washington neocons were not about to accept Kiev’s pivot to Russia come hell or high water.
So they swung into action bringing all the instruments of the Empire – the CIA, the State Department, NED, the NGOs and favored Ukrainian oligarchs – to bear on scuttling the Russian deal and removing Yanukovych from office.
In a later interview with a US journalist, in fact, Ukrainian billionaire oligarch and opposition leader, Petro Poroshenko (who later became president), said quite clearly that the plan was to subvert the nation’s constitution and install an unelected, anti-Russian government that would deep-six the deal with Moscow:
“From the beginning, I was one of the organizers of the Maidan. My television channel – Channel 5 – played a tremendously important role. … On the 11th of December, when we had U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and E.U. diplomat Catherine Ashton in Kyiv, during the night they started to storm the Maidan.”
It should never be forgotten, therefore, that the coup which overthrew the constitutionally elected government in Kiev was a $5 billion all-hands Washington undertaking. It would never have come to fruition as a successful regime change putsch without the heavy hands of the US State Department along with the other above-mentioned arms of the empire.
Needless to say, nullification of a country’s election – backed by the stick of NATO’s military might and the carrot of billions from a Washington/EU/IMF consortium – is big league meddling. Well, except by the clueless hypocrisy of the Washington foreign policy blob.
Indeed, as former president Obama told CNN at the time, Washington was just going about its “indispensable nation” business. It had helpfully encouraged another “flowering of democracy” and to that end it had,
“……brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.”
Brokered a deal my eye!
This was a blatant and inexcusable breach of so-called “international law” because it served the will-to-power objectives of the Washington neocons and kept the now largely obsolete US foreign policy apparatus in the hegemony game – to say nothing of recruiting a new customer for arms sales.
Never mind that Washington’s massive political and financial support for the Maidan uprising on the streets of Kiev, and then nearly instantaneous recognition of the resulting putsch as the official government of the Ukraine, was a frontal assault on the nation’s sovereignty.
The late and detestable Senator John McCain even went to Kiev to show solidarity with the Euromaidan activists. McCain dined with opposition leaders, including members of the ultra-right‐wing Svoboda Party and later appeared on stage in Maidan Square during a mass rally.
There he stood shoulder to shoulder with Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok, who made no secret of his pro-Nazi convictions.
But McCain’s actions were a model of diplomatic restraint compared to the conduct of Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, who, by your way, was soon back in the same position in the Biden Administration, conducting the same pro-war neocon policies.
As Ukraine’s political crisis deepened, Nuland and her subordinates became more brazen in favoring the anti‐Yanukovych demonstrators. Nuland noted in a speech to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation in December 2013, that she had traveled to Ukraine three times in the weeks following the start of the demonstrations. Visiting the Maidan on December 5, she famously handed out cookies to demonstrators and expressed support for their cause.
Washington’s conduct not only constituted meddling, but it also bordered on puppeteering. At one point, US Ambassador Pyatt mentioned the complex dynamic among the three principal ultra-nationalist opposition leaders, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Oleh Tyahnybok, and Vitali Klitschko
Both Pyatt and Nuland wanted to keep Tyahnybok and Klitschko out of an interim government. In the former case, they worried about his extremist neo-Nazi ties; in the latter, they appeared to want him to wait and make a bid for office on a longer‐term basis (This former boxing champion became the current pugnacious mayor of Kiev).
Nuland thus famously stated that,
“I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary.” She added that what Yatseniuk needed “is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside.”
The two diplomats were also prepared to escalate the already extensive U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s political turbulence by bringing in the Big Guy.
Pyatt stated bluntly that,
“…..we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing [the political transition].”
Nuland clearly had Vice President Joe Biden in mind for that role. Noting that the vice president’s national security adviser was in direct contact with her, Nuland related that she told him,
“…probably tomorrow for an atta‐boy and to get the details to stick. So Biden’s willing.”
That is to say, Victoria Nuland didn’t merely tell some undercover operatives to buy ads on Ukrainian social media, as Russia was accused of doing during the 2016 US election. To the contrary, she actually picked Yanukovych’s successor and the entire cabinet!
And we know this from a hacked phone call between Nuland and the US ambassador in Kiev. In discussing who should lead the Washington-installed government, Nuland made clear who the next prime minister would be and who he should be talking to for advice.
Nuland: I think Yats (Arseniy Yatseniuk) is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. … what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know.
As it turned out, the putsch leaders followed Nuland’s advice to the letter, installing “Yats” as the new prime minister. But it also filled four cabinet posts out of eleven with rabid anti-Russian neo-Nazis.
Indeed, at the heart of the putsch were Ukrainian organizations called Svoboda (national socialist party of Ukraine) and Right Sector.Their national hero was one Stepan Bandera – a collaborator with Hitler who led the liquidation of thousands of Poles, Jews and other minorities as the Nazi Wehrmacht, as previously mentioned, made it way through Ukraine toward Stalingrad in the early 1940s.
In fact, another founder and leader of Svoboda, Andriy Parubiy, was given a portfolio which included the Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces, Law Enforcement, National Security and Intelligence. That the Kremlin was alarmed by these developments and that the Russian-speaking populations of Crimea and the Donbas (the blue areas on the electoral map above) feared an ethnic cleansing led by the new Ukrainian nationalist government in Kiev is hardly surprising.
Indeed, the first legislative act of the new government was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 which made Russian an official language. As one commentator noted, it was a bit as if putschists decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages in Switzerland.
The Russian language ban caused a storm in the Russian-speaking population. This resulted in fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which began in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and some notorious massacres (those in Odessa and Mariupol were the most odious).
By the end of summer 2014, Crimea had return to Mother Russia after an overwhelming plebiscite and the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk became the object of a vicious civil war conducted by Kiev.
As we have amplified elsewhere, Sevastopol in Crimea has been the homeport of the Russian Naval Fleet under czars and commissars alike. After 171 years as an integral part of the Russian Motherland, it only technically became part of Ukraine during a Khrushchev inspired shuffle in 1954.
The fact is, only 10% of the Crimean population is Ukrainian speaking, and it was the coup on the streets of Kiev by extremist anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalists and proto-fascists that caused the Russian speakers in Crimea to panic and Moscow to become alarmed about the status of its historic naval base, for which it still had a lease running to the 2040s.
Thus, during a referendum in March 2014 83% of eligible Crimeans turned out to vote and 97% of those approved cancelling the 1954 edict of the Soviet Presidium that gifted Russian-Crimea to Ukraine. There is absolutely no evidence that the 80% of Crimeans who thus voted to sever their historically short-lived affiliation with Ukraine were threatened or coerced by Moscow.
Indeed, what they actually feared were the edicts against Russian language and culture coming out of Kiev. And exactly the same thing was true of the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking populations of the Donbas.
So in the context of a relentless and pointless NATO expansion to the very borders of the shrunken Russian state, Washington did not merely sponsor and fund the overthrow of Ukraine’s constitutionally elected government in February 2014. But once it had unleashed a devastating civil war, it also relentlessly blocked for eight years running the obvious alternative to the bloodshed that had claimed 14,000 civilian and military casualties, even before the current hot war commenced.
To wit, Ukraine could have been partitioned with autonomy for the Russian-speaking Donbas provinces – or even accession to the Russian state from which these communities had essentially originated.
So the appalling truth of the matter is this: Adding insult to injury after its blatantly foolish and reckless coup in February 2014, Washington now insists that the grandsons and granddaughters of Stalin’s industrial army in the Donbas are to be ruled by the grandsons and granddaughters of Hitler’s collaborators in Kiev, whether they like it or not.
Yet that historic chasm is exactly where the present civil war originated.
And its also why partition of an artificial polity forced together by 20th century communist dictators is the only way out.
THE NATO FACTOR
The current CIA director, William J Burns, actually recognized the eventual crack-up of Ukraine back in 2008, when he served as U.S. ambassador to Russia. After Ukraine’s NATO aspirations were announced at that year’s Bucharest Security Conference, Burns wrote a secret cable (subsequently published by Wikileaks) entitled,
“Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines”.
The missive to Washington contained a stern warning of trouble to come:
Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.
Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
He got that right!
For more than two decades, Washington’s NATO expansion policy has been a dagger aimed at the heart of an inherently divided Ukrainian polity—a division that had been suppressed by 69 years of brutal communist rule, but which broke into the open after the Soviet Union fell in 1991.
So, as Burns predicted, in response to the 2014 putsch, Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas region rose up against the coup government in Kiev, which they denounced as an illegitimate Western puppet regime, riddled with anti-Russian Neo-Nazis.
Independence activists declared the creation of two new autonomous states, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. In turn, the new anti-Russian Ukrainian government in Kiev, with abundant Western military support and weapons, launched a brutal war against these breakaway republics–an assault that went on until the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022.
As Kiev’s assault in the Donbas unfolded, upwards of 14,000 Ukrainians were killed, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced – all before the Russian invasion commenced.
Moreover, the manner in which the two new breakaway republics armed themselves for combat against Kiev’s forces tells you all you need to know about the deep divisions in the Ukrainian polity. These were fissures which were instantly brought to the surface by the Maidan coup.
According to Jacques Baud, a NATO adviser to Ukraine during that period, the breakaway Republic fighters got their arms mainly from defecting Ukrainian units, not Russia!
Folks, when entire military units defect with their arms and fighting wherewithal, you are not dealing with minor differences of opinion among a nation’s population; it’s a sign of deep and likely irreconcilable strife. As Baud has further noted,
In 2014, I (was) at NATO, responsible for the fight against the proliferation of small arms, and we (were) trying to detect Russian arms deliveries to the rebels in order to see if Moscow (was) involved.
The rebels are armed thanks to the defections of Russian-speaking Ukrainian units which cross over to the rebel side. As the Ukrainian failures progressed, the entire tank, artillery or anti-aircraft battalions swelled the ranks of the autonomists. This is what (drove) the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Accords.
Just after signing the Minsk 1 Accords in September 2014, however, then Ukrainian President and corrupt oligarch, Petro Poroshenko, launched a vast anti-terrorist operation against the Donbas. But poorly advised by NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat at Debaltsevo, which forced them to commit to the Minsk 2 Agreements in February 2015.
As it happened, these Agreements provided for neither the separation nor the independence of the Republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine. That is, the ultimate status of the republics was to be negotiated between Kiev and the representatives of the republics, for an internal solution to the crisis of Ukraine’s split polity.
But owing to Washington’s writs this was not to be. Instead, the post-coup Kiev government waged a brutal civil war against the Donbas for eight years. This attack was resisted by Russian-speaking Ukrainians who were deathly afraid of being ruled by the neo-Nazi elements which permeated the Kiev government, military and security forces (SBU).
Indeed, even though he had run as the peace candidate, Zelensky put the kibosh on Minsk 2 soon after he was installed in office in 2019. The Minsk agreements, of course, had detailed how Kiev could reintegrate its breakaway regions by offering them a general amnesty, greater autonomy, and representation in the government.
But after having his very life threatened by the Azov militias embedded in Ukraine’s military, Zelensky and other senior officials declared that the Minsk agreements could not be implemented. Instead, they claimed that they could only proceed with their obligations under the agreements after retaking control of the rebel-held areas.
Needless to say, as far as the breakaway republics were concerned, disarmament first and negotiations later was an absurd non-starter. In fact, after the fall of 2019, the Zelensky government made a bee line toward severe intensification of the raging civil war,
To that end, it caused ascension to NATO to be added to its constitution, even as Zelensky issued at executive order vowing to recover Crimea. Yet as we have frequently explained that territory and the site of Russia’s most strategic naval base had never been part of Ukraine until 1954 when Khrushchev gifted it to the brutal communist rulers in Kiev for their help in securing the succession after Stalin’s death.
Moreover, once Zelensky intensified the civil war the idea that Ukraine had anything to do with a functioning democracy lost all meaning. Zelensky’s government soon arrested the leading opposition politicians, shut-down all opposition media by combing multiple TV outlets into a single government propaganda network and, as we saw earlier, initially even outlawed the use of the Russian language.
So long before Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, a bloody civil war raged in the unnatural polity called Ukraine. The latter was inherently not built to last given its deep ethnic divisions and especially the legacy of the aforementioned bloody history during WWII, when the country was bitterly divided between populations loyal to Hitler’s Wehrmacht versus those aligned with Stalin’s Red Army. Like after the American civil war, the animosity lasted for decades.
So again, as Jacques Baud noted, this was a civil war: There were never major Russian troops in the Donbass before February 24, 2022. Even the US intelligence map published by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021 does not show Russian troops in the Donbass.
Indeed, as far back as October 2015, Vasyl Hrytsak, director of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), confessed that only 56 Russian fighters had been observed in the Donbass. It was hardly even comparable to that of the Swiss going to fight in Bosnia during the weekends, in the 1990s, or the French mercenaries who are going to fight in Ukraine today.
The Ukrainian army was then in a deplorable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor, Antoly Matios, said that Ukraine had lost 2,700 men in the Donbass but not from the much larger combat losses. Instead, he referenced losses including 891 from disease, 318 from traffic accidents, 177 from other accidents, 175 from poisoning (alcohol, drugs), 172 from careless handling of weapons, 101 from breaches of safety rules, 228 from murder and 615 from suicide!
In fact, like everything else in Ukraine, the Army has been severely undermined by the corruption of its cadres. According to a UK Home Office report, when reservists were called up in March-April 2014, 70% did not show up for the first session, 80% for the second, 90% for the third and 95% for the fourth.
Thus, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. They were essentially made up of foreign mercenaries. As of 2020, they constituted around 40% of Ukraine’s forces and numbered around 102,000 men according to a in-depth Reuters investigation. That is to say, much of what constituted the Ukrainian military force on the eve of the Russian invasions was armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France.
These militias, stemming from the far-right groups that led the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, are made up of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of that of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division. The latter is the object of nationalist veneration in Ukraine for having liberated Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943.
None of this is a secret, even if it has been banned from the 24/7 news narrative. So the West supports and continues to arm militias that have been guilty of widespread crimes against the civilian populations of the Donbas since 2014, including rape, torture and massacres.
Moreover, the integration of these paramilitary forces into the National Guard was not at all accompanied by a “denazification”, as is frequently claimed. Among the many examples, that of the insignia of the Azov Regiment is edifying:
Finally, on the eve of the invasion the Kiev government moved to drastically intensify the civil war and its brutal campaign against the breakaway republics. Beginning on February 16th – a week before the invasion – Ukrainian artillery shelling of the civilian populations of the Donbass increased dramatically, as shown by the daily reports of OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) observers.
Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacted or intervened even verbally.
At the same time, there were also reports of acts of sabotage in the Donbass. On January 18, Donbass fighters intercept saboteurs equipped with Western equipment and speaking Polish seeking to create chemical incidents in Gorlivka.
The Ukrainian artillery bombardments on the populations of Donbass continued to intensify as shown below – so on February 23, the two Republics requested military aid from Russia. And on the 24th, Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter which provides for mutual military assistance within the framework of a defensive alliance.
At that point, the Ukrainian civil war became international, and the artificial nation that was not “Built to Last” was ushered into its death throes
Indeed, the real truth of the matter is that Imperial Washington is now reaping the whirlwind it sowed over decades by massive interference in the internal politics and governance process of countries all over the world – of which the vignette above about the Ukrainian coup and its bloody aftermath is only the latest flock of chickens to come home to roost.
Contrary to the bombast, jingoism, and shrill moralizing flowing from Washington and the mainstream media, America had absolutely no national security interest – even to this day – in the spat between Putin and the coup that unconstitutionally took over Kiev in February 2014. That changed everything and knocked the props out from under Washington’s current sanctimonious attacks on Putin for finally resorting to its own game.
As we said, Ukraine was “Not Built to Last”. Yet notwithstanding all of these damning realities, Zelensky continues to peevishly and arrogantly demand that Washington and the west stand-up an on-ramp to WWIII (e.g. a No-Fly Zone) in order to defend every inch of this artifact of recent history called Ukraine.
After all, if according to the horse’s mouth itself there would have been no war had Ukraine been willing to give up the historic Russian territories of Crimea and the Donbas in the first place, then why isn’t Washington making a bee line toward the negotiating table to offer just that?
If the truth be told, of course, it is not interested in ending the Ukraine War or saving a nation which cannot and should not be saved.
To the contrary, Washington and its fawning media acolytes have become so crazed with anti-Putin hysteria that they will not be satiated until Russia itself is brought down – even if that threatens to bring down the entire dollar-based global trade and payments system on which America’s tenuous prosperity depends [end]
Der Friedensstifter 