Hugo Chávez’s Vision of a Communal Future Will Inspire Generations

Owen Schalk
Hugo Chávez in uniform, 2010. Photo courtesy Presidencia de la Nación Argentina

March 5, 2023 marks the ten-year anniversary of the death of legendary Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Only four days earlier, the Biden administration had renewed an executive order, issued by Barack Obama and continued under Donald Trump, labelling Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

While ten years without Chávez has brought innumerable challenges to Venezuela (many of which still persist) it is evident that even without the singularly charismatic persona of El Comandante at the helm, the future envisioned by the Bolivarian Revolution—one of socialism, anti-imperialism, and communal production—remains a tremendous threat to US hegemony in the hemisphere.

Revolutionary, educator, president

Hugo Chávez was a deeply impressive leader whose political adroitness, mediatic skill, and commitment to radical new visions of democracy have not been equalled in the hemisphere since he assumed the presidency in 1999. Not since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 had a Latin American head of state combined the qualities of president, revolutionary, and popular educator so seamlessly—a uniqueness that most Venezuelans admired, as evidenced by the vote shares in every presidential election he contested (he won 56 percent of votes in 1998, 60 percent in 2000, 63 percent in 2006, and 55 percent in 2012).

In his widely viewed Aló Presidente broadcasts, Chávez worked to educate the population about democracy, communes, socialism, and more. Asserting that “it is impossible to have a revolution without revolutionary theory,” Chávez inaugurated a new series in 2009 called Aló Presidente Teórico in which he hosted discussions on socialist transition, guiding the broadcasts using wide-ranging references including Simón Bolívar, Karl Marx, István Mészáros, and José Carlos Mariátegui.

Unsurprisingly, Chávez was a lightning rod for the hatred of Venezuela’s traditional ruling class. A man from a poor family and an Indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan background, his enormous popularity provoked an existential crisis of sorts in the Venezuelan oligarchy that continues to this day. They demeaned him, degraded his supporters, and fear-mongered about his supposedly dictatorial aspirations. Often their attacks were overtly racist.

In 2005, Chávez stated, “Racism is very characteristic of imperialism and capitalism. Hate against me has a lot to do with racism. Because of my big mouth and curly hair. And I’m so proud to have this mouth and this hair, because it is African.”

Officials in Washington shared the Venezuelan opposition’s hatred for Chávez. Their anti-socialist alliance culminated in a failed coup d’état by the Venezuelan oligarchy in April 2002. The coup was supported by the George W. Bush administration.

During their two days in power, the right-wing opposition acted with the flagrant aversion to democracy of which they constantly accused Chávez, dissolving the National Assembly and Supreme Court, dismissing Chávez appointees, suspending all governors and mayors elected during Chávez’s time in power, and voiding the 1999 constitution, which was approved by popular referendum with 72 percent support.

Fortunately for Venezuelan democracy, supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution took to the streets in such force that the military returned Chávez to the presidency. Population mobilization would also be key in opposing the 2002-2003 opposition oil lockout and the failed 2004 recall referendum against Chávez.

The Bolivarian Revolution endures

With Chávez gone and a terrible economic crisis roiling Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution under Nicolás Maduro continued to triumph in most major elections, with Maduro winning the presidential vote in 2013 and 2018, despite the opposition’s victory in 2015 parliamentary elections.

The Bolivarian Revolution continued to triumph even as left-wing political projects across Latin America fell one by one to a resurgent right. Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was removed in a military coup backed by the US and Canada in 2009. Embittered elites in Paraguay used a conflict over peasant land rights to remove President Fernando Lugo in 2012. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff fell to a US-backed lawfare campaign in 2016. The Bolivian right-wing led a coup against Evo Morales after he won the 2019 presidential election, leading to one year of dictatorial right-wing rule characterized by massacres of pro-Evo protestors and the persecution of MAS supporters.

Despite some significant gains including the overturning of Bolivia’s right-wing coup in 2020 and the victory of Lula da Silva in Brazil’s 2022 election, the Latin American left remains on its back foot. In Argentina, the popular left-leaning politician Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has faced a lawfare campaign aimed at preventing her from running for president, an election she would likely win. Former Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa remains locked out of his country’s politics by the governing conservatives (although local elections bode well for the future prospects of the left in Ecuador). And the elected president of Peru, the socialist-oriented Pedro Castillo, was recently deposed by congress in what most Peruvians recognize as a coup.

But through all this regional turbulence, plus the growing strength of opposition attacks during Maduro’s tenure, the Bolivarian Revolution persists in Venezuela. Why? Venezuelan journalist Clodovaldo Hernández identifies several important reasons:

1. By prioritizing the passage of a new, participatory constitution in 1999, Chávez was quickly able to sideline the Venezuelan right and place more power in the hands of the population, “allow[ing] the Bolivarian Revolution to armour itself against the typical conspiracies of the recently displaced elites.”
2. The revolution’s progressive policies, including in the areas of literacy, housing, health care, and land reform, have led to a large degree of popular support, even in the midst of economic crisis. “Without this popular support,” Hernández writes, “the imperialist forces and the domestic right wing would have long ago achieved their goal of destroying the Venezuelan revolutionary process.”
3. The strength of Chávez’s leadership and his national prestige as an individual.
4. Chávez reworked Venezuela’s military doctrine and reformed the armed forces to reduce the influence of the United States through its training facilities like the notorious School of the Americas. This “civic-military alliance” foreclosed the possibility of another coup.
5. The revolution recognized the importance of the domestic media war and encouraged the organization of popular media as a way to break the information stranglehold of large news companies, which were uniformly against Chávez.
6. Despite having “almost unanimous support from the conglomerate of global capitalism,” the Venezuelan opposition remains a clumsy and schismatic coalition that has proven unable to fundamentally challenge the revolution.

A billboard of Hugo Chávez’s eyes and signature in Guarenas, Venezuela. Photo by Wilfredor.

“Not a one-man show”

When examining the successes of the Bolivarian Revolution, and potential explanations for its endurance, one topic we must take seriously is Chávez’s commitment to a communal future. The Venezuelan communes, often ignored in North American media coverage, represent the backbone of the revolutionary process and one of the most militant, organized, and politically conscious socialist assemblages in the Western Hemisphere.

Chávez himself described communes as “the space from which we give birth to socialism” and the cellular tissue of the Bolivarian Revolution. However, the movement toward local autonomy and worker self-management had been developing for decades before Chávez.

Since at least the 1980s, the traditional political parties in Venezuela had been discredited, and when the state dispatched security forces to massacre hundreds (possibly thousands) of protestors during the Caracazo, the liberal model of representative democracy revealed itself as the velvet glove around the iron fist of capitalism.

The “rejection of the logic of representation,” as Dario Azzellini calls it in Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below, caused the goals of the popular movements to crystallize into “self-determination, self-management, and constituent power,” as well as “direct democracy, expressed in the [1999] Constitution as ‘participatory and protagonistic democracy.’” By aligning himself with these pre-existing forces and empowering them through his progressive reforms, Chávez was able to earn the revolution a key ally against the opposition’s assaults.

Due to the often fraught alliance between the state and these grassroots organizations, the Bolivarian Revolution has never been a process dictated by centralized authority. Azzellini characterizes the socialist transition in Venezuela as one of “two-track construction”:

We are speaking of a new way, unheard of in previous struggles and strategies for social transformation, that combines concepts ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ to pursue an anti-imperialist politics of national sovereignty. In this process, the state and its institutions are strengthened, and follow a strategy of active regulation of economic process in a mixed (capitalist) economy. On the other hand, according to the declared normative orientation, movements must assume the central role in the process of change and must have autonomy.

Azzellini adds that the persistence of the Bolivarian Revolution since 2013 proves that it is “a solid transformation project and not a one-man show based on populism.” Rather, it embodies a dynamic alliance (and occasional opposition) between multiple forces, the primary ones being the Chavistas in the state and the comuneros outside of it.

Towards a communal state

Of central importance to the ongoing revolutionary process is the idea of the communal state. The Organic Law of Communes, passed by the National Assembly in 2006, defines the communal state as a “form of social political organization… in which power is exercised directly by the pueblo, by means of communal self-governments with an economic model of social property and endogenous and sustainable development.” The commune is defined as “the basic structural cell of the communal state.”

The theorization of a communal state has a long history in Venezuela. As George Ciccariello-Maher points out in Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela:

It was no coincidence that those who fought against colonial rule and slavery from the very beginning often did so by building communal societies beyond Spanish control, from indigenous communities to the cumbe communities founded by runaway slaves. It is likewise no coincidence that those who today draw upon their inspiration continue to pioneer new forms of communal living and collective production that are compatible with older traditions, showing the ways that this new communal culture—by emphasizing local sustainability over consumerism—is also deeply anticolonial.

When Chávez described the importance of communes in 2007, one of the influences he borrowed from was Simón Rodríguez, an influential teacher of national hero Simón Bolívar. Rodríguez, who lived from 1769 to 1854, “urged the destruction of the existing religious and military powers dominating Venezuela” and the creation of a “toparchy,” or a form of “decentralized local rule” comprised of “small, self-governing units.”

Reinaldo Iturizza, the former Minister of Communes and a strong champion of the communal state, has described Venezuela’s transition to socialism as “toparchic,” indicating the influence of Rodríguez’s thought on communal politics today.

Kléber Ramírez was another influence on the notion of the communal state. Ramírez worked with Chávez during the planning of the failed 1992 coup against neoliberal President Carlos Andrés Pérez. His role was to draft the political documents that would form the basis of the new government if the coup succeeded. In this position, he emphasized the importance of constructing a “commoner state” in Venezuela, which would mean a “broadening of democracy in which the communities will assume the fundamental powers of the state.”

Ramírez described the commoner state as a “government of popular insurgency,” stressing the dialectical relationship between the state and the movements, between those “above” and those “below,” in transforming bourgeois rule into the rule of communality. Needless to say, Ramírez’s idea of the commoner state bears a striking resemblance to the two-track character of the communal state put forward by the Chávez government from 2006 onward.

Chávez lives

As Vijay Prashad wrote in a recent Tricontinental Institute newsletter, Chávez is still very present in Venezuela. His images are ubiquitous in barrios, poor neighbourhoods, and the communes that were the central tenet of his political philosophy.

“[T]he legacy of Chávez was not in his own life,” writes Prashad, “but in the difficult work of building socialism.”

While Chávez’s idea of the communal state was deeply rooted in Venezuelan history, it is certainly a theory that is applicable to life elsewhere. In North America, examples of communal living abound in the cultures of Indigenous peoples, the Métis, and some settler groups.

For many, modern life in Canada and the US may feel socially atomized, thoughtlessly technologized, and politically hopeless. But these ideas of communality can be reclaimed, expanded, knitted into global struggles. In this process, the Venezuelan vision of a communal future is one of many guides.

Even though Hugo Chávez is in his grave, he remains a revolutionary thinker and a popular educator. In his speeches, his writings, and his theories of popular empowerment, Chávez lives.

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Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. He is primarily interested in applying theories of imperialism, neocolonialism, and underdevelopment to global capitalism and Canada’s role therein. Visit his website at http://www.owenschalk.com.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/03/05/hugo-chavezs-vision-of-a-communal-future-will-inspire-generations/

Propagande de Guerre — Etat des lieux — STRATPOL

STRATPOL
Propagande de Guerre — Etat des lieux — STRATPOL
On entend beaucoup parler de la propagande russe dans les médias occidentaux, mais jamais de la propagande du camp otano-ukrainien.

Propagande de Guerre – Etat des lieux

Freie Marschrouten

Die EU setzt den Ausbau ihrer Verkehrsinfrastruktur für umfangreiche Truppenbewegungen in Richtung Osteuropa und Ukraine fort und vermeldet erste Erfolge.

BRÜSSEL/BERLIN (Eigener Bericht) – Die EU treibt den Ausbau ihrer Verkehrswege in Richtung Osten für militärische Zwecke voran und vermeldet inzwischen greifbare Erfolge. Demnach haben erste Maßnahmen, die unter dem Schlagwort „militärische Mobilität“ („military mobility“) umgesetzt wurden, bereits zu Erleichterungen beim Transport von Kriegsgerät aller Art aus den Mitgliedstaaten von EU und NATO in die Ukraine geführt. Weitere Schritte werden gegenwärtig umgesetzt oder sind geplant, so zum Beispiel der Bau einer Brücke aus Rumänien über den Fluss Prut nach Moldawien, das fürchtet, in den Krieg gezogen zu werden. Vor allem geht es darum, potenzielle „militärische Hauptrouten“ auch militärisch nutzbar zu machen – etwa Straßen und Brücken so umzubauen, dass sie unter der Last überaus schwerer westlicher Kampfpanzer nicht zusammenbrechen. Der Ausbau der militärischen Mobilität wird in enger Abstimmung mit Soldaten der NATO-Staaten geplant, deren Erfahrungen aus Manövern in Ost- und Südosteuropa genutzt werden, um die Verkehrswege für die Streitkräfte zu optimieren. An einschlägigen Maßnahmen beteiligt ist unter anderem die Deutsche Bahn AG.

„Bewegungen großer Kräfte“

Während die ersten deutschen Panzer im Ukraine-Krieg angekommen sind, treibt die EU die Militarisierung ihrer Transportnetze in Richtung Osteuropa weiter voran. Unter dem Schlagwort „militärische Mobilität“ finanziert und koordiniert Brüssel den Ausbau der transeuropäischen Verlegefähigkeit von Streitkräften und Kriegsgerät.[1] Ziel ist es, in enger Abstimmung mit der NATO physische und bürokratische Hürden auf grenzüberschreitenden Routen abzubauen. Dazu sollen „Kapazitäten der Verkehrsinfrastruktur im Hinblick auf Gewicht, Größe und Umfang militärischer Bewegungen“ verbessert, eine „Straffung und Harmonisierung komplexer, langwieriger und voneinander abweichender nationaler Vorschriften und Verfahren fortgesetzt“ und der „Schutz des Verkehrssektors vor Cyberangriffen und anderen hybriden Bedrohungen“ verbessert werden.[2] Ziel der Maßnahmen ist es, „rasche, effiziente und ungehinderte Bewegungen potenziell großer Kräfte“ zu ermöglichen, insbesondere auch im Rahmen der NATO. Russlands Einmarsch in die Ukraine habe gezeigt, heißt es, „wie wichtig eine möglichst schnelle und reibungslose Mobilität der militärischen Hilfe ist“.

Erste Erfolge

Tatsächlich profitieren die europäischen Staaten bei ihren Waffenlieferungen an die ukrainischen Streitkräfte nach Angaben aus Brüssel schon jetzt von Fortschritten, die sie in den vergangenen Jahren im Bereich „militärische Mobilität“ erzielt haben. Allerdings behinderten unterschiedliche Eisenbahn-Spurbreiten „zwischen der Ukraine und den EU-Mitgliedstaaten sowie innerhalb der Europäischen Union“ die Militärtransporte in den Krieg noch immer, heißt es.[3] Mit ihrem Aktionsplan Militärische Mobilität 2.0 will die EU nun „das nächste Kapitel“ in Sachen Verlegegeschwindigkeit aufschlagen.

Wege in den Krieg

Ihr erstes Maßnahmenpaket – den Aktionsplan Militärische Mobilität – hatte die EU bereits 2018 beschlossen. Vorangegangen waren erhöhte Truppenbewegungen des NATO-Blocks innerhalb Osteuropas in der Krise, die im Anschluss an den prowestlichen Umsturz in der Ukraine 2014 sowie an die faktische Abspaltung der Krim und von Teilen des Donbass eskaliert war. Seitdem gehen erhöhte militärische Aktivitäten und der Ausbau der militärischen Mobilität in und nach Osteuropa Hand in Hand. Während der Manöver machen die Soldaten der NATO- und EU-Staaten sich mit den Marschrouten vertraut und testen ihre schnelle Passierbarkeit. Die in den Manövern gesammelten Erfahrungen fließen dann in die Planung der Maßnahmen zur Verbesserung der militärischen Mobilität ein. Diese wiederum ermöglicht immer schnellere und immer größere transatlantische und transeuropäische Truppenverlegungen in Richtung Osten. Dadurch wurde der erste gewaltige Aufmarsch des NATO-Blocks seit dem Ende des Kalten Krieges möglich: Während des Manövers Defender Europe 2020 verlegten rund 20.000 US-Soldaten auf zwölf unterschiedlichen Routen über den Atlantik und quer durch Europa in Richtung russische Grenze und Ukraine; insgesamt waren rund 37.000 Soldaten beteiligt.

„Connecting Europe“

Im Rahmen ihres Programms zum Ausbau der militärischen Mobilität hat die EU zunächst die Anforderungen an die Infrastruktur festgelegt, die sie seitdem entlang „militärischer Hauptrouten“ militärisch nutzbar macht. Für Projekte mit „Doppelnutzung“ (zivil und militärisch) stehen für den Zeitraum 2021 bis 2027 unter dem Schlagwort „Connecting Europe“ 1,69 Milliarden Euro bereit. Mittlerweile sei das Zusammenwirken des militärischen und des zivilen Netzes bereits verbessert worden, heißt es. Inzwischen gibt es einen offiziellen Vorschlag für eine Überarbeitung der Verordnung über die Transeuropäischen Verkehrsnetze (TEN-V), mit der die Anforderungen für die militärische Mobilität in die Planung der bis jetzt formal rein zivilen europäischen Infrastruktur einfließen sollen. Darüber hinaus wurden regulatorische Hemmnisse für Militärbewegungen an Grenzübergängen abgebaut, beispielsweise im Zoll und bei Gefahrguttransporten. 24 EU-Staaten und Norwegen setzen diese Anstrengungen gegenwärtig in Form des Projekts „Optimierung der Verfahren für die Genehmigung grenzüberschreitender Bewegungen in Europa“ fort.

PESCO

Auch im Rahmen der Ständigen Strukturierten Zusammenarbeit (PESCO) treibt die EU die Militarisierung ihrer Infrastruktur voran, vor allem in Teilprojekten mit den Bezeichnungen Militärische Mobilität und Logistik-Drehkreuze. In diesem Rahmen werden nationale Maßnahmen auch über den Aktionsplan hinaus koordiniert und bereits bestehende nationale Infrastruktur und logistische Kapazitäten auf EU-Ebene militärisch nutzbar gemacht. All diese Maßnahmen laufen dabei unter der Maßgabe, sich eng mit der NATO abzustimmen. Folgerichtig sind auch die USA, Kanada und Norwegen in die PESCO-Projekte in Sachen militärische Mobilität eingegliedert.

Die Deutsche Bahn

Ein deutsches Unternehmen, das mit mehreren Initiativen am Ausbau der militärischen Mobilität beteiligt ist, ist die Deutsche Bahn AG. 2019 schlossen Bahn und Bundeswehr einen Vertrag in dreistelliger Millionenhöhe, der den deutschen Streitkräften bei Bedarf den Zugriff auf Lokomotiven und Wagons sowie auf das Schienennetz für transnationale Truppenverlegungen in Richtung Osten sichert.[4] Die Deutsche Bahn unterstützt zudem ein Projekt des Verteidigungsministeriums, das Bundeswehrsoldaten in Uniform seit 2020 kostenlose Zugfahrten ermöglicht.[5] Für das Großmanöver Defender Europe stellte Berlin unter anderem auch das zivile Schienennetz zur Verfügung und zertifizierte nebenbei Bundeswehreinheiten und -fahrzeuge für Transport von US-Großgerät.[6] Außerdem ist die Deutsche Bahn beteiligt an dem „military mobility“-Projekt des Washingtoner Center for European Policy Analysis.[7] Zurzeit werden zur Verbesserung der militärischen Mobiltät in Deutschland unter anderem sechs Eisenbahnbrücken erneuert.[8]

Räder rollen für den Sieg

Es ist nicht das erste Mal, dass die deutsche Bahn an der Erschließung militärischer Marschrouten nach und durch Osteuropa beteiligt ist. Für den deutschen Überfall auf Polen am 1. September 1939 stellte die Bahn 180.000 Wagons zur Verfügung und war insbesondere im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion für Truppen- und Materialtransporte an die Front verantwortlich. Auch in den besetzten Gebieten Europas griff das faschistische Deutschland zur Gewährleistung der militärischen Mobilität auf die Bahn zurück: Sie sollte dort die notwendige Infrastruktur aufbauen. Bereits damals waren Unterschiede in den Spurbreiten der west- und der osteuropäischen Schienensysteme eine Hürde auf dem Weg an die Front.[9]

[1] Ein Strategischer Kompass für Sicherheit und Verteidigung – Für eine Europäische Union, die ihre Bürgerinnen und Bürger, Werte und Interessen schützt und zu Weltfrieden und internationaler Sicherheit beiträgt. Rat der EU, Pressemitteilung vom 21. März 2022.

[2], [3] Action Plan on Military Mobility 2.0. defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu 10.11.2022.

Aktionsplan zur militärischen Mobilität 2.0 vom 10.11.2022

[4] Claudia Haydt: Bahn frei für die Bundeswehr. imi-online.de 07.01.2019.

[5] Großer Erfolg: Kostenloses Bahnfahren in Uniform. bmvg.de 07.10.2020

[6] Defender 20: Logistiker bereiten Transporte vor. bundeswehr.de 27.11.2019.

[7] S. dazu Das Military Mobility Project.

[8] Militärische Infrastruktur der EU. tagesspiegel.de 12.01.2023.

[9] «Räder müssen rollen für den Sieg» – Die Bahn im Nationalsozialismus und im Zweiten Weltkrieg. kuwi.europa-uni.de.

https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/9186

How Could Western Intelligence Have Got It Wrong, Again? They Didn’t. They Had Other Purposes

Alastair Crooke

The West now faces the task of de-fusing the landmine of their own electorate’s conviction of a Ukraine ‘win’, and of Russian humiliation.

Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA analyst, writes “I no longer hold clearances and have not had access to the classified intelligence assessments. However, I have heard that the finished intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers continues to declare that Russia is on the ropes – and their economy is crumbling. Also, analysts insist that the Ukrainians are beating the Russians”.

Johnson responds that – lacking valid human sources – “western agencies are almost wholly dependent today on ‘liaison reporting’” (i.e., from ‘friendly’ foreign intelligence services), without doing ‘due diligence’ by cross-checking discrepancies with other reporting.

In practice, this largely means western reporting simply replicates Kiev’s PR line. But there does occur a huge problem when marrying Kiev’s output (as Johnson says) to UK reports – for ‘corroboration’.

The reality is UK reporting itself is also based on what Ukraine is saying. This is known as false collateral – i.e., when that which is used for corroboration and validation actually derives from the same single source. It becomes – deliberately – a propaganda multiplier.

In plain words however, all these points are ‘red herrings’. Bluntly, so-called western ‘Intelligence’ is no longer the sincere attempt to understand a complex reality, but rather, it has become the tool to falsify a nuanced reality in order to attempt to manipulate the Russian psyche towards a collective defeatism (in respect not just to the Ukraine, but to the idea that Russia should remain as a sovereign whole).

And – to the extent that ‘lies’ are fabricated to accustom the Russian public to inevitable defeat – the obverse edge clearly is intended to train the western public towards the ‘groupthink’ that victory is inevitable. And that Russia is an ‘unreformed evil Empire’ which threatens all Europe.

This is no accident. It is highly purposeful. It is behavioural psychology at work. The ‘head-spinning’ disorientation created throughout the Covid pandemic; the constant rain of ‘data-driven’ model analysis, the labelling of anything critical of the ‘uniform messaging’ as anti-social disinformation – enabled western governments to persuade their citizens that ‘lockdown’ was the only rational answer to the virus. It was not true (as we now know), but the ‘pilot’ behavioural nudge-psychology trial worked better – better even than its own architects had imagined.

Professor of Clinical Psychology, Mattias Desmet, has explained that mass disorientation does not form in a vacuum. It arises, throughout history, from a collective psychosis that has followed a predictable script:

Just as with lockdown, governments have used behavioural psychology to instil fear and isolation to mass large groups of people into herds, where toxic sneering at any contrariness cold-shoulders all critical thinking or analysis. It is more comfortable being inside the herd, than out.

The dominant characteristic here is remaining loyal to the group – even when the policy is working badly and its consequences disturb the conscience of members. Loyalty to the group becomes the highest form of morality. That loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues, questioning weak arguments, or calling a halt to wishful thinking.

The ‘Groupthink’ allows some self-imagined reality to detach; to drift further and further from any connection to reality, and then to transit into delusion – always drawing on like-minded peer cheerleaders for its validation and extended radicalisation.

So, it’s ‘goodbye’ to traditional Intelligence! And ‘welcome’ to western Intelligence 101: Geo-Politics no longer revolves around a grasp on Reality. It is about the installation of ideological pseudo-realism – which is the universal installation of a singular groupthink, such that everyone lives passively by it, until it is far too late to change course.

Superficially, this may seem clever new psyops – even ‘cool’. It is not. It is dangerous. By deliberately working on deeply ingrained fears and trauma (i.e. the Great Patriotic War for Russians (WW2)), it awakens a type of multi-generational existential plight within the collective unconscious – that of total annihilation – which is a danger that America has never faced, and towards which there is zero American empathetic understanding.

Perhaps, by resurrecting long, collective memories of plague in European countries (such as Italy) western governments have found that they were able to mobilise their citizens around a policy of coercion, that otherwise ran wholly against their own interests. But nations have their own distinct myths and civilisational mores.

If that were the purpose (to acclimatise Russians to defeat and ultimate Balkanisation), Western propaganda has not only failed, but it has achieved the converse. Russians have coalesced closely together against an existential western threat – and are prepared to ‘go to the wall’, if necessary, in defeating it. (Let those implications sink in.)

On the other hand, falsely promoting a picture of inevitable success for the West inevitably has raised expectations of a political outcome that is not only not feasible, but which recedes further into the far horizon, as these fantastical claims of Russian setbacks persuade European leaders that Russia can accept an outcome in line with their constructed false reality.

Another ‘own goal’: The West now faces the task of de-fusing the landmine of their own electorate’s conviction of a Ukraine ‘win’, and of Russian humiliation and decomposition. There will be anger and further distrust for the Élites in the West to follow. Existential risk ensues when people believe nothing the élites say.

Plainly put, this resort to clever ‘nudge theories’ has succeeded only in toxifying the prospect for political discourse. Neither the U.S. nor Russia can now move directly to pure political discourse:

Firstly, the parties inevitably must come to some tacit psychological assimilation of two quite dis-connected realities, now hyped into palpable, vital beings through these psychological ‘Intelligence’ techniques. There will be no acceptance by either side of the validity or moral rightness of the Other Reality’s, yet its emotive contents must be acknowledged psychically – together with the traumas underlying them – if politics is to be unlocked.

In short, this western exaggerated psyops perversely is likely to lengthen the war until facts-on-the ground finally grind the contrasting expectations closer to what may be the ‘new possible’. Ultimately, when perceived realities cannot be ‘matched’ and nuanced, war rubs one or the other into more emollient form.

The degeneracy in western intelligence did not start with the recent collective ‘excitement’ at the possibilities of ‘nudge-psychology’. The first steps in this direction began with a shift in ethos reaching back to the Clinton/Thatcher era in which the intelligence services were ‘neo-liberalised’.

No longer was the role of ‘devil’s advocate’ – of bringing ‘bad news’ (i.e. hard-edged Realism) to the relevant political leadership valued; instead what was inserted was a radical shift towards ‘Business School’ practice of services being tasked with ‘adding value’ to existing government policies, and (even) of creating ‘a market’ system in Intelligence!

The politician-managers demanded ‘good news’. And to make ‘it stick’, funding was tied to the ‘value added’ – with administrators skilled at managing bureaucracy moved into leadership jobs. It marked the end to classical Intelligence – which always was an art, rather than science.

In short, it was the outset to fixing the intelligence around policies (to add value), rather than the traditional function of shaping policies to sound analysis.

In the U.S., the politicisation of intelligence reached its apex with Dick Cheney’s initiation of a Team ‘B’ intelligence unit reporting personally to him. It was intended to furnish the anti-intelligence to combat the intelligence service output. Of course, the Team ‘B’ initiative shook confidence amongst the analysts, and by-passed the work of the traditional cadre – just as Cheney had intended. (He had a war (the Iraq war) to justify).

But there were separately other structural shifts. Firstly, by 2000, woke narcissism had begun to eclipse strategic thought –creating its own novel groupthink. The West just could not shake off the sense of itself at the centre of the Universe (albeit no longer in a racial sense, but via its awakening to ‘victim politics’ – requiring endless redress and reparations – and such woke values serendipitously seemed to anoint the West with a renewed global ‘moral primacy’).

In a parallel shift, U.S. neo-cons piggy-backed on this new woke universalism to cement the meme of ‘Empire matters primordially’. The unspoken corollary to this, of course, is that original values of the American Republic or of Europe, cannot be re-conceived and brought forward into the present, as long as ‘liberal’ Empire groupthink configures them as a threat to western security. This conundrum and struggle lies at the heart of U.S. politics today.

Yet the question remains just how can the intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers insist that Russia is imploding economically, and that Ukraine is winning – against what can be easily observed facts on the ground?.

Well, no problem; Washington thinks-tanks have big, big finance from the Military Industrial World, with the preponderance of these funds going to the neo-cons – and their insistence that Russia is a small ‘gas-station’ posing as a state, and not a power to be taken seriously.

Neo-con claws tear at anyone gain-saying their ‘line’ – and think-tanks employ an army of ‘analysts’ to turn out ‘academic’ reports suggesting that Russia’s industry – to the extent it exists at all – is imploding. Since last March, western military and economic experts have been regularly-as-clockwork, predicting that Russia has run out of missiles, drones, tanks and artillery shells – and is expending its manpower throwing human-waves of untrained troops upon the Ukrainian siege lines.

The logic is plain, but again flawed. If a combined NATO struggles to supply artillery shells, Russia with the economy the size of a small EU state (logically) must be worse off. And if only we (the U.S.) threaten China hard enough against supplying Russia,then the latter will ultimately run out of munitions – and NATO supported Ukraine ‘will win’.

The logic then is that a war prolonged (until the money runs out) must deliver a Russia bereft of munitions, and NATO-supplied Ukraine ‘wins’.

This framing is entirely wrong because of conceptual differences: Russian history is one of Total War that is fought in a long, ‘all-out’, uncompromising engagement against an overwhelming peer force. But inherent to this idea, is its all-important grounding in the conviction that such wars are fought over the course of years, with their outcomes conditioned by the capacity to surge military production.

Conceptually, the U.S. shifted in the 1980s away from its post-war military-industrial paradigm, to off-shore manufacturing to Asia and to ‘just-in-time’ supply lines. Effectively, the U.S. (and the West) shifted in the opposite direction to ‘surge capacity’, whereas Russia did not: It kept alive the notion of sustainment which had contributed to saving Russia during the Great Patriotic War.

So, western intelligence services again got it wrong; they misread the reality? No, they didn’t get it ‘wrong’. Their purpose was different.

The few who got it right were mercilessly caricatured as stooges to make them seem absurd. And Intelligence 101 was re-conceived as the purposeful denialism of all off-Team thinking, whilst the majority of western citizens would live passively in the embrace the groupthink – until too late for them to awaken, and to change the dangerous course on which their societies were embarked.

Unverified Ukrainian reports (liaison reporting) served up to western leaders therefore is not a ‘glitch’ – it is a ‘feature’ of the new Intelligence 101 paradigm intended to confuse and dull its electorate.

How Could Western Intelligence Have Got It Wrong, Again? They Didn’t. They Had Other Purposes

Doit-on promouvoir l’abstinence énergétique ?

André Pellen

La société semble plus que jamais confrontée au dilemme suivant : choisir ou non de provoquer la récession économique par une décroissance énergétique volontaire.

Dans le récent article du journal Le Monde intitulé « Une relance nucléaire décidée dans le plus grand mépris démocratique », la secrétaire nationale d’un parti ayant eu la peau de Fessenheim et celle de Superphénix, avec seulement 6 à 7 % du corps électoral, déplore implicitement le bafouage de sa militante chasse gardée : la CNDP.

Madame Tondelier surestime manifestement le nombre des nostalgiques de cette mystification consultative et n’a pas encore perçu que ses compatriotes en ont majoritairement soupé de la fallacieuse démocratie dont ils n’ont pas fini d’endurer les effets délétères. Désormais, ces Français veulent être directement pris à témoins de l’appréhension par des experts reconnus de problèmes fondamentaux comme celui soulevé ci-après par Jean-Jacques Biteau¹, sans travestissement médiatique, ni intermédiaire.

La liberté relative de chaque être humain de choisir son alimentation et son énergie

Elle est toute relative, car très différente suivant les pays et les niveaux sociaux des individus.

Le problème majeur est que la planète Terre a des limites que nous, humains, cernons d’évidence de plus en plus, explorons et exploitons. Cette exploitation ne se construit d’ailleurs pas toujours dans des conditions de préservation naturelle optimales alors que celles-ci deviennent de plus en plus essentielles à nos projets pour les rendre acceptables.

Il est possible que pour peu que nous découvrions un jour sur Mars ou sur la Lune des éléments utiles à produire notre énergie, nous puissions les extraire et les importer. Ceci n’est certainement pas pour le court et le moyen terme. La fusion nucléaire viendra aussi probablement à moyen terme fournir de l’électricité et, comme la fission nucléaire, sera contrôlée et mise en œuvre par des États, à cause des forts CAPEX, sans parler de sécurité des installations.

Les limites planétaires sont des limites volumiques. Je ne parle pas de l’uranium mais d’abord des produits carbonés fossiles qui sont pour 80 % ceux de notre énergie. Ils proviennent de stocks animaux et de végétaux déposés, enfouis et fabriqués pendant des millions d’années avec des pertes considérables du début à la fin. La géologie et la durée des processus regorgent de facteurs contraires à leur préservation, ce qui rend ces hydrocarbures et à moindre titre les charbons très précieux et épuisables. Contrairement aux idées répandues, les liquides et les gaz naturels vont se raréfier à moyen terme et décliner en quantités et en volumes d’extraction. Le charbon c’est un empire de mille ans.

Des consultants comme Rystad ou WoodMackenzie commencent à en parler en citant certains types de pétroles et même tous les hydrocarbures, comme c’est le cas de l’ASPO depuis 30 ans. Les compagnies pétrolières le savent mais ne vont pas se tirer une balle dans le pied, si j’ose dire ! Vous remarquerez que certaines empruntent les chemins d’autres sources d’énergie, ce qui n’est pas du pipeau – du greenwashing comme disent les journalistes – mais leur survie à terme et leur préparation du futur.

La démographie humaine fait que nos besoins énergétiques, certes très inégaux entre les continents et les pays, augmentent sans cesse et la transition voulue se révèle être une addition de sources dont certaines que l’on pensait déclinantes comme le charbon ou la biomasse.

Tout cela mis bout à bout fait qu’une régulation est indispensable (chauffage, transports en commun…). J’y ajouterai bien volontiers l’utilisation de l’eau, un bien commun essentiel à notre alimentation…

Ces règles que vous trouvez contraignantes seront capables de préserver notre niveau de vie et d’aider ceux qui ont un niveau de survie à élever. Bien sûr, et c’est le point de vigilance, ceci est concevable en évitant de se laisser aller aux endoctrinements et puis aux dictatures que des idéologues dogmatiques et radicaux – « pastèques » ou « khmers verts » – très minoritaires, comme les bolcheviks ou les nazis au début de leurs ascensions, sauraient nous imposer, pour peu qu’on n’anticipe pas cette régulation énergétique et minière.

Minière, oui nécessairement et ce sera en rouvrant activement des mines notamment en Europe occidentale, à même de nous pourvoir en minéraux critiques que l’électrification de la locomotion nécessitera.

Pierre-René Bauquis² renchérit sur le caractère prégnant de la finitude des ressources énergétiques naturelles.

La planète devrait pouvoir tolérer sur son sol la présence de 3 à 4 milliards d’êtres humains sans trop de préjudices pour leur biosphère mais pas celle de dix ni même de cinq milliards. Et si une vraie lueur d’espoir assez inattendue et discutable semble se dessiner pour l’aventure humaine, quant à son avenir démographique, la lecture d’une étude de l’ASPO – le président en est Jean Laherrere – me conduit à penser qu’il n’est toujours pas exclu que le vaste rééquilibrage démographique se fasse de façon catastrophique. Certes, il y a une trentaine d’années j’étais convaincu que ce rééquilibrage ne pourrait se faire qu’à coup de famines, de guerres et d’épidémies.

C’est sous l’angle de ce constat qu’il convient de placer aujourd’hui le débat car le vieux dilemme étatisme versus libéralisme présente, certes, un intérêt pour la gestion court/moyen terme mais pas pour la gestion de long terme.

Réfléchir dès maintenant à une évolution de la notion d’État vers toujours plus de dirigisme ?

Sans doute pas, car le devoir premier et permanent d’un État est de promouvoir les conditions permettant au peuple de s’approvisionner suffisamment en eau et en énergie.

En 2023, ceci signifie adopter l’attitude résolument déterministe consistant à trouver le moyen de garantir à l’économie du pays l’approvisionnement énergétique le plus abondant, le plus sûr et le moins cher possible, laissant à d’autres dont c’est le rôle, la fonction ou le métier de donner une matérialité à des états d’âme prospectifs ou probabilistes.

Une telle responsabilité interdit en tout cas à l’État de se muer en organisation confessionnelle ou en agence doctrinaire s’autorisant la police morale et/ou la police des mœurs chargées de contingenter les consommations d’énergie. Cette responsabilité consiste au contraire à laisser le soin à des systèmes production-consommation commerciaux loyaux et surtout disciplinés de procéder le plus naturellement du monde à tout contingentement, lorsque nécessaire. Depuis la nuit des temps, le gradient des contingentements le plus lent qui se puisse imaginer résulte en effet de la rencontre permanente des limites physiques de notre univers par les systèmes en question. Hélas, pour le plus grand malheur de la France, l’idéologie depuis trop longtemps au pouvoir nie contre toute évidence que ce gradient a jusqu’ici ménagé à un génie humain toujours plus inventif les temps de réponse suffisant à permettre à la civilisation de s’adapter au fur et à mesure.

Or, c’est précisément dans cette inventivité que tout État soucieux de l’optimisation du progrès économique et social de ceux qui l’ont constitué est tenu de puiser constamment pour favoriser l’accroissement des rendements et de l’efficacité énergétique de tous les process techniques, organisationnels, sociaux et même intellectuels réclamant de l’énergie, des matières premières et de la main d’œuvre. N’est énoncée là que la banalité de l’optimisation socioéconomique dans laquelle le niveau de vie des citoyens a toujours puisé sa croissance, érigée en précepte depuis un siècle et demi par les économies les plus saines.

Mais la sobriété, voire l’ascèse énergétique que s’imposerait une société entière ou que lui imposeraient ses gouvernants, portant le nom de récession programmée, n’a rien à voir avec tout ceci. On attend de ceux qui pense le contraire la démonstration selon laquelle la prospérité économique – la croissance pour faire simple – ne serait pas proportionnelle à la consommation de matières premières, à la consommation d’énergie tout particulièrement.

Si donc on admet que les économies d’énergie ne peuvent être attendues que de l’amélioration de tous les rendements industriels et sociaux, la seule chose à faire est de rendre notre économie la plus performante possible, ce que font très mal, depuis des années, les acteurs qui chez nous en ont la charge et prétendent pourtant faire de leur mieux.

En tout cas, le gosplan étatique consistant à imposer la rénovation et l’isolation des bâtiments à marche forcée et à un prix d’or³qui serait plus utile à financer les moyens de production énergétiques dont on prétend ainsi se passer, ce gosplan donc est bien le contraire d’une optimisation économique. Car, outre qu’on décide d’une baisse de régime de la machine économique, au sens premier du terme, le rendement de la dépense ainsi arrachée aux Français, sans qu’ils aient eu à en choisir l’usage, promet d’être catastrophique, comme tout ce que touche leur État.

En résumé, la société moderne – la française en particulier – semble plus que jamais confrontée au dilemme suivant : choisir ou non de provoquer la récession économique par une décroissance énergétique volontaire que, même modérée, aucune mesure d’abstinence ne sera capable de compenser, en termes de PIB. Or, en l’état actuel des choses, choisir de ne pas provoquer une telle récession ne peut consister qu’à tout miser sur l’énergie nucléaire de quatrième génération et à laisser à un marché non dévoyé le soin de rendre l’abstinence attractive, à un rythme permettant au consommateur et au contribuable d’en mesurer régulièrement les bienfaits sur leurs factures.

1. Jean-Jacques Biteau, Ingénieur géologue ENSG Nancy 1977, retraité Elf Aquitaine et Total (1979-2019) ; dernier poste actif : Directeur E&P de la Coordination/Arbitrage Exploration 
2. Pierre-René Bauquis, Géologue ENSG et économiste ayant travaillé à l’Institut Français du Pétrole et au groupe Total, enseignant en économie énergétique en France et à l’étranger. 
3. Se figure-t-on bien les sommes colossales représentées par « la mise à niveau thermique » de l’ensemble du parc immobilier français, dans les courts délais requis par la disparition programmée de nos moyens de production ? Des sommes colossales que l’État se dispose à extorquer quasiment au comptant et non à tempérament au contribuable et au consommateur. 

Doit-on promouvoir l’abstinence énergétique ?

The Hunter Biden / Ihor Kolomoïsky affair

The Biden Administration is finally reacting to the scandals that have arisen from the computer of the president’s son, Hunter Biden. This loser, whose only known activities are those of a junkie and a pimp, managed to become the director of a large gas company; a job he knows nothing about. A man of straw, he signed all sorts of big contracts, in different countries, where he travelled -without right- in official US planes. His father is now launching an operation to cover up his affairs, which has led him to clean up the Ukrainian government.The Hunter Biden / Ihor Kolomoïsky affair

H/T: Unorthodox Truth

Related:

Kings of Ukrainian Gas

Fascinating Timing: Home of Ukrainian Oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky Raided

https://thechaoscat.wordpress.com/2023/03/07/the-hunter-biden-ihor-kolomoisky-affair/

‘They Now Need Democracy’: Iran claims to have discovered 8.5 million-ton lithium deposit

The new discovery is the second largest in the world, amounting to almost a tenth of the world’s lithium.Iran claims to have discovered 8.5 million-ton lithium deposit

‘They Now Need Democracy’

https://thechaoscat.wordpress.com/2023/03/07/they-now-need-democracy-iran-claims-to-have-discovered-8-5-million-ton-lithium-deposit/

Freie Marschrouten

Die EU setzt den Ausbau ihrer Verkehrsinfrastruktur für umfangreiche Truppenbewegungen in Richtung Osteuropa und Ukraine fort und vermeldet erste Erfolge.

BRÜSSEL/BERLIN (Eigener Bericht) – Die EU treibt den Ausbau ihrer Verkehrswege in Richtung Osten für militärische Zwecke voran und vermeldet inzwischen greifbare Erfolge. Demnach haben erste Maßnahmen, die unter dem Schlagwort „militärische Mobilität“ („military mobility“) umgesetzt wurden, bereits zu Erleichterungen beim Transport von Kriegsgerät aller Art aus den Mitgliedstaaten von EU und NATO in die Ukraine geführt. Weitere Schritte werden gegenwärtig umgesetzt oder sind geplant, so zum Beispiel der Bau einer Brücke aus Rumänien über den Fluss Prut nach Moldawien, das fürchtet, in den Krieg gezogen zu werden. Vor allem geht es darum, potenzielle „militärische Hauptrouten“ auch militärisch nutzbar zu machen – etwa Straßen und Brücken so umzubauen, dass sie unter der Last überaus schwerer westlicher Kampfpanzer nicht zusammenbrechen. Der Ausbau der militärischen Mobilität wird in enger Abstimmung mit Soldaten der NATO-Staaten geplant, deren Erfahrungen aus Manövern in Ost- und Südosteuropa genutzt werden, um die Verkehrswege für die Streitkräfte zu optimieren. An einschlägigen Maßnahmen beteiligt ist unter anderem die Deutsche Bahn AG.

„Bewegungen großer Kräfte“

Während die ersten deutschen Panzer im Ukraine-Krieg angekommen sind, treibt die EU die Militarisierung ihrer Transportnetze in Richtung Osteuropa weiter voran. Unter dem Schlagwort „militärische Mobilität“ finanziert und koordiniert Brüssel den Ausbau der transeuropäischen Verlegefähigkeit von Streitkräften und Kriegsgerät.[1] Ziel ist es, in enger Abstimmung mit der NATO physische und bürokratische Hürden auf grenzüberschreitenden Routen abzubauen. Dazu sollen „Kapazitäten der Verkehrsinfrastruktur im Hinblick auf Gewicht, Größe und Umfang militärischer Bewegungen“ verbessert, eine „Straffung und Harmonisierung komplexer, langwieriger und voneinander abweichender nationaler Vorschriften und Verfahren fortgesetzt“ und der „Schutz des Verkehrssektors vor Cyberangriffen und anderen hybriden Bedrohungen“ verbessert werden.[2] Ziel der Maßnahmen ist es, „rasche, effiziente und ungehinderte Bewegungen potenziell großer Kräfte“ zu ermöglichen, insbesondere auch im Rahmen der NATO. Russlands Einmarsch in die Ukraine habe gezeigt, heißt es, „wie wichtig eine möglichst schnelle und reibungslose Mobilität der militärischen Hilfe ist“.

Erste Erfolge

Tatsächlich profitieren die europäischen Staaten bei ihren Waffenlieferungen an die ukrainischen Streitkräfte nach Angaben aus Brüssel schon jetzt von Fortschritten, die sie in den vergangenen Jahren im Bereich „militärische Mobilität“ erzielt haben. Allerdings behinderten unterschiedliche Eisenbahn-Spurbreiten „zwischen der Ukraine und den EU-Mitgliedstaaten sowie innerhalb der Europäischen Union“ die Militärtransporte in den Krieg noch immer, heißt es.[3] Mit ihrem Aktionsplan Militärische Mobilität 2.0 will die EU nun „das nächste Kapitel“ in Sachen Verlegegeschwindigkeit aufschlagen.

Wege in den Krieg

Ihr erstes Maßnahmenpaket – den Aktionsplan Militärische Mobilität – hatte die EU bereits 2018 beschlossen. Vorangegangen waren erhöhte Truppenbewegungen des NATO-Blocks innerhalb Osteuropas in der Krise, die im Anschluss an den prowestlichen Umsturz in der Ukraine 2014 sowie an die faktische Abspaltung der Krim und von Teilen des Donbass eskaliert war. Seitdem gehen erhöhte militärische Aktivitäten und der Ausbau der militärischen Mobilität in und nach Osteuropa Hand in Hand. Während der Manöver machen die Soldaten der NATO- und EU-Staaten sich mit den Marschrouten vertraut und testen ihre schnelle Passierbarkeit. Die in den Manövern gesammelten Erfahrungen fließen dann in die Planung der Maßnahmen zur Verbesserung der militärischen Mobilität ein. Diese wiederum ermöglicht immer schnellere und immer größere transatlantische und transeuropäische Truppenverlegungen in Richtung Osten. Dadurch wurde der erste gewaltige Aufmarsch des NATO-Blocks seit dem Ende des Kalten Krieges möglich: Während des Manövers Defender Europe 2020 verlegten rund 20.000 US-Soldaten auf zwölf unterschiedlichen Routen über den Atlantik und quer durch Europa in Richtung russische Grenze und Ukraine; insgesamt waren rund 37.000 Soldaten beteiligt.

„Connecting Europe“

Im Rahmen ihres Programms zum Ausbau der militärischen Mobilität hat die EU zunächst die Anforderungen an die Infrastruktur festgelegt, die sie seitdem entlang „militärischer Hauptrouten“ militärisch nutzbar macht. Für Projekte mit „Doppelnutzung“ (zivil und militärisch) stehen für den Zeitraum 2021 bis 2027 unter dem Schlagwort „Connecting Europe“ 1,69 Milliarden Euro bereit. Mittlerweile sei das Zusammenwirken des militärischen und des zivilen Netzes bereits verbessert worden, heißt es. Inzwischen gibt es einen offiziellen Vorschlag für eine Überarbeitung der Verordnung über die Transeuropäischen Verkehrsnetze (TEN-V), mit der die Anforderungen für die militärische Mobilität in die Planung der bis jetzt formal rein zivilen europäischen Infrastruktur einfließen sollen. Darüber hinaus wurden regulatorische Hemmnisse für Militärbewegungen an Grenzübergängen abgebaut, beispielsweise im Zoll und bei Gefahrguttransporten. 24 EU-Staaten und Norwegen setzen diese Anstrengungen gegenwärtig in Form des Projekts „Optimierung der Verfahren für die Genehmigung grenzüberschreitender Bewegungen in Europa“ fort.

PESCO

Auch im Rahmen der Ständigen Strukturierten Zusammenarbeit (PESCO) treibt die EU die Militarisierung ihrer Infrastruktur voran, vor allem in Teilprojekten mit den Bezeichnungen Militärische Mobilität und Logistik-Drehkreuze. In diesem Rahmen werden nationale Maßnahmen auch über den Aktionsplan hinaus koordiniert und bereits bestehende nationale Infrastruktur und logistische Kapazitäten auf EU-Ebene militärisch nutzbar gemacht. All diese Maßnahmen laufen dabei unter der Maßgabe, sich eng mit der NATO abzustimmen. Folgerichtig sind auch die USA, Kanada und Norwegen in die PESCO-Projekte in Sachen militärische Mobilität eingegliedert.

Die Deutsche Bahn

Ein deutsches Unternehmen, das mit mehreren Initiativen am Ausbau der militärischen Mobilität beteiligt ist, ist die Deutsche Bahn AG. 2019 schlossen Bahn und Bundeswehr einen Vertrag in dreistelliger Millionenhöhe, der den deutschen Streitkräften bei Bedarf den Zugriff auf Lokomotiven und Wagons sowie auf das Schienennetz für transnationale Truppenverlegungen in Richtung Osten sichert.[4] Die Deutsche Bahn unterstützt zudem ein Projekt des Verteidigungsministeriums, das Bundeswehrsoldaten in Uniform seit 2020 kostenlose Zugfahrten ermöglicht.[5] Für das Großmanöver Defender Europe stellte Berlin unter anderem auch das zivile Schienennetz zur Verfügung und zertifizierte nebenbei Bundeswehreinheiten und -fahrzeuge für Transport von US-Großgerät.[6] Außerdem ist die Deutsche Bahn beteiligt an dem „military mobility“-Projekt des Washingtoner Center for European Policy Analysis.[7] Zurzeit werden zur Verbesserung der militärischen Mobiltät in Deutschland unter anderem sechs Eisenbahnbrücken erneuert.[8]

Räder rollen für den Sieg

Es ist nicht das erste Mal, dass die deutsche Bahn an der Erschließung militärischer Marschrouten nach und durch Osteuropa beteiligt ist. Für den deutschen Überfall auf Polen am 1. September 1939 stellte die Bahn 180.000 Wagons zur Verfügung und war insbesondere im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion für Truppen- und Materialtransporte an die Front verantwortlich. Auch in den besetzten Gebieten Europas griff das faschistische Deutschland zur Gewährleistung der militärischen Mobilität auf die Bahn zurück: Sie sollte dort die notwendige Infrastruktur aufbauen. Bereits damals waren Unterschiede in den Spurbreiten der west- und der osteuropäischen Schienensysteme eine Hürde auf dem Weg an die Front.[9]

[1] Ein Strategischer Kompass für Sicherheit und Verteidigung – Für eine Europäische Union, die ihre Bürgerinnen und Bürger, Werte und Interessen schützt und zu Weltfrieden und internationaler Sicherheit beiträgt. Rat der EU, Pressemitteilung vom 21. März 2022.

[2], [3] Action Plan on Military Mobility 2.0. defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu 10.11.2022.

Aktionsplan zur militärischen Mobilität 2.0 vom 10.11.2022

[4] Claudia Haydt: Bahn frei für die Bundeswehr. imi-online.de 07.01.2019.

[5] Großer Erfolg: Kostenloses Bahnfahren in Uniform. bmvg.de 07.10.2020

[6] Defender 20: Logistiker bereiten Transporte vor. bundeswehr.de 27.11.2019.

[7] S. dazu Das Military Mobility Project.

[8] Militärische Infrastruktur der EU. tagesspiegel.de 12.01.2023.

[9] «Räder müssen rollen für den Sieg» – Die Bahn im Nationalsozialismus und im Zweiten Weltkrieg. kuwi.europa-uni.de.

https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/9186

Hammering the Last Nail into the Coffin of Western Neocolonial Aspirations

Dmitry Medvedev
A sharp blade of turbulence in international relations has opened a festering sore of our world’s long-standing problems. For many decades they have been treated with “political band-aids” instead of addressing the causes of the disease. But the abscess cannot go on forever. It is time for international surgery to remove the malignant tumor of the colonial past.

One example is Argentina’s withdrawal from the agreement with Britain on administrative and economic activities in the Malvinas (or Falkland Islands, in British parlance) Islands. The piece of paper is quite recent by historical standards – 2016. But politically, it is rotten and foul (as, indeed, is the case with everything touched by London’s plague hand). Buenos Aires’ focus on continuing the just struggle to regain sovereignty over disputed territories clearly demonstrated the course of strengthening the legal personality of states and their struggle against the shameful modern practices of neocolonialism that continue to plague many countries.

According to the UN classification, today there are plenty of non-self-governing territories in the world, vestiges of the collapse of the colonial system in the 1950s and 1970s. Indeed, do the former metropolises want to give them true freedom? Hardly.

Britain will never give the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, and France will never give Mayotte to the Union of the Comoros or the Epars Islands to Madagascar. Therefore, they have recently been strengthening their understanding of the correctness of resistance to the remnants of neocolonial practices and the imposition of perverted cultural attitudes that emanate from former Western metropolises.

The main reason, however, is that truly sovereign states are no longer afraid of the dictates of the notorious “collective West. Their own national interests outweigh the risks of sanctions counteraction. Fear, which Pliny the Younger called a bad mentor in matters of duty, no longer works. Latin America, perceived by Atlantists since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 as their “backyard,” categorically rejects this status. Characteristically, some of the elites in Western countries are increasingly aware of this. And not just about South America. In a recent issue of the French magazine L’Express, which makes futuristic forecasts for the local armed forces (and foreign policy in general), there is not a single positive one. The CAR and Mali have unceremoniously shown the door to French military contingents, and the Burkina Faso government has decided to denounce the 1961 Treaty of Military Assistance. The Fifth Republic’s influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as that of all the other Western masters who have lost their vitality and social rhythm, is shrinking like shagreen leather.

The new multipolar world will be much more complex than a bipolar or unipolar dictatorship. Such a scheme suits us. For Russia there are no forbidden regions for dialogue on any issues, because we have never had colonies. And if the Soviet Union actively contributed to the destruction of the colonial system in the world, now we, together with other countries, can hammer the last nail in the coffin of the Western world’s neocolonial aspirations.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/03/07/hammering-the-last-nail-into-the-coffin-of-western-neocolonial-aspirations/

Special Military Operation and Vladimir Putin’s Promise

Natasha Wrigh

If Russia survives, the rest of the world will survive. Anything opposite from this is surely not an option.

This article is based on a video report by a renowned Serbian journalist Nikola Vrzic, RT Balkan. Translated by Tatiana Obrenovic.

BBC crew arrived in Belgrade, Serbia a while ago so as to show that the Serbs are unlike any other nation. Nonetheless the BBC is using the pattern defined by Peter Ustinov, the commander of the Order of the British Empire and its knight as well. Ustinov, that knight of that Empire of theirs, used to say that Serbs are two-dimensional humans. “Animals use their own resources way more appropriately than those ghastly creatures, the belonging of whom to the human race is extremely behindhand.”

Though, there are still those who remember that in January 1972, Robert De Niro, Milos Forman, Vittorio De Sica and Sergey Bondarchuk and Peter Ustinov with them, used to be “dragged” along for kafana crawls (1) in Belgrade. Those say that the would-be knight (i.e. Peter Ustinov) used to take to heavy drinking very much like said animal, and very much prone to revelry at that. “In wine there is truth” and therefore in heavy drinking everyone’s character inevitably surfaces to broad daylight. Only after that rampant revelry in Belgrade did Ustinov notice that never had one moral issue been clearer and that any reaching an agreement with those ‘highwaymen’ (i.e. with the Serbs) would be against feelings of honour, decency and self-respect.

In line with that, the BBC could not help but begin a documentary about a country which supports the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine with eerie sounds of the violin (2) and with the fellas with the hoodies on their heads at dusk right next to the graffiti with the NATO and the EU symbols scratched out. Odd things are happening in Serbia: a shadow hovering above it – the narrator notices with a conspiratorial tone of his voice and so forth in that tone all along, although the creators of this documentary were somewhat more honest than those before them. But there had to be a mention of “Russian propaganda” being spread (in Serbia) because “it must be there”, complete with the RT Balkans billboard (they find fault with us, eh?) and symbols of war – says the narrator, while the camera zooms on a T-shirt with the image of Vladimir Putin.

They fail to understand that in Serbia, the NATO symbol is the symbol of war whereas Putin can be something completely opposite, accordingly. A symbol of victory and rebellion which ensues out of that rebellion of his, which is bound to be ours as well because we have to stand up against them (NATO), rather than to yield to their pressure in subjugation, and a symbol of peace which will follow upon our victory. Otherwise, we will be no more. They fail to understand that. This is a common case of their arrogant British lack of intelligence.

Not only because of that but because they are capable of thinking that we should act in any way different from this. The same people who bombed us together with the Germans and the same people who are robbing us of our land (i.e. Kosovo and Metohija) and who want to declare us as a genocidal nation. How on Earth can they even be flabbergasted with the fact that we are not with them and against those (i.e. the Russians) who have never done anything from the list (i.e. brutalities mentioned above) to us. Quite the opposite in fact.

For that matter, our profuse gratitude goes to Vitaly Churkin and Vladimir Putin. We shall not forget a hand raised up high in the UN Security Council and their veto to the British Resolution about Srebrenica about the allegedly genocidal Serbs which thanks to Vitaly Churkin was not upheld in the UN. Seven times have the British put forth a number of drafts with the same essence. Apparently, they have made similar offers to the Russians in return for their consent. The Russians refused. But about their said British lack of intelligence and the complementary arrogance we are also talking about the more important fact that they are failing to grasp that the Serbs are not an exception anymore because of their attitude towards Russia. Namely, all the others are now, so to say, “the Serbs”.

We shall remain what we have always been whilst they, the British and the rest, for example the Latvians, the Estonians , the Lithuanians and all the rest of the “Bulgarians” (4.) who feel that way simply are not “the absolute criterion for all that exists”. That process of their becoming much more relevant than they are used to be a year ago on the 24th February 2022 has gained particular momentum in as much as even The Washington Post has had to admit what all of us already know and anyhow when would be a better moment for it than now, propaganda cannot be plausible unless it contains some truth.

They say the global division is being deepened due to the war in Ukraine. It is surely much deeper than that – The Washington Post writes. This conflict has indicated the boundaries of the U.S. impact on the world order which is undergoing change at a shocking speed. There is growing evidence to suggest that the efforts to isolate Putin have failed and not only among Russian allies whom one would expect to support Moscow, such as Iran and China. All those who are dissatisfied (i.e. with the state of the matters) can nag all they like. This is not Russian propaganda but it is in fact The Washington Post which supports this evaluation of theirs with indisputable numbers.

Only 33 countries have introduced sanctions out of 193 UN member states. The pseudo state of Kosovo of course is not among them but that is the reason why they counted it among those 33. The same goes for Taiwan. The anti-Russian sanctions map, published by The Washington Post is interesting. From Mexico downwards no country has joined them in Latin America and precisely nobody in Africa. And the same goes for the whole Asia apart from the previously mentioned Taiwan and two countries on whose soil the U.S. occupational troops are still based there: Japan and South Korea. With them are Australia and New Zealand and of course the whole Europe except for Belarus and Serbia, which is being robbed of Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which would rather demolish Republika Srpska in order to sway it away to the opposite side i.e. to theirs.

The Collective West is summed up in that map in The Washington Post by an Egyptian reporter, whilst India’s former minister of foreign affairs mentions our Serbian example as well so as to prove that serious people cannot accept an argument that all of a sudden standing up against Russia is to do with any moral imperative. But one other issue is crucial here. Why is the power of attraction of Russia, whilst Russia has never made an effort to be attractive rather than be what it is, has proven mightier than all the threats and pressures and undoubted power coming from their opponents. On one hand because the whole world understands, apart from the Collective West, which is not allowed to understand anything but only to obey what it is told to do, albeit the rest of the world as a whole do understand that Russia has initiated their special military operation not because they want to enlarge their Empire but because they want to survive.

They did not want to but they had to. That is why the rest of the world, commensurate with their bravery and independence, is supporting Russia. If Russia survives, the rest of the world will survive. Anything opposite from this is surely not an option. This is not only because of that (and the world is able to fathom that as well) that this is not only about what is happening on the battlefield. That battlefield is but one part of the battle front in the war in which the divide lines are not completely clear. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, is referring to that so that the whole world understands him well. They understand, says Putin, that it is impossible to beat Russia on a battlefield and that is why they are carrying out ever more aggressive information campaigns against us, targeting predominantly the younger generation. Look at what they are doing to their own people. All boils down to the destruction of a family, cultural and national identity and perversion and abuse of children including paedophilia. All of these things are declared as normal.

Putin exaggerating? Obviously not. A member of the Dutch coalition in the Netherlands Party D66 in their organization’s official programme for the young people has the request to accept paedophilia as yet another among sexual orientations. Party D66 is not only part of the ruling Dutch coalition but the delegates group Renew Europe in the European Parliament in which the ruling parties of Germany and France feature as well: the Liberals and the Renaissance, the party of Emanuel Macron. None of them ever complained with one single word, because the advocates in favour of paedophilia are among them. D66 proudly points out their support for EU values and to NATO as well. They are demanding that jet fighters are sent by the West against Russia.

Anyhow, it perhaps has to do with the fact that the paedophiles and their parliamentary advocates are at war against Russia and this is all we should know about Russian special military operations and not only the military operation. Vladimir Putin has promised: “We shall protect our children”. No person in their right mind can think anything else but this. Perhaps we are two-dimensional and worse than animals but Sir Peter Ustinov indeed was right though not in the manner that would bring him joy. Never has any moral issue been clearer. Any other choice when such choices are at issue, indeed must be against the feelings of honour, decency and self-respect. And 365 days of the special military operation behind us only go to say that we are that much nearer the ultimate triumph of the choice we made.

Special Military Operation and Vladimir Putin’s Promise