Sunday 28th of April 2024

crumbling empires, for dummies....

Yeah, darlin’ gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space

Steppenwolf, Born to be Wild, 1967

The world has got to be thankful to the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council Dimitri Medvedev.   Paraphrasing that iconic Cold War era string of ads about a beer that refreshes the parts other beers cannot each, Medvedev refreshes those – sensitive – parts the Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for diplomatic reasons, cannot reach.

 

Why Medvedev Is Free to Go Full ‘Born to Be Wild’     Pepe Escobar

 

As astonishing tectonic shifts keep turning geopolitics and geoeconomics upside down, and the Angel of History looks East while the United States, corroded from the inside, desperately clings to scraps of its dwindling Full Spectrum Dominance, Medvedev makes no bones about how much he enjoys “smoke and lighting”, not to mention “heavy metal thunder”.

Exhibit One is something for the ages. It deserves a full quote – complete with colorful English translation:

 

“Western politicians who have shat their pants and their mediocre generals in NATO have once again decided to scare us. They launched the largest military exercises since the Cold War.

These involve 90,000 soldiers from 31 countries of the Alliance and ‘almost block’ Sweden, about 50 warships, 80 aircraft, 1,100 ground combat vehicles, including 133 tanks. 

Some stages are expected to take place in the most blatantly Russophobic and most disgusting countries to us, such as Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, that is, in close proximity to Russia’s borders. 

The NATO blabbers were afraid to directly say who these exercises are aimed against, and limited themselves to empty chatter about ‘practicing defense plans and deterring potential aggression from the nearest opponents’. 

But it is quite obvious that this convulsion of flabby Western muscles is a warning to our country. It’s like they’re saying, shouldn’t we properly threaten Russia and show the Russian hedgehog a fat transgender European ass. 

It turned out not scary, but very significant. 

After all, if the Alliance itself decided to conduct exercises of this level, it means they are really afraid of something. 

And even more so, they do not believe not only in victory but in any military successes of the rotten neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. Plus, of course, they are working out the anti-Russian agenda for domestic political purposes, consolidating their dissatisfied electorate. 

Overall this is a very dangerous play with fire. 

Significant forces have been assembled. And exercises of this scale have not been conducted since the last century. So they are a well-forgotten old thing. 

We are not going to attack any country in this bloc. All reasonable people in the West understand this. But if they play too hard and encroach on the integrity of our country, they will instantly receive an adequate response. 

This will mean only one thing – a big war, from which NATO will no longer turn away. 

The same thing will happen if any NATO country begins to provide its airfields to Bandera’s supporters or quarters its troops with neo-Nazis. They will certainly become a legitimate target for our Armed Forces and will be mercilessly destroyed as enemies. 

All those wearing helmets with NATO symbols, who today swaggeringly rattle their weapons not far from our borders should remember this”.

 

Humiliating defeat or Totalen Krieg 

Heavy metal thunder Medvedev is complemented by a superb analysis by Rostislav Ishchenko, who I had the pleasure to meet in Moscow years ago.

These are two key takeaways:

  1. “Today, the readiness of the armies of European NATO members for a real war is lower than that of the Russian army in the most difficult time ‘of the 90s’”.
  2. Ishchenko neatly draws the West’s choice, “between recognition of a shameful defeat, with a defeat on the battlefield of NATO units proper, and the beginning with Russia of a full-fledged war, which the European armies cannot wage, and the Americans have no strength for, for they are going to engage in China.”

 

The inevitable conclusion: the whole U.S. architecture of “Russian containment” is “crumbling”.

Ishchenko correctly notes that “the West is not able to wage a proxy war against Russia beyond 2024” (Defense Minister Shoigu, on the record, already said last year that the SMO will end in 2025).

Ishchenko adds, “Even if they manage to hold out not only until the fall, but until December 2024 (which is very doubtful), the end of Ukraine is still near, and to replace them, the West was not able to prepare yet another one who wanted to die for the United States in a proxy war with Russia.”

Well, they are trying. Hard. For instance by regimenting a bunch of hyenas for the Three Seas scam. And by giving the CIA’s darling Budanov in Kiev free reign to stage serial terror attacks inside the Russian Federation.

Meanwhile, a confidential memo designed at the London School of Economics suggests close cooperation between the German government, USAID and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation to build a sort of “new Singapore in Kiev”: that is, a “reconstruction” profiting corporate Germany out of a low-wage hellhole.

Well, no one knows what sort of “Kiev” will survive, and in what form. So there won’t be any remixed “Singapore”.

There will be no compromise

German analyst Patrik Baab has offered a meticulous breakdown of the key facts underlying Medvedev’s outburst.

Of course he needs to quote NATO’s Stoltenberg, who has already elliptically confirmed, on the record, that this is not an “unprovoked” war of aggression – NATO in fact provoked it; moreover it’s a proxy war, essentially about NATO’s eastward expansion.

Baab also correctly acknowledges that after the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March/April 2022, imploded by U.S. and UK, there is zero trust in the Kremlin – and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – of collective West politicos.

Baab also refers to one of Sy Hersh’s Deep State sources:

“The war is over. Russia has won.”

Still, the key point – which does not escape Medvedev’s attention – is that “no concessions are to be expected in Washington. The military confrontation continues. The war has become a battle of attrition.” That ties in with Medvedev already making it explicit that Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Mykolaev and Kiev are “Russian cities.”

Hence, “a compromise is therefore de facto ruled out.”

Russia’s Security Council clearly understands how the strategic concept adopted by NATO at the 2022 summit in Madrid totally militarizes Europe. Baab: “It proposes multi domain warfighting against a nuclear-armed peer-competitor. In other words, nuclear war. It says: ‘NATO enlargement has been a historic success.’”

That’s the rhetoric parroted non-stop by Stoltenberg straight out of NATO’s think tank, the Atlantic Council.

Feeling the pulse in Moscow, in a series of in-depth exchanges, it becomes clear that the Kremlin is prepared for a nasty war of attrition that could last years – beyond the current Raging Twenties. As it stands, the song remains the same in Ukraine: a crossover of snail technique and the ineluctable meat grinder.

The endgame, as Baab clearly understands, is that “Putin is seeking a fundamental security agreement with the West.” Even as we all know it’s not gonna happen with Straussian neocons dictating policies in the Beltway, the facts on the – geoeconomic – ground are unmistakable: sanctioned-to-death Russia already surpassed Germany and the UK and is now the strongest economy in Europe.

It’s refreshing to see a German analyst quoting historian Emmanuel Todd (“WW III has already begun”) and crack Swiss military analyst Jacques Baud, who explained how there has been “a sophisticated philosophy of war in Russia since Soviet times”, including economic and political considerations.

Baab also refers to the inimitable Security Council’s Scientific Council stalwart Sergei Karaganov in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta: “Russia has completed its European journey… The European and especially the German elites are in a state of historical failure. The foundation of their 500-year dominance – the military superiority on which the West’s economic, political, and cultural dominance was built – has been stripped away from them (…) The European Union is moving… slowly but surely towards disintegration. For this reason, European elites have shown a hostile attitude towards Russia for about 15 years. They need an external enemy.”

When in doubt, read Shelley 

It’s now crystal clear how Washington is actively splitting the EU in favor of a rabidly Russophobic Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis.

Meanwhile, the “no compromise” in Ukraine is deeply determined by geoeconomics: the EU desperately needs access to Ukraine’s lithium for the “decarbonization” scam; the vast mineral wealth; the rich black-earth soil (now mostly property of BackRock, Monsanto and co.); the sea routes (assuming Odessa does not revert to its status of “Russian city”); and most of all, the ultra-cheap workforce.

Whatever happens next, Baab’s diagnosis for the EU and Germany is gloomy: “The European Union has lost its central function”, and “historically, it has failed as a peace project.” After all now it’s the Washington-Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis that “sets the tone.”

And it gets worse: “We are becoming not only the backyard of the United States, but also the backyard of Russia. The energy flows and container traffic, the economic centers are moving eastwards, forming along the Budapest-Moscow-Astana-Beijing axis.”

So as we crisscross Medvedev, Ishchenko and Baab, the inevitable conclusion is that the proxy war on country 404 will keep going on and on and on – in myriad levels. “Peace” negotiations are absolutely out of the question – certainly not before the November elections in the U.S..

Ishchenko understands how “this is a civilizational catastrophe” – perhaps not “the first since the fall of the Roman Empire”: after all, several civilizations collapsed across Eurasia since the 4th century. What is blatantly clear is that the collective West as we know it is fast flirting with a one-way ticket to the dustbin of History.

And that brings us to the genius of Shelley encapsulated in one of the most devastating sonnets in the history of literature, Ozymandias, published in 1818:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

As we keep searching for light in the darkness of insanity – complete with a genocide running 24/7 – we may visualize the pedestal standing in the middle of a vast desert, painted by Shelley with a couple of sublime alliterations, “boundless and bare” and “lone and level.”

This is all about a vast empty space mirroring a political black void: the only thing that matters is the blind obsession for Total Power, the “sneer of cold command” asserting the perpetuity of a hazy “rules-based international order”.

Oh yes, this a heavy metal thunder sonnet that outlasts Empires – including the “colossal wreck” vanishing in front of our eyes.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/02/08/why-medvedev-free-go-full-born-to-be-wild/

 

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alleged....

Afforded a chance by Carlson to expand on his efforts to portray Russia as a defender of “traditional values” against what he frequently depicts as a degenerate and declining West, the Russian president was uncharacteristically restrained. “Western society is more pragmatic,” he said. “Russian people think more about the eternal, about moral values.”

 

 

He added that “there’s nothing wrong with” the Western path, noting that it had led to “good success in production, even in science”. It was an echo of Putin’s frequent assertion over the last two years that his conflict is not with the West as a whole, but with a hegemonic ruling elite.

 

Putin’s appearance underscored his tactical confidence as his adversaries face a vulnerable moment: Ukraine is struggling on the battlefield, further military aid is stalled in the US Congress, and Kremlin-friendly politicians are ascendant on both sides of the Atlantic. Chief among those politicians is former president Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner whom Carlson frequently praises.

That confluence of circumstances means that the interview with Carlson comes as Putin senses his “finest hour”, said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre.

Putin’s end goal, she said, was to secure a peace deal in Ukraine that would cement Russia’s control of the territory it has already captured and to install a friendly government in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. But to achieve it, Putin appeared to believe that he needed the US to put pressure on Ukraine to hold negotiations on ending the war, rather than to continue to resist Russia’s invasion.

“He believes that he now has a window of opportunity,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

 

IN THIS COMMENTATIONING IN REGARD TO TUCKER CARLSON'S INTERVIEW OF PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN, THE NEW YORK TIMES HARDLY HIDES ITS DISDAIN FOR TRUTH. THE SAME CAN BE SAID OF CNN THAT PRESENTS A LOT OF CAVEATS SUCH AS "CLAIMED", "ALLEGED" IN REGARD TO FACTS THAT ARE ARE VERIFIED BY DOCUMENTS. BUT THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING IS THAT PUTIN DOES NOT WANT TO INFLICT MORE PAIN ON A PEOPLE THAT THE AMERICANS CLAIM AS THEIR OWN: THE UKRAINIANS — THE UKRAINIAN NAZIS... OF COURSE THE "DENAZIFICATION" OF UKRAINE BY RUSSIA RECEIVED LITTLE ATTENTION IN THE WESTERN MEDIA... YEP, BANDERA, WHOSE NAZI UNIT KILLED ABOUT 600,000 JEWS IN POLAND, UKRAINE AND RUSSIA, IS LAUDED AS THE HERO OF KIEV. OF COURSE LITTLE WOULD BE MENTIONED ABOUT THE (GERMAN AND UKRAINIANS) NAZIS WHO ESCAPED TO THE US, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, AND SOUTH AMERICA (ESPECIALLY BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA) UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE VATICAN.

MEANWHILE AS THE WEST WANTS TO SEND MORE WEAPONS TO UKRAINE, THE UKRAINE ARMY IS BEING DECIMATED. SOON ADVIIKA WILL FALL, IF NOT ALREADY AS WE SPEAK (WRITE THIS). 

 

WHETHER THERE IS A PEACE DEAL NOW OR A CAPITULATION LATER, Russia’s control of the territory it has already captured WILL REMAIN and a RUSSIA friendly government WILL BE INSTALLED in Kiev. IT'S A QUESTION OF WHEN AND HOW MANY MORE UKRAINIAN WILL DIE TO DEFEND THEIR INDEFENSIBLE NAZIDOM.... 200 OR 200,000? 

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN. TO THIS ADD ODESSA, KHARKIV AND KHERSON, OF NOVOROSSIYA...

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

READ FROM TOP

 

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the plan is....

 

The US plan to kill more Ukrainians    By Jeffrey D. Sachs

 

Biden and Schumer’s proposed $61 billion for the Ukraine war will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war, the tens of thousands of deaths, and the physical destruction of Ukraine.

President Joe Biden is refusing to fold a losing hand as he bets with Ukrainian lives and U.S. taxpayer money. Biden and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer propose to squander the lives of tens of thousands more Ukrainians and $61 billions of federal funds to keep Biden’s disastrous foreign policy failure hidden from view until after the November election.

The $61 billion will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war, tens of thousands of deaths, and physical destruction of Ukraine. It will not “save” Ukraine. Ukraine’s security can only be achieved at the negotiating table, not by some fantasised military triumph over Russia.

$61 billion is not nothing. This worse-than-useless outlay would exceed the combined budgets of the U.S. Department of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, and the Women, Infant, and Children nutrition program.

Almost exactly 10 years ago this month, Biden did much to put Ukraine on the path to disaster. This is well known to those who have looked carefully at the facts but is kept hidden from view by the White House, the Senate Democrats, and the mainstream media that back Biden. I have previously provided a detailed chronology, with hyperlinks, here.

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush, Sr. and his German counterpart Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward if the Soviet Union accepted German reunification. When the Soviet Union disbanded in December 1991, with Russia as the successor state, American leaders decided to renege.

President Bill Clinton began NATO expansion over the vociferous opposition of top diplomats like George Kennan and the opposition of his own Secretary of Defence, William Perry. In 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski upped the ante, with a plan for NATO to expand all the way to Ukraine. He famously wrote that without Ukraine, Russia would cease to be a great power.

Russian leaders have repeatedly made clear that NATO expansion to Ukraine is understandably the reddest of Russian redlines. In 2007, President Vladmir Putin stated that NATO enlargement to that date was a cheat on the 1990 promise, and that it must go no further. Despite these clear warnings, including by his own diplomats, George W. Bush Jr. committed in 2008 to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea.

William Burns, now CIA director, and then the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, wrote a famous memo entitled “Nyet means Nyet,” explaining that Russia’s opposition to NATO enlargement was across Russia’s political spectrum. Most Ukrainians themselves were also firmly against the plan, favouring neutrality over NATO membership. The Ukrainian Rada declared Ukraine’s state sovereignty in 1990 on the basis of becoming “a permanently neutral state.” In 2009, the people of Ukraine elected Viktor Yanukovych, who ran on a platform of neutrality.

In early 2014, the U.S. decided to help bring down Yanukovych in a coup. This was standard U.S. deep-state operating procedure, one used on dozens of occasions around the world. The CIA, National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and NGOs like the Open Society Foundation went to work in Ukraine. The point person was Victoria Nuland, who was first Richard Cheney’s principal deputy foreign policy advisor, then George Bush Jr.’s ambassador to NATO, then Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, and by 2014 Assistant Secretary of State.

This time, the Russians caught the conspiracy on tape, in an intercepted call between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (now Assistant Secretary of State). Nuland explains to Pyatt that Vice President Joe Biden will help choose and cement the post-coup government. The 2014 Ukraine team, including Biden, Nuland, Jake Sullivan (then and now Biden’s national security advisor), Geoffrey Pyatt, and Antony Blinken (then the deputy national security advisor), remains the Ukraine team today.

It is a team of bunglers. They thought that Yanukovych’s overthrow would quickly usher in NATO expansion. Instead, ethnic Russians in Ukraine virulently rejected the Russophobic post-coup government that was installed by Nuland, and called for autonomy of the ethnically Russian regions. In a referendum, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to join Russia.

Obama, Biden, and their team armed the post-coup government to attack the ethnically Russian regions, thinking this would be the end of it. Yet the regions resisted. Ukraine and the breakaway regions signed the Minsk Agreements to bring an end to the fighting and give constitutional autonomy to the ethnically Russian Donbas. The Minsk II agreement was backed by the UN Security Council, but the U.S. privately agreed with the Ukrainian government that it was okay to ignore it.

In 2021, after 7 years of fighting and more than 14,000 deaths in the Donbas, Putin called on newly elected President Biden to stop NATO enlargement and engage in negotiations with Russia over mutual security arrangements. Biden rejected Putin’s call to end the gambit of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

In February 2022, Putin launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) invasion to push Ukraine to the negotiating table. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately called for negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality. Within a month, a framework agreement to end the fighting was reached between Ukraine and Russia, based on Ukraine’s neutrality and an end to NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine. Biden stepped in to stop the deal, with the U.S. informing Zelensky that the U.S. would not support neutrality.

Biden and team had still more failed tricks up their sleeve. They firmly believed that U.S. financial sanctions—freezing Russia’s assets and cutting it out of the SWIFT banking system—would cripple the Russian economy and cause Putin to relent. In fact, they expected that the ensuing economic crisis would topple him. Of course, nothing of the sort happened.

Then they expected that NATO weaponry would trounce Russia on the battlefield. That too did not happen. Then they expected that Ukraine’s “counter-offensive” in the summer of 2023, backed by Pentagon and CIA planners, would defeat Russia. Instead, Ukraine lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead and wounded—its military hardware destroyed.

The entire war, including the loss of Ukrainian territory, the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties, and the utter waste of more than $100 billion of U.S. taxpayer money to date, could easily have been avoided.

Now, Biden and Schumer want to throw more Ukrainian lives and more tens of billions of dollars at this glaring failure. They want to do this in a rushed vote, without any Congressional let alone public oversight, without hearings, and without any strategy. The fact is they want to save Biden from the embarrassment of a decade of puerile and failed plotting, at least until the November election.

There remains one answer for Ukraine’s security: diplomacy and neutrality. That solution doesn’t cost lives or money. It was Ukraine’s choice before the 2014 coup and again in 2022 until stopped by Biden. It is the path that Biden and the Senate Democrats still refuse to take.

 

Republished from COMMON DREAMS, February 7, 2024

 

https://johnmenadue.com/the-us-plan-to-kill-more-ukrainians/

 

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykX6_MOmJLQ

 

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