In Sicily, Top of the Mountain, Watching the New Barbarians

You don’t need to be Seneca to observe that Sicily embodies so many perfect archetypes of Beauty that it all seems superhuman, Pepe Escobar writes.

It’s another stunning sunset in the western edge of the Sicilian coast, and I’m right in front of the Real Duomo in Erice, the pluri-millenary “Mount”, sung by Virgil in the Aeneid as “close to the stars”, and founded by the mythical homonymous son of Venus and Bute who became King of the Elimi, an ancient tribe that settled in these lands.

 

Welcome to a realm of gods and demi-gods, heroes and nymphs, saints and hermits, Faith and Art, who still survives as a practically intact, magnificent medieval village.

Following century after century of splendor, misery and wars, it’s enlightening to remember how Thucydides recalled “Trojans in flight” arriving with their ships in Sicily and then interacting with the Sicani and the Elimi, “while their cities carried the names of Erice and Segesta”.

And then, much later, Thucydides tells us, the Segestans took ambassadors from Athens to the temple of Aphrodite in Erice: that’s where all the cool cats of the time used to hang out.

From the apartment of Roger II, King of Normandy in Cefalu in the late 11th century, to creeks and coves scratching the shores of the deep blue Mar Tirreno; from Venus worshipped in Erice to Venus worshipped in Segesta, it was in these realms drenched in History and Mythology that I happened to follow, from a safe distance, a rather prosaic, provincial manifestation of post-modernity: a clown show in Vilnius advertised as the NATO summit.

Imagine an epigone of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian from the early 1st century tracking the arrival of Aeneas and the Trojans to Sicily and pointing that the Venus altar at the Erice heights was erected by Aeneas himself to honor his mother, reacting to the “ceremonial” staged by a bunch of North Atlantic upstarts, led by a declining superpower which qualifies crossroads-of-the-world Sicily as a mere AMGOT: “American Government Occupied Territory”.

Well, you don’t need to be Seneca, in first century Rome, to observe that Sicily, like nowhere else in the world, embodies so many perfect archetypes of Beauty that it all seems superhuman.

So it was impossible not to see the NATO clown show for what it was: a tawdry, trashy crypto-Aristophanes rip-off – and deprived from the slightest trace of self-deprecating humor.

A clown show falls flat

Particularly proficient among the cast of minor characters was the little sweaty sweatshirt warmonger, who was ruthlessly snubbed by the supposed A-list.

One of his helpless ministers framed the dilemma: what conditions do we need to meet to be part of the club, and who makes the rules?

Unfortunately demi-goddess Maria Zakharova, our contemporary of Mercury, the messenger of the Gods, was not available in person to quell his doubts, but she did, anyway, from afar: if you don’t know the rules of the game, that means you know nothing about the “rules-based international order”.

Once again, no one needs a PhD on Tacitus – another big fan of the temple of Venus in Erice – to know how this works.

The “rules” thing was invented by the declining hyperpower. In fact there are no rules. They make them up on the go. And they change them if the results don’t match their expectations. Tiberius – who Tacitus chronicled – would have been impressed.

The alternative to the “rules” Mafioso racket is called “international law”: a concept that happens to be duly supported by the Global South, or Global Majority.

Now let’s get to the main plot in the clown show. NATO explicitly formulated it “does not want” a war with Russia. Translation: they are absolutely terrified. More scared than if Zeus in the flesh was threatening them with a million thunderbolts (or their post-modern epigone: Mr. Khinzal).

What NATO – via the real masters, the Americans, or their piece of Norwegian wood posing as the man in charge – could not possibly admit in public is that they have less than zero resources for a real war.

Russia, on the other hand, has them – in droves.

NATO, already miserably humiliated in Afghanistan, is now being ruthlessly, methodically demilitarized, a process running in parallel to the increasingly abysmal state of the economy prevailing amongst all NATOstan members.

War? Against a nuclear, hypersonic superpower? Give us a – Thucydides – break.

Watching the New Barbarians

Then there’s the story of a major character that ended up making a big splash: the Sultan. He may be a Neo-Ottoman potentate or just a plain streetwise grifter, but in the end he got what he needed: the moolah in the coolah.

Well, not yet in the coolah: considering this is an IMF racket, the moolah will come with a zillion conditions attached.

It goes like this. Sultan is broke. Turkiye is broke. Foreign exchange reserves are going down the Bosphorus drain. So what’s Sultan to do? Miserably default? Sell what’s left of the palace gold? Or bend over backwards to the IMF?

There’s no smokin’ gun on who called who first to set up the deal. Ankara may have been promised a lifeline of up to $13 billion – in fact pocket money. The Sultan could have gotten a much better deal with the “win-win” Chinese – complete with serial BRI investment projects.

And yet he decided to play his cards with NATO, not Eurasia. Reality won’t take much time to dictate its terms. Turkiye will never be admitted into the – floundering – EU. The Americans may force Brussels to do it – remember those “rules” – but up to a point.

Selling tons of extra Bayraktar drones to Kiev – yes, it’s a Sultan family racket – won’t alter anything on the battlefield.

Yet simultaneously antagonizing the Russia-China strategic partnership and their push for Eurasia integration – via SCO, BRICS, EAEU – does alter the chessboard.

The Sultan may be condemning Turkiye to the role of extra minor sidekick – with nearly zero screen time – in the plot line that really matters: the Eurasian Century.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow, reflecting on the Vilnius clown show, remarked that the world will not be turned into a “NATO globe”. Of course not: what’s ahead has been defined by Old Man Luka, the Oracle of Minsk, as the “Global Globe”.

But enough of the “rules” racket. On a splendid sunny morning, after leaving the Mare Tirreno and driving inland, I found myself right in front of the temple of Segesta, the most important center of the Elimi, one of Sicily’s original peoples before the arrival of the Greeks.

Segesta, for centuries, was allied with Carthage, and then Athens. The temple is the embodiment of absolute Doric perfection. Construction was started in 430 B.C. But it may have been abandoned twenty years later, when Segesta was captured by…Carthage.

History, always capricious, led to the site being currently named Monte Barbaro. That comes from the denomination given to Segesta by the Arabs: Calatabarbaro. Poetic justice struck again: so there I was, under the blazing sun, at the top of a pluri-millenary Barbarian Mountain, watching the New Barbarian Warmongers weave their poisonous “rules-based order”.

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enough is enough — bring him home......

 

 

BY Henry Kamens

 

As I was recently departing Batumi, Georgia, on the Black Sea, the announcement was made, “Please Passengers, the train is about ready to leave the station, so please leave the train”, in English. Of course, something was lost in translation. However, the same could be said about the status of Ukraine in the wake of its aspirations for fast-tracked NATO membership—and how it and some NATO members want to overlook the requirements for membership and its own Charter.

It is clear that NATO is being a proxy-to-a-proxy, and due to believing in its own rhetoric it has backed itself into a corner, not only based on how it deals with claimed adversaries but in its relations amongst its own membership, and suffers from a dearth of integrity—or a total lack thereof!

But let’s start about this train where we left off with contradictions about NATO expansion, in light of the Lithuanian NATO Summit. There are many reasons why people don’t want to fund Ukraine besides the obvious ones.

Recently, the New York Times came out with a story with this headline: Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, Kyiv and its NATO allies have posted, and then quietly deleted, several photos of soldiers with patches bearing Nazi emblems. This is surprising since the mainstream media has been trying to keep this a secret.

This is just the “tip-of-the-iceberg” of what is going on in Europe and within the ranks of NATO.

NATO’s War Council

What is going on in Ukraine and at NATO Summits is clear, the gathering of War Councils, and call it what we may, even the Deputy Head of Russia’s Security Council, has said that Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) are already at war with each other. It is becoming clear, not only based on Zelensky’s sarcastic remarks at the recent NATO Summit, that not all is well in Never-Never Land when he said that he calls the UK Defense Minister each morning to thank him.

This is becoming a sad comedy when Ben Wallace, the British Defense Minister chides the Ukrainian president over his lack of gratitude when he said “Whether we like it or not, people want to see a bit of gratitude. And how this was [especially the case] when you are sometimes asking countries to give up their own stocks” for the sake of Ukraine.  The statement that “We are not Amazon” perhaps sums up the UK and Western positions best in terms of a never-ending supply of weapons, no strings attached, to Ukraine.

The argument over to let or not let Ukraine join, and when, is one that is best suited to discuss [over a round of drinks than to have out in the open], as it is far too revealing one way or another—not only exposing all that is wrong with NATO but how its expansion has added to regional instability and internal weaknesses in Europe and among its allies. It should be common sense to understand that the costs of expanding the Alliance outweigh the benefits. Best to qualify this, by saying overall, as for some it is a windfall, especially for those who supply NATO standard weapons.

Nobody can deny the risk, and as some pundits have concluded, at the Vilnius summit and beyond, NATO leaders would be wise to acknowledge these facts and close the door to Ukraine. It seems that Zelensky is following the lead of Donald Trump with his fiery tweets, and this does not help his cause or his reputation—as fewer and few are taking him seriously.

The Washington Post reports how the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s angry tweet slamming NATO for their “unprecedented and absurd” timeline for Ukraine’s membership left allies stunned — and almost pushed US officials to edit their invitation for Kyiv to eventually join the alliance. It boils down to his demands and lack of gratitude, and his abrasive personality is rubbing people the wrong way—and some may start questioning as whose side is he really on?

It is getting so bad that the “president’s fiery response to NATO’s conditions-based pledge in Vilnius touched off a scramble” — and brief consideration of watering down what Kyiv would be offered. It is as if you got me in this deep, and you must not cut and run now, as if “I have some hard critics to face, and they don’t mess around, and I can really disappear for good.”

It is the conditions that challenge Ukraine and Zelensky, as he knows that they are unrealistic to the Ukrainian reality, i.e., business as usual, and all the hype about the rule of law, democracy and equal rights is but political rhetoric, and if allowed,  the real business and the selloff of Ukraine would be hampered.

Nonetheless, NATO finds a way to get around its own requirements with the wording of the establishment of the NATO-Ukraine Council, a new joint body where NATO Allies and Ukraine sit as equal members to advance political dialogue, engagement, cooperation, and Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO.  Supposedly [wishful thinking] it will provide for joint consultations, decision-making, and activities, and will also serve as a crisis consultation mechanism between NATO and Ukraine.

It is like Orwellian doublespeak, as reflected in some of the language used, and what it means today, will have another meaning in another time. One instance is its commitment to defense, by reaffirming its “iron-clad” commitment to defend each other and every inch of Allied territory at all times, protect our one billion citizens, and safeguard our freedom and democracy, in accordance with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.

And near the end of the long document, it goes on about new allies, as there is nothing that separates the meaning of what is a member and what an ally is, and this should be disturbing even for laypersons. It is a bit clearer as to enemies; it describes how The People’s Republic of China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge NATOs interests, security and values. However, the document itself brings into question the divide between its claimed values and reality.

NATO its own worst enemy

It is all becoming theater, and to make such a statement is not making an abstraction. Take for instance, the recent article A Stronger NATO for a More Dangerous World: What the Alliance Must Do in Vilnius—and Beyond, purportedly written by Jens Stoltenberg, shows more than hypocrisy.  Rather, it is NATO that is destabilizing the world with its very expansion, despite all promises otherwise in the wake the re-unification of Germany and the end of the Cold War.

It is not a response, and NATO is “not responding to a more unpredictable world with unity and strength” but just the opposite, and it is the main source of instability. Afghanistan and other NATO operations should have been a lesson to allies in Europe and North America, of its inherent weaknesses. The provision of unprecedented economic and military support to Ukraine is backfiring, as is being demonstrated with the divisions within NATO and the economic and political blow back.

As some pundits fully understand, Instead of making a questionable promise that poses great dangers but would yield little in return, the United States should accept that it is high time to close NATO’s door to Ukraine. It is all about cost vs. benefits, and Ukraine is making a good case for it not to be included, and perhaps this too is part of Zelensky’s tattered script.

And to add another level of instability in an already instable world, one just needs to scroll to the end of the NATO document and read about Asia.  However, first ask yourself, what was the purpose of NATO, at least its early days?

Now it has expanded with the issuance of a proclamation of undeclared way by claiming that the Indo-Pacific is important for NATO, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security.

We welcome the contribution of our partners in the Asia-Pacific region – Australia, Japan, New `Zealand, and the Republic of Korea – to security in the Euro-Atlantic, including their commitment to supporting Ukraine.  We will further strengthen our dialogue and cooperation to tackle our shared security challenges, including on cyber defence, technology and hybrid, underpinned by our shared commitment to upholding international law and the rules-based international order.

As long as it takes!

Not only Europeans, but Americans too, are growing sick and tired of supporting needless wars and never-ending corruption, and not only in Ukraine. It is becoming only too apparent that the founding principles of NATO are secondary to corporate interests and the bottom line.

Even Europeans are realizing that this war is becoming too expensive, unwinnable, and comes at the expense of their own national security and economic stability. However, they in light of the NATO Summit are going to have to first spend more for their own military budgets, and that may not be as easy as claimed.

The assertion of “when and not if” is going to be a statement that will eventually mean, never and as long as it takes is just a delaying tactic, in the hope the problem will just go away.  As long as it takes, in talking about unwavering support for Ukraine, may be extended far beyond their natural lifespans. Their political careers are likely to be cut short when the unwashed masses finally wake up to realize that the conflict in Ukraine was planned, orchestrated, and any option for resolution intentionally derailed or delayed.

Ukraine fatigue after NATO summit

It is especially ironic for the Estonian Prime Minister to now say that Europe must spend more money on its own national defense.  Did not Trump say the same thing? And it is icing on the cake for BoJo, Boris Johnson, the smooth talking warmonger, to come out now and warnWashington, NATO and the civilized world of the “dire consequences” of giving up on Ukraine.

It is refreshing to see that upholding international law and the rules-based international order have not been overlooked in this the NATO Summit document, in spite of the fact that NATO is so far from any such values with its wars of aggression and choice.

So much for MAP, Membership Action Plans, and Ukraine is doing what NATO has not the balls to do on its own accord.  As the picture shows of Zelensky, as his fan club are keeping a safe distance, knowing he is a spent round, and the novelty wearing off like the smell of a new car.

The never-ending rhetoric of support, as long as it takes, is also wearing thin. The proxy war in Ukraine will likely be decided based on the old adage, “put your money where your mouth is!”  There are even sites for people who are so supportive of Ukraine who are making the same assertion. However, likely the money does not go to Ukraine, like much of the money and military assistance being spent by NATO members.

I hope this recent Summit and the conditions it has set for Ukraine will slice up NATO like a pizza. I still don’t want to understand or accept why it is still around. But I know—an instrument of aggressive US policy and Imperialism. What NATO is actually saying to Ukraine is simple: Americans and a handful of its closest partners in crime don’t like losers, and time is running out.

 

https://journal-neo.org/2023/07/19/vilnius-summit-a-stronger-and-expanded-nato-makes-for-a-more-dangerous-world/

 

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it is a PROXY war, Jon......

 

enough is enough — bring him home......

MOSCOW, (Sputnik) - Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) will launch for the first time its Type 12 surface-to-ship missile (SSM) into Australian waters ahead of the Talisman Sabre military drills, Talisman Sabre exercise director Brig. Damian Hill said on Tuesday.

"This is the first time the JSDF have tested this capability in Australia," Hill told the US broadcaster, adding that the Japanese armed forces will launch the missile from Beecroft Weapons Range into the East Australia Exercise Area off the coast of Jervis Bay.

 

Exercise Talisman Sabre 2023 will take place from July 22 to August 4. It is the largest exercise between Australia and the United States, which is held every two years in the Indo-Pacific region. This year, over 30,000 military personnel from 13 countries will participate in the drills.

 

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230719/japan-to-launch-type-12-anti-ship-missile-into-australian-waters-for-1st-time---official-1111981877.html

 

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it is a PROXY war, Jon......

 

enough is enough — bring him home......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa4X5a3JgL0

 

NATO just DESTROYED the US Constitution with this move | Redacted with Clayton Morris

 

What is the most important document in the United States of America if you said the US Constitution unfortunately that's no longer correct. The United States Senate just voted to give the north Atlantic Treaty organization supreme power over the United States in war, making decisions.

 

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it is a PROXY war, Jon......

 

enough is enough — bring him home......