Apr 212021
 
 April 21, 2021  Posted by at 4:46 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Mark Chagall I and the village 1911

 

 

Joe Biden declares a “national emergency”, calls Putin a killer, slaps more sanctions on Russia, for which he has his Foreign Secretary Antony Blinken declare that “Today, we announced actions to hold the Russian Government to account for the SolarWinds intrusion, reports of bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and attempts to interfere in the 2020 U.S. elections,” … and then “invites” Putin for a summit.

For the SolarWinds “intrusion”, the US has never provided any evidence at all, the Russian bounties story was -finally- fully debunked well before Blinken made his statement -which makes him look very incompetent-, and the election interference narrative is by now just too dumb to even get into. No evidence for it whatsoever after 2 years of the Mueller investigation, but now Putin’s at it again? Who did he want to win, then? Trump again, after apparently not even trying in 2016?

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky states that his country should urgently be made a full member of both NATO and the EU, and has his own proxy, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, solemnly claim that not just “The only possibility for this [to prevent alleged invasion plans] is for Ukraine to finally become a NATO member”, but also that “Ukraine has no other choice: either we are part of an alliance such as NATO and are doing our part to make this Europe stronger, or we have the only option – to arm by ourselves, and maybe think about nuclear status again”.… And then Zelensky invites Putin for a summit. In the Donbass, no less.

These people are all as insincere as they possibly could be, but they trust that this doesn’t matter anymore. The western media have been planting the “Putin is a monster” seeds in their readers and viewers for many years now, and critical thought has long since left the building. Yes, that is the ultimate effect of what’s called propaganda, and as long as the sheeple “victims” don’t recognize it as such, it works like a charm.

 

I’ve been wondering for a long time why Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin as his successor in 1999, and I can’t find much information on it. Yeltsin was a US asset, and sold out his country to the CIA and a bunch of CIA-asset homegrown oligarchs. I’ve always suspected that when Yeltsin left, he felt a lot of regret for what he had done to Russia, and that maybe appointing Putin was his way to try and make up for that. I see people saying that Yeltsin thought Putin was pliable, but I think perhaps he knew exactly how Putin thought.

A “detail”: remember that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, male life expectancy for a period of time feel from a very steep cliff. And nothing Yeltsin did provided a solution to that crisis. Then, in August 1999, he appointed Putin as his prime minister, and didn’t leave a year later as planned, but 4 months later, in December. His chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev , who had hired Putin as his deputy in 1997, wrote his resignation speech:

Mr Yumashev was entrusted with writing Yeltsin’s resignation speech. “It was a hard speech to write. It was clear the text would go down in history. The message was important. That’s why I wrote the famous line ‘Forgive me’. “Russians had suffered such shock and stress during the 1990s. Yeltsin had to speak about this.”

Back to today. All economic -and other- sanctions against Russia since Putin first became president have led to one thing only: the country has dramatically increased its self-sufficiency. And in the process has upgraded its weapons arsenal to a level that no western country even comes close to, including the US, for maybe 10% of what the same US has spent on its own arsenal.

Russia’s latest generation of hypersonic missiles, against which no country has any defense, are far superior to what anybody else possesses. When they said recently they could take out a specific building in Kyiv if they wanted, they were not exaggerating. So yeah, look for Biden and Blinken and NATO et al to soon start using that superiority as a reason to incite more war vs Moscow.

A war they could never win, but that’s not the point any longer. One might argue of course that it never was after the advent of nuclear weapons. The whole point of NATO today, its raison d’être, is that it can create chaos wherever it goes and looks. It’s no longer capable of defending anyone from the Russian threat, but then that threat hasn’t been there for many years.

 

And NATO wants to continue existing, as does the Pentagon, and Boeing and Raytheon, it’s all about money, so they have to make up a threat, aided by their media brethren. That‘s why you see, from time to time, reports about Putin having yet another person “poisoned”, why governments in countries like the UK and Germany go along with the narrative, and why media in all other vassal states parrot these stories.

In that vein, the story this week out of Czechia, which expelled 18 Russian diplomats, kind of sets a new standard in absolute nonsense.

The Czech organised crime squad (NCOZ) said it was looking for two men using Russian passports in relation to the explosions. The passports bear the names of Alexander Petrov, born in 1979, and Ruslan Boshirov, born in 1978, and their holders are also wanted in Britain in connection with Skripal’s poisoning in Salisbury.

Mark Ames’ reaction to this on Twitter is so good, I’m not going to try to beat him to it: : “If I understand this right, apparently GRU thought it’d be smart to use the same 2 spies to carry out 2 separate deadly operations in NATOland – 2014 bombing in Czech Rep, 2018 Skripal poisoning – using exact same aliases & fake passports in both operations.”

Now that the west has lost its military superiority, all that’s left for it to claim is some sort of “intelligence superiority”, so it portrays Russians as really dumb people. Putin tries to poison one person after another, invariably people who are no threat to him at all, with the deadliest poisons on the planet, and fails time and again. Navalny is a US asset who gets 2% max of votes in a poll, Skripal is a former military intel officer who was allowed to go to the UK after being exposed as a double-agent (!), but they fit the 20+ year old narrative of Putin as Pol Pot. Stories. They are all that counts. Reality, not so much. Bernays and Goebbels are having a ton of fun in their own private hells.

So how will the Ukraine episode be resolved? Not easy. Making the world’s 2nd-most corrupt country a full member of NATO is out of the question, Russia will never accept that. Which is why the west is pushing it. Ukraine with nukes is even more preposterous, if that is possible (hard call). Dmitry Orlov suggested a “solution” the other day about which I have major question marks, but he’s Russian and I’m not, so take a look:

Putin’s Ukrainian Judo

The answer, I believe, is obvious: evacuation. There are around 3.2 million residents in Donetsk People’s Republic and 1.4 million in Lugansk People’s Republic, for a total of some 4.6 million residents. This may seem like a huge number, but it’s moderate by the scale of World War II evacuations. Keep in mind that Russia has already absorbed over a million Ukrainian migrants and refugees without much of a problem.

Also, Russia is currently experiencing a major labor shortage, and an infusion of able-bodied Russians would be most welcome. Domestically, the evacuation would likely be quite popular: Russia is doing right by its own people by pulling them out of harm’s way. The patriotic base would be energized and the already very active Russian volunteer movement would swing into action to assist the Emergencies Ministry in helping move and resettle the evacuees.

The elections that are to take place later this year would turn into a nationwide welcoming party for several million new voters. The Donbass evacuation could pave the way for other waves of repatriation that are likely to follow. There are some 20 million Russians scattered throughout the world, and as the world outside Russia plunges deeper and deeper into resource scarcity they too will want to come home.

While they may presently be reluctant to do so, seeing the positive example of how the Donbass evacuees are treated could help change their minds. The negative optics of surrendering territory can be countered by not surrendering any territory. As a guarantor of the Minsk Agreements, Russia must refuse to surrender the Donbass to the Ukrainian government until it fulfills the terms of these agreements, which it has shown no intention of doing for seven years now and which it has recently repudiated altogether.

[..] The West would be left with the following status quo. The Donbass is empty of residents but off-limits to them or to the Ukrainians. The evacuation would in no sense change the standing or the negotiating position of the evacuees and their representatives vis-à-vis the Minsk agreements, locking this situation in place until Kiev undertakes constitutional reform, becomes a federation and grants full autonomy to Donbass, or until the Ukrainian state ceases to exist and is partitioned. The Ukraine would be unable to join NATO (a pipe dream which it has stupidly voted into its constitution) since this would violate the NATO charter, given that it does not control its own territory.

Further sanctions against Russia would become even more difficult to justify, since it would be untenable to accuse it of aggression for undertaking a humanitarian mission to protect its own citizens or for carrying out its responsibilities as a guarantor of the Minsk agreements. The Donbass would remain as a stalker zone roamed by Russian battlefield robots sniping Ukrainian marauders, with the odd busload of schoolchildren there on a field trip to lay flowers on the graves of their ancestors. Its ruined Soviet-era buildings, not made any newer by three decades of Ukrainian abuse and neglect, will bear silent witness to the perpetual ignominy of the failed Ukrainian state.

Dmitry suggests 4.6 million people leave the Donbass so peace may be restored. But most of those people grew up there, and so did their families. And largely peacefully so, until the US and NATO, John McCain and Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, tried to take over Ukraine. Why should Russia, instead of protecting these people where they live, migrate them and protect them in Russia? Anyone ask for their own opinion?

There would be a giant empty piece of land where they once lived, in a kind of demilitarized zone? And what then? Nobody in Ukraine would come up with the idea to move into the empty land? And if they did, Russia would have to shoot them from Russian territory? I sort of see the reasoning of course, but not all of it. It only seems to work if you see Russia, and the Russians in the Donbass, as the aggressors.

Were they? Are they? Russia only sprung into action when the west tried to take away their sole warm water port, Sevastopol in Crimea. An election was held, and 97% of mostly Russians voted to be part of Russia. Yeah, that upset NATO and the other usual suspects, but that doesn’t make Russia an aggressor.

Russia has no reason to “invade” Ukraine. They don’t need even more territory, they’re already by far the largest nation on earth. Moreover, they don’t have the military to occupy large swaths of land. They only have the capacity to protect their own.

Thing is, they really got that down. So the only thing NATO can do, in its quest to prove it has reason to exist, is to create chaos, as I said before. But there is a problem with consciously creating chaos between nuclear powers, instead of maintaining communication channels, as the US and USSR always did during the Cold War. Do we all understand this means we are in a worse situation today than back then? That all those expulsions of diplomats only make the situation worse?

And that some fool could actually fire a nuclear missile because of that? Me, I’m not so sure anymore. Between the Covid virus and the US cancel culture, there are not that many western people paying attention to warmongers and NATO aka warheads. Not a good idea.

 

 

 

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Home Forums Warheads

Viewing 9 posts - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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  • #73615

    Mark Chagall I and the village 1911     Joe Biden declares a “national emergency”, calls Putin a killer, slaps more sanctions on Russia, for
    [See the full post at: Warheads]

    #73619
    zerosum
    Participant

    PUNCHLINE 🙂
    “make up a threat, aided by their media brethren …
    there are not that many western people paying attention to warmongers and NATO aka warheads.”

    #73621
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud,” according to Orwell. In which case we’ve been totalitarian since at least 2001

    “Why should Russia, instead of protecting these people where they live, migrate them and protect them in Russia? Anyone ask for their own opinion?”

    I don’t hear suggestions of forced evacuation. The idea behind evacuation is to avoid forced evacuations like death, homelessness, extreme poverty. To facilitate a thing is not to demand a thing. To offer an escape from living hell is a fine thing for a government to offer people who perceive themselves as Russians living just across the border. Doing so would leave existing infrastructure intact for Ukrainians, and obviously, Russia would not care if they moved in so long as they don’t mobilize troops and such along Russia’s border.

    Also, if nuclear war happens, they’re safer in Russia than Ukraine. I dare to say that Russia WOULD win a nuclear confrontation. It would be crippled, for sure, but it has so much more reactive-and-proactive defense capability that it would come out better by far than Euromerica (ouch), who would be worse than crippled, poor sots.

    This sounds unthinkable but so does shoving a baby out your vagina. Trust me. Trust me that it happens and that women think about it.

    Orlov is an arrogant and often disingenuous ass, imo, but he is also almost always right even if he is morbidly afraid of appearing publicly wrong (which minds me of those women who simply can’t go in public without first putting on their “face”).

    All that said, consider that the longer NATO plays rubber chicken with Moscow, the better Russia will look to de facto Russians, and merely Russian-speaking Russophiles, living in Ukraine, and that, as Orlov mentioned, major migration from Uke into Russ is already underway and only bound to intensify the longer NATO rattles its sword. Russia has jobs. Ukraine doesn’t. Next case. (Segue to weird future concept of empty Chinese cities becoming UkroRussian colonies. Put those new but empty cities to use.)

    Meanwhile, USA is like Ukraine: locals fleeing if possible, foreigners increasingly declining to move here.

    In the long run, I envy Ukraine: they’re next door to Russia and are family. When NATO fails (it already has), and the new paradigm commences, they’ll have Russia helping them (if possible).

    “Now that the west has lost its military superiority, all that’s left for it to claim is some sort of “intelligence superiority”, so it portrays Russians as really dumb people. Putin tries to poison one person after another, invariably people who are no threat to him at all, with the deadliest poisons on the planet, and fails time and again.”

    Interesting. Dovetails weirdly with the idea of testing how gullible the Euromerican populace is (very, it seems, but less so of late).

    #73632
    Maxwell Quest
    Participant

    When I first saw Dmitry’s proposal of abandoning the Donbass to Ukraine (NATO really), my first thought was “Hell no!”. It would be like giving your money to the schoolyard bully expecting that in the future he would leave you alone. I think it’s time to stop coddling imperialism’s naked aggressions. By trying to appease the west’s attempts at global hegemony, it only makes an eventual hot war that much more certain.

    I’m reminded of the scene from It’s A Wonderful Life, when George Bailey lets loose on the villain, Henry Potter, because his greed and lust for power could not be sated until he controlled every business in the little backwater of Bedford Falls, especially the measly little Bailey Building and Loan that competed with his bank:

    Bailey: … Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you’ll ever be.

    Potter: I’m not interested in your book. I’m talkin’ about the Building and Loan.

    Bailey: I know very well what you’re talking about. You’re talking about something you can’t get your fingers on, and it’s galling you. That’s what you’re talking about, I know. …

    There are still a few governments on the planet that operate outside the control of the US-centralized empire, and it’s galling the greedy Potters of Wall Street.

    #73633
    Germ
    Participant

    O/T – but it is war.

    Listen to and share this powerful front-line testimony. Dr. Charles Hoffe of Lytton, British Columbia tells how the Moderna “vaccine” has decimated the health of his small town, after they had no trouble naturally fending off Covid …

    #73644
    madamski cafone
    Participant

    @ Maxwell Quest

    “When I first saw Dmitry’s proposal of abandoning the Donbass to Ukraine (NATO really), my first thought was “Hell no!”. It would be like giving your money to the schoolyard bully expecting that in the future he would leave you alone. I think it’s time to stop coddling imperialism’s naked aggressions. By trying to appease the west’s attempts at global hegemony, it only makes an eventual hot war that much more certain.”

    However, there are several million innocent people in the crossfires. And Russia doesn’t WANT Ukraine. It’s not capitulation in the slightest. In fact, it is the most blatant insult imaginable: keep your stinking country, we just want our precious Russians.

    #73646
    WES
    Participant

    Back in 1983, after spending 6 months working in Siberia, I left USSR no longer afraid of them!

    I am still not afraid of them! There are only about 140 million of them!

    Now our military-industrial-deep state scares the hell out of me!

    #73647
    WES
    Participant

    In regards to the Donbass area, local young Russians will move to Russia for, advanced schooling and better economic outcomes. Nothing will change that.

    It is no different that the Canadian province of Saskatchewan exporting all of its young people to the rest of Canada. By the way many of the people in Saskatchewan are Ukrainian!

    When my Father was going to school in Saskatchewan during the depression, many of his fellow students were the sons and daughters of local Ukrainians farmers. All day long they would eat sunflower seeds, spitting the shells onto the classroom floor. The teachers did like this but there was nothing they could do about it, except at the end of the school day, sweep up all of the sunflower shells on the floor.

    As my Father said those Ukrainian farm boys were a lot bigger than the tiny school teachers!

    #73692
    williampemberton3
    Participant

    What seems rather insidious about all the NATO and media posturing over “unheard of troop buildup” on the Ukrainian border, and “we haven’t seen numbers of troops like these since 2014”, when a report published in 2018 in the “NATO Review” discussed Putin’s development of large-scale troop exercises rotating through Russia’s military districts. (Here: https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2018/12/20/vostok-2018-ten-years-of-russian-strategic-exercises-and-warfare-preparation/index.html)
    In fact their chart outlining the annual exercises show that the actual troop numbers participating in the exercises in the South (Kavkaz) disctrict in 2016 numbered about 120,000 troops. There was no expressed concern over 120,000 troops in the region in 2018. Meanwhile NATO has been aggressively deploying more troops, and co-ordinated international military exercises in such operations as DEFENDER EUROPE 20 & 21. The narrative around Russian exercises has provided a “convenient truth” for this military adventurism and irresponsibly deadly rhetoric.

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