fantastic negative result

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/08/15/russia-sanctions-cost-to-west-could-exceed-700bn-warns-think-tank/>

RUSSIA SANCTIONS COST TO WEST COULD EXCEED $700BN WARNS THINK TANK

by BREITBART LONDON 15 Aug 2015

Britain's oldest Conservative think tank, the Bow Group, has published a paper
from six Eastern European analysts on the affect of sanctions against Russia
on Eastern Europe and the wider West.
The report exclusively reveals that the estimated financial costs of sanctions
to the West could exceed $700bn.

"The costs to Europe include ?120bn worth of exports to Russia are in danger,
a total volume of business of ?326bn, almost 2 million jobs are at risk, as
well as potential default on $147bn of Russian debt held by EU banks.

"The cost to the UK alone: ?8.6bn of total exports, 119,000 jobs at stake,
£27bn of Russian capital invested in the UK.

"Cost to the US: total trade worth $137bn, $38bn US exports to Russia, up to
$30bn US capital tied up in Russia."

"This results in a total potential exposure of approximately $755bn to Western
economies"

The paper has been criticised by neo-liberal activists who feel the European
Union should be united in a strong stance against Russia via sanctions.

Bow Group Chairman Ben Harris-Quinney said: "Like most papers we publish not
everyone in the Bow Group agrees, and I disagree with many of the conclusions
this paper draws.

"It's important to consider foreign perspectives, but Britain must maintain a
position of strength in perception and reality. Just as we are currently
seeing in Cuba and Iran, détente without conditionality is defeat.

"However, after a decade of ill-advised diplomatic and military misadventure
it has to be acknowledged that the theory of neo-liberal interventionism is
bankrupt.

"It is therefore important to acknowledge the massive potential cost of
sanctions to the UK and wider West, at over $700 billion, and explore other
options.

"The strategy that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher advocated - peace
through strength - must be a better answer. If, in partnership with other NATO
powers we spent a proportion of that $700 billion on strengthening our
military at home and abroad, it's highly unlikely that NATO borders would be
challenged by Russia or any other opportunist expansionism. That's something
that sanctions have not and will never achieve.

"For a Conservative Prime Minister the last 5 years has been a disappointment
in terms of defence and care of our armed forces.

The Bow Group is challenging the government to now take a more detailed and
long term approach to the Strategic Defence and Security Review, commit to 2
per cent GDP spending on defence, and a more pragmatic approach to using our
resources to achieve this."

The think tank has also pressured for the government to extend the Strategic
Defence and Security view after many criticised the government's new approach:
consultations in no more than 300 words from stakeholders.

[Oleg Smirnov]

<https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/straight-shooting-from-the-uk/>

STRAIGHT SHOOTING FROM THE UK

AUGUST 17, 2015

The Bow Group <http://www.bowgroup.org/>, 'the United Kingdom's oldest
conservative think tank', is as 'Establishment' an institution as one could
hope to find. Its board includes prominent former Conservative cabinet
ministers such as Norman Tebbit and Geoffrey Howe as well as right-wing
academics like philosopher Roger Scruton. I was intrigued, therefore, to hear
its chairman, Ben Harris-Quinney, announce <http://bit.ly/1fnLOfJ> last week
that, 'the theory of neo-liberal interventionism is bankrupt.'

The context of Harris-Quinney's remarks was the publication of a new Bow Group
report <http://bit.ly/1Kul3ij> entitled 'The Sanctions on Russia'. In the
report's introduction, editor Adriel Kasonta declares:

Given that many people in Ukraine actually consider themselves to be
Russian, and that the justifications for sanctions may have shifted, it
appears necessary to revise our approach to what could be considered one of
the greatest challenges of the 21st century. We might do worse than explore
for [sic] a peaceful solution to this crisis, engaging EU member states
and Russia in a meaningful and inclusive dialogue.

The title 'The Sanctions on Russia' is actually misleading as only the first
of the report's three parts directly covers the sanctions imposed on Russia by
Western countries. The report's second part digresses into a discussion of the
'Russian soul', and the third focuses not on Russia but on Ukraine and what
that country has to do to solve its problems.

In the section of the report dealing with sanctions, Elina Kyselchuk of the
Ukrainian Business Centre in London shows that the sanctions have had a
negative impact on the Russian economy but have not altered Russian behaviour
in Ukraine. Given that the latter was their intention, the sanctions have
failed. Kyselchuk concludes that:

There must be reached a diplomatic compromise, which will allow Russia to
remain an influential political player in Eastern Europe, while letting
Ukraine choose its own internal political regime and foreign policy
orientation. A diplomatic solution will require all sides to find middle
ground and to focus on their fundamental economic needs, which will
perhaps not mean the best possible outcomes or absolute victory. Finding
such a compromise will not be easy. However, it is vital for the West and
Russia to work together towards reconciliation and building a stable,
prosperous Ukraine.

The report's economic analysis is easy to follow. The same could not be said
of its dissection of the 'Russian soul'. (OS: What's the point to speculate
much about the Russian soul nowadays? One can meet a lot of the Russians in
the internet and ask them directly about something. Oh I've forgotten, they
all are those paid Kremlin trolls, you know. This is a nice trick intended to
help you preserve your habitual delusions.) Think tanks are meant to speak to
policy makers rather than to academics. But in his chapter on 'Russian
Christian thought as a key to understanding Russian politics', Artur
Mrowczynski-Van Allen of the International Center for the Study of the
Christian Orient makes little concession to those not well versed in theology,
as he explains the thinking of philosophers such as Pavel Florensky, Nikolai
Berdyaev, and Vladimir Solovyov. For instance, he writes:

It is very easy to see that "Vernunft [reason]" accompanies "Adam:"
philosophy and theology (and, ultimately, all spheres of life, culture,
politics, economy, etc.) form a unit. A unit that is revealed in
metaphysics, anthropology, and historiosophy-historiosophy intimately tied
to ecclesiology. It is not just a theoretical question, but rather a real
and rational way of thinking and living that can be defined as an
eschatological pragmatism.

I am man enough to admit that I haven't the slightest clue what the author is
talking about here, and I suspect that most readers will shake their heads in
befuddlement and skip this part of the report after reading just a few lines.
But Mrowczynski-Van Allen's final words are at least relatively clear:

Rather than imposing our own paradigms of interpretation, we must at least
listen to others, be attentive to their counterdiscourses, come closer to
the ontology, anthropology, and historiosophy that beat in the heart of a
people and make it live, that make it live in a particular, unique way,
whether in the case of Russia or of so many other peoples and cultures that
are resisting modern colonization by the dominant and prevailing discourse
of secular modernity.

In simpler words, we should respect cultural differences. Liberal
interventionists will not like this conclusion, as it suggests that Western
liberalism does not embody universal values which must be spread to the rest
of the world. They will probably also dislike the contribution to the third
part of the report by Nikolai Petro of the University of Rhode Island, which
again warns against the imposition of artificial cultural unity.

'Stable democracy does not result from having homogeneous political or
cultural attitudes,' writes Petro, 'but from society's ability to develop
institutions that not only manage these conflicting elements within a culture,
but also preserve a balance among them.' (OS: In the case of the Ukraine the
American / Western meddling was rather intended to aggravate the conflicting
elements and push to solution of the conflict not 'within a culture' but via
rude violence, by implementing the anti-constitutional / anti-democratic coup.
The coup has not made the Ukraine more democratic, it's rather made it less
democratic by setting a [yet one] precedent of unlawful / violent 'success',
needless to say about those neo-Nazis. And thus 'the West' has come to moral
bankruptcy. The Atlanticist masterminds still continue to incite hatreds in
the Ukraine, covering their unsightly efforts by presenting various lies to
the ordinary Western sheep.) The way out of Ukraine's crisis, he continues, is
'to develop a unifying civic culture that encompasses both its Russian and
Ukrainian speaking communities.' This will be impossible, 'if Ukrainian elites
persist in trying to promote national unity by imposing highly divisive
national symbols, rallying around an "eternal enemy" (Russia), and insisting
on a new national identity as a litmus test of loyalty... Ukraine will thrive
only if its bicultural and bilingual identity is seen as a source of strength,
rather than as a weakness to be eradicated.' (OS: He is either naive or
hypocrite. Such a 'unifying civic culture' is / was quite developed already,
and the main goal of American political technologists from the very beginning
was rather to deliberately destroy it, since that's the only way to 'tear off'
the Ukraine from Russia.)

Western analysts, Petrio concludes, should:

First, stop talking about Ukrainian identity as if it were a monolithic
concept, rather than two closely related, but distinct, cultural heritages.

Second, oppose attempts to ignore or minimize the importance of the Russian
cultural component of Ukrainian national identity. Historically such efforts
have always resulted in bloodshed.

Third, stop trying to force Ukrainians to choose between Europe and Russia.
Instead, adopt a broader view of European identity that accepts both Russia
and Ukraine as quintessential parts of Europe.

Finally, recognize that all actors share a common interest in resolving this
crisis through a direct dialogue of the conflicting parties.

This is all excellent advice. I know from my own experience
<http://bit.ly/1MBn2Hz> that conservative think tanks in the UK are not always
open to ideas which challenge the hegemony of liberal interventionist ideas.
It is encouraging, therefore, to see the Bow Group offering an alternative
point of view.

...

The contemporary 'liberal interventionists' are not much different from those
early Bolsheviks (which dreamed of a world communist revolution) and from the
global jihadists (whose effort is to convert the whole world to Islam).

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/05-Aug-2015/getting-russia-right>

Getting Russia right
What is now needed in western capitals is an acknowledgement that they have
not always gotten Russia and Putin right

Jonathan Power August 05, 2015

Even today, in many different ways, the US and Russia remain close. There is
cooperation in space, not least the International Space Station. The US
regularly hires Russian rockets to launch its crews to the station and to
launch satellites. Russia sells advanced rocket engines to the US. Russia
allows war material en route to Afghanistan to pass through its territory on
Russian trains. Russia worked hand in glove with the US to successfully remove
the large stocks of chemical weapons possessed by Syria. It shares
intelligence on Muslim extremists including Islamic State (IS). Conceivably,
it could enter the battle against IS. It has encouraged western investment
including joint oil exploration of the Artic. Recently, it stood side by side
with the US and the EU as they forged an agreement with Iran on its nuclear
industry. At the UN Security Council, Russia and the US voted together for a
resolution approving the agreement. President Barack Obama phoned President
Vladimir Putin to thank him.

US diplomats are now conceding that Russia's claim that the neo-fascist,
so-called "Right Sector" in Ukraine is wreaking havoc is true. The Right
Sector, in the eyes of many, was a key - and violent - element in the success
of last year's Maidan demonstrations that toppled President Viktor Yanukovich.
When the Russian, French and German foreign ministers hammered out an
agreement, with the support of Ukraine's Parliamentary opposition, for
Yanukovich to step down at the next election, the west totally 'forgot' about
it in the next few days as the Maidan demonstrators drove Yanukovich into
exile. (OS: Here's a mistake or a typo: there was no Russian foreign minister,
there was Polish one, and there was Russian special envoy Mr Lukin who didn't
sign anything since he was there rather as an observer.) Washington and other
western capitals supported the 'democratic revolution', rather than demanding
the fulfilment of the agreement. No wonder Putin was livid.

What is now needed in western capitals is an acknowledgement that they have
not always gotten Russia and Putin right. For example, in the Ossetian /
Georgian war in 2008, Russia was accused of starting it. In fact, as is now
widely accepted in the west, it was Georgia's bombing of the South Ossetian
capital that triggered the war. Today many western observers believe that the
degree of Russia's intervention in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine is grossly
overstated. Not long ago, the US commanding general in NATO warned that Russia
was about to invade - an ill-informed or deceitful (depending on one's
perspective) viewpoint that was quickly shot down by the head of French
intelligence.

Back in 1999 NATO's bombing of Belgrade, which led to an independent Kosovo,
went against international law because the invaders were not themselves under
threat. Russia, at the UN, voted against this campaign, arguing that changing
a country's boundaries by force was illegal. If the west had not waged its
Kosovo campaign, it is probable that Russia would never have taken over
Crimea. Russian paranoia was understandable when the second Russian-Chechen
war broke out. Many powerful Washington insiders ignored the jihadi nature of
the Chechen invasion of neighbouring Dagestan, focusing only on Russian
violations of human rights. Yet today emirs, controlling perhaps as much as 80
percent of the Caucasus Emirate mujahideen, have declared their loyalty to IS.

In 2011, Russia abstained from a resolution at the UN Security Council, which
authorised a western initiative to use its air forces to attack those in
favour of the regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi, in order to save civilians from
being massacred. In fact, the western powers went far beyond their UN mandate
and fought to bring down Qaddafi. This led to the present chaos in Libya,
which is reducing the new 'free' state to anarchy and seems to have no end in
sight. Russia felt it had been double-crossed which, indeed, it had.

Gordan Hahn, the Russian watcher, who once was a Senior Associate of
Washington's prestigious Center for Strategic and International Studies,
writes: "All this demonstrates again the utter futility in expanding NATO into
Russia's sphere of influence (breaking a solemn agreement made with Russia).
It undermines Western security in two respects. It has alienated Russia and
transformed it into the West's "greatest geo-political foe" that the
Republican presidential candidates misconceptualise. Second, it runs directly
contrary to the requirements of an effective global fight in the war against
jihadism, which must include all major powers in a robustly institutionalised
alliance."

Of course Putin, on occasion, is boorish and heavy-handed, but it is no
surprise that Putin has overwhelming support in his confrontation with the
west. I believe the opinion polls show that he has a high 80 percent approval
rating. In the last nine months, I have walked the streets of Russia on three
visits, doing my own amateur poll. Russia responds to the policies and actions
of the west. It is always the west that makes the first move on the
chessboard. Russia has developed, writes Hahn, "carefully thought out plans
designed to defeat the West, regardless of what the West may or may not do."


The writer has been a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald
Tribune for 20 years and author of the much acclaimed new book, Conundrums of
Humanity - the Big Foreign Policy Questions of Our Age. ..

<http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2015/july/31/monsters-of-ukraine-made-in-the-usa/>
Monsters of Ukraine: Made in the USA

[Byker]

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/05-Aug-2015/getting-russia-right>

What does Russia's President Putin really want?

By Matthew Chance, CNN Senior International Correspondent in Moscow

Wed February 11, 2015

(CNN)Has Russian President Vladimir Putin gone completely mad? This question
is actually being debated in serious circles.

In a telephone conversation with President Obama a few months ago, German
Chancellor Angela Merkel is reported to have suggested her Russian
counterpart is "living in another world."

Just last week, a leaked report commissioned by the U.S. Defense Department
in 2008 concluded that the Russian leader may have Asperger's Syndrome, a
type of high-functioning autism. The report said it may account for his
apparently high degree of control.

A Pentagon spokesman said there was no guidance from the Department of
Defense on the report and experts told CNN they were skeptical of the
reliability of the Asperger's claim.

For the record, the Kremlin has dismissed the allegation as utter nonsense.

Putin, though, is an enigma.

His unflinching support for rebel separatists in Eastern Ukraine, despite
their alleged excesses, has plunged Russia's relations with the West into
their worst crisis since the end of the Cold War.

Even in the face of mounting international sanctions that have isolated
Russia and helped hobble its fragile economy, Western officials say weapons
and manpower continue to flow across the border, although the Kremlin
insists it is supplying neither.

Clearly, Putin is determined to get his way in Ukraine.

We already know, essentially, what this means in terms of a peace deal -- a
truce was signed last September, although it didn't hold.

The Minsk Protocol agreed that, among other things, autonomy would be
granted to Ukraine's southeastern regions. The Russian language would be
given official status. A buffer zone would be established along the front
lines and heavy weapons would be pulled back from civilian areas.

But Putin may actually want much more.

On an official visit to Egypt this week, the Russian president dropped a
large hint -- and not for the first time.

In an interview with the Al-Ahram newspaper he rejected Russian
responsibility for the crisis in Ukraine.

"It emerged in response to the attempts of the U.S.A. and its Western
allies, who considered themselves winners of the Cold War, to impose their
will everywhere," Putin told the newspaper.

"Promises of non-expansion of the NATO to the east have turned out to be
hollow statements," he said.

A solution to the Ukraine crisis, then, may involve ruling the country out
of any future NATO membership, however unpalatable that may be to some in
the West.

Russian diplomats call it guaranteeing Ukraine's "neutral status" -- which
sounds much better than "capitulation."

The bigger problem, though, is that this may not end with Ukraine.

For Putin, this crisis is only the latest in a catalog of grievances, which
includes the West trampling over Russia's interests from Kosovo to Iraq, to
Libya and Syria.

Putin's ultimate goal may be to tear up the post-Soviet assumptions about
what Russia will tolerate, and permanently change Russia's relationship with
the West.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/11/world/chance-putin-analysis/

[abelard]

Post by Byker
For Putin, this crisis is only the latest in a catalog of grievances

what about the sudetenland?

Post by Byker
, which
includes the West trampling over Russia's interests from Kosovo to Iraq,

national socialist regime

Post by Byker
to
Libya

national socialist regime

Post by Byker
and Syria.

national socialist regime

Post by Byker
Putin's

raised under socialism

maybe there's a pattern

Post by Byker
ultimate goal may be to tear up the post-Soviet assumptions about
what Russia will tolerate, and permanently change Russia's relationship with
the West.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/11/world/chance-putin-analysis/

[Oleg Smirnov]

Although, now I more tend to think that he's not
just fool, but also a hateful insane psycho fixated
on 'socialism'.

On Wed, 19 Aug 2015 19:49:45 -0500, "Byker"

Post by Byker
For Putin, this crisis is only the latest in a catalog
of grievances

what about the sudetenland?

Post by Byker
, which
includes the West trampling over Russia's interests from
Kosovo to Iraq,

national socialist regime

Post by Byker
to
Libya

national socialist regime

Post by Byker
and Syria.

national socialist regime

Post by Byker
Putin's

raised under socialism
maybe there's a pattern

Post by Byker
ultimate goal may be to tear up the post-Soviet
assumptions about
what Russia will tolerate, and permanently change
Russia's relationship with the West.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/11/world/chance-putin-analysis/

--
www.abelard.org

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://www.unz.com/proberts/us-has-been-planning-to-wipe-out-russia-since-1945/>

US Has Been Planning to Wipe Out Russia Since 1945

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS . AUGUST 18, 2015

An article on Sputnik by Ekaterina Blinova, <http://sptnkne.ws/AM9>, provides
a history of US and British plans to destroy the Soviet Union with nuclear
weapons in the early post-World War II years before the Soviets got the bomb
and prior to President John F. Kennedy reining in the plans to use nuclear
weapons against Soviet civilian populations. If truth be known, the Cold War
was entirely a Washington creation.

The military/security complex, against which President Dwight Eisenhower
warned the American people to no avail, has found that its profits cannot
survive the end of the Cold War and has orchestrated its resumption.
Washington has revived its plans for surprise nuclear attack on Russia and
this time on China as well. These plans are known and have destroyed the trust
among nuclear powers, leading to an even more dangerous situation than existed
during Cold War I.

The American people are not politically competent, and they are easily
brainwashed by Washington's propaganda. It has only taken two years for
Washington's demonization of Russia to convince hapless Americans that Russia
is the Number One Threat to the United States. This unbelievable hogwash is
constantly broadcast by the presstitute media and is now believed by a
majority of the American Sheeple.

Armageddon will be the consequence.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/08/15/russia-sanctions-cost-to-west-could-exceed-700bn-warns-think-tank/>
RUSSIA SANCTIONS COST TO WEST COULD EXCEED $700BN WARNS THINK TANK

[jack595]

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.unz.com/proberts/us-has-been-planning-to-wipe-out-russia-since-1945/>
US Has Been Planning to Wipe Out Russia Since 1945
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS . AUGUST 18, 2015
An article on Sputnik by Ekaterina Blinova, <http://sptnkne.ws/AM9>, provides
a history of US and British plans to destroy the Soviet Union with nuclear
weapons in the early post-World War II years before the Soviets got the bomb
and prior to President John F. Kennedy reining in the plans to use nuclear
weapons against Soviet civilian populations. If truth be known, the Cold War
was entirely a Washington creation.
The military/security complex, against which President Dwight Eisenhower
warned the American people to no avail, has found that its profits cannot
survive the end of the Cold War and has orchestrated its resumption.
Washington has revived its plans for surprise nuclear attack on Russia and
this time on China as well. These plans are known and have destroyed the trust
among nuclear powers, leading to an even more dangerous situation than existed
during Cold War I.
The American people are not politically competent, and they are easily
brainwashed by Washington's propaganda. It has only taken two years for
Washington's demonization of Russia to convince hapless Americans that Russia
is the Number One Threat to the United States. This unbelievable hogwash is
constantly broadcast by the presstitute media and is now believed by a
majority of the American Sheeple.
Armageddon will be the consequence.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/08/15/russia-sanctions-cost-to-west-could-exceed-700bn-warns-think-tank/>
RUSSIA SANCTIONS COST TO WEST COULD EXCEED $700BN WARNS THINK TANK

We can afford it, Russia can't. Armegeddon will be like when the Soviet Union
folded, not with a bang but a whimper.

[Oleg Smirnov]

The anti-American sentiment had raised in Russia already in spring 2014, when
it became clear that the US gov't and American MSM (+ their puppets in Europe)
have chosen path of absolute lies and bold trolling about the Ukraine coup.

Mr. Scales is a sort of typical American swine, but his personal contribution
to hatreds is rather small, eg. Mr. Osama's idiotist rants about Russia vs
Ebola, those "in tatters" etc, certainly contributed much more to the hatreds.

The American exceptionalism resembles the German Nazis' ideas of superiority,
most of the Russians have an allergy about things like that, so the stupid
Yanks <http://qr.de/7w8> are on their way to reproduce the Nazis' experience.


<http://observer.com/2015/08/anti-american-sentiment-surges-in-russia-as-us-officer-taunts-from-perch-at-fox-news/>

Anti-American Sentiment Surges in Russia as US Officer Taunts From Perch at Fox
News / Retired General who called for US to 'start killing Russians' says he
bought a polonium detector

By Mikhail Klikushin | 08/25/15 8:00am

Since the beginning of the year, Putin's propaganda industry, feeling the
economic crisis, has had to tighten its belt. The Russian Information Agency
TASS announced a 25 percent staff reduction and 20 percent salary cut for its
employees. Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which holds the monopoly on the official
publications of new laws and government decrees, fired 10% of its staff.
Similar examples are innumerable, as Bloomberg reported <http://bv.ms/15oZYIo>
in January.

Despite all the economizing, the level of anti-Americanism in Russia has
reached its all-time high, fluctuating from 70 percent to 73 percent of
negative and strongly negative feelings towards the US this year, according to
the respected polling institution Levada-Center.

The possible explanation-somebody else is doing all the heavy-lifting for the
Kremlin propaganda machine, helping it to save millions and outsource the
humongous task of proving to the Russians that the West started the final,
doomed-from-the-start crusade against Mother Russia.

One of the big helpers has been the Fox News channel and a handful of its
analysts. (Yes, one can watch Fox News in Russia, as well as CNN, EuroNews and
unlimited number of other TV channels the world knows).

This year, Fox News analyst retired US Major General Robert H. Scales saved a
lot of money for the Kremlin propaganda machine. And now he's saving even more.

Back in March, Maj. Gen. Scales infuriated the Russian public with his solution
on how to help Ukraine regain control over the territories that have fallen
into the arms of pro-Russia insurgents. "The only way the United States can
have any effect in this region and turn the tide," Mr. Scales said, "is to
start killing Russians . killing so many Russians that even Putin's media can't
hide the fact that Russians are returning to the motherland in body bags. But,
given the [small] amount of support we've given to the Ukrainians, given the
ability of the Ukrainians themselves to counter-attack against these, what?
12,000 Russians camped in their country . eh.sadly, it's not gonna likely to
happen".

This gift from Fox News was eagerly accepted by the Kremlin propaganda machine
and Russian media bit into the story like a pitbull.

Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs reacted with angry statement and its
official representative Alexander Lukashevich called the retired general's
remarks "disgusting."

"No less disgusting was the fact that the calls for the killings of our
fellow citizens-of you and me-were made live by one of the leading national
channels, during the prime-time, aiming at the maximum audience possible.
This is exactly how the country's mainstream media forms the atmosphere of
hatred towards Russia in American society."

The representative of the Russian Investigative Committee, Vladimir Markin,
reacted with less political correctness, Tweeting the following: "We thought
that, at the arrival of the spring, only maniacs, schizophrenics and pedophiles
become more active, but it turns out, American retired generals also. We will
keep this fact in mind."

The US State Department, when asked for explanation, shrugged off the whole
thing, stating that they didn't comment on the views expressed by retired
military personnel.

Russian media immediately made an anti-celebrity out of Mr. Scales, the main
argument being "What if a Russian retired general would have gone on a major
Russian TV channel and called for killing Americans in Ukraine? How would the
State Department have reacted?"

As the scandal was growing, Mr. Scales was surprised to discover that Russians
watch Fox News in addition to the "official propaganda" TV channels. "Isn't it
funny they watch us?" He said during his next interview on Fox. "I got emails
today from people in Russia I've never heard of before. I didn't know that the
Fox News was watched in Russia but I'll tell you this-Fox is not Vladimir
Putin's favorite network because ... we are trying to tell the truth about
what's going on in places like Ukraine."

He was even more surprised to discover that his statement launched a criminal
case against him under the Russian Criminal Code Article 354 "Public calls to
start aggressive war, made with the use of mass media" whose punishment varies
from 500,000 rubles (or the criminal's income of three years) to five-years
jail term. According to the argument of the Russian Criminal Investigation
team, "taking part in the live show of one of the TV channels, retired general
of the US Army Robert Scales called on the highest political and military
leadership of the USA, American citizens to conduct the military operations on
the territory of Ukraine and to killing of the citizens of the Russian
Federation, and, also, Russian-speaking people."

In addition, Russia's Investigative Committee stated that the retired general's
calls to "kill Russians" broke international norms, including Article 20 of the
International Pact on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, which prohibits any
war propaganda and any incitement to discrimination, animosity and violence.

"No vodka and no borsch for me" was the retired general's public reaction to
the investigation, expressed live on Fox News again. "If we don't help the
Ukrainians do something to take back lost territories in the east, if we don't
give the Ukrainians the weapons they need . The Russian military is in
disarray. . Only military actions by the Ukrainians that we support will turn
the tide," he added.

Mr. Scales was not concerned "at all" about the criminal investigation that
Russians launched against him, although he stated that his wish to vacation in
Russia "is not gonna happen".

According to Mr. Scales, the attack on him by the Russians was an attack on the
First Amendment in the US and an attempt to intimidate the free press. Despite
all the bravado, he abruptly canceled plans a cruise to the Baltics, being
careful about the long arms of Russian Femida.

One of the papers wrote: "All the meaning of American politics is hidden, which
is based on the unlimited egoism and egocentrism. It turns out that, according
to the US general, to call for mass murder of the citizens of a particular
ethnicity in front of multi-million audience - that is within the framework of
things, it is allowed to him, but to call him to justice is an attack on
western media and freedom of speech!"

Mr. Scales' public statement that he had to buy the polonium detector as a
precaution against the evil Russians most likely already plotting against
him-an obvious referral to the mysterious murder of the ex-KGB Alexander
Litvinenko in London in 2006-again hit the headlines in Russia, adding gasoline
to the fire.

"How many diapers does he use in a day?" asked the representative of the
Russian Investigative Committee Vladimir Markin via Twitter. "And the spring is
still ahead of us!" Vice-Prime Minister in charge of the Russia's
military-industrial complex Dmitry Rogozin echo-also on Twitter-"He [ret. Maj.
Gen.] is a real cuckoo! Let's send him a diaper!"

"US general was prescribed diapers" was the least vicious of the newspaper
headlines.

Nobody knows if the Russians in fact did send Mr. Scales a package of diapers
or if he used his new detector to check it for polonium poisoning upon its
arrival, but definitely the Russians have been on alert for his every word ever
since.

Take my word for it-in Russia people don't usually pay attention to San Diego
Union-Tribune or to the opinions expressed in it-unless the opinion belongs to
the retired major-general Robert H. Scales.

The very title of his piece <http://bit.ly/1KpUGOX>, published on August 15,
"The Army is broken," was music to the ears of Russia's hawks and
America-haters.

On the day after Mr. Scales' opinion appeared, Russian news media giant RIA
Novosti published a story with the sensational headline, "The General Who Said
'Kill Russians' Complains about the Decline of the US Army." Shrugging off the
general's intimate emotions expressed in the piece, the Kremlin media machine
provided a dry summary of Mr. Scales' outcry.

The US army is destroyed for the third time since the mid-20th century-this
time, by the reduction of the army and defense budget cuts by 'ahistorical
and strategically tone-deaf leadership in Washington.' The US army is broken
by the lack of training and antiquated equipment. Low morale, alcoholism,
hard drug abuse by soldiers, domestic violence and suicides among US troops
led to the decline in 'military spirit.' Young army leaders are voting with
their feet.

In other words, implied RIA Novosti, the US army is not as strong an adversary
as it looks. It cannot be otherwise, since no less a celebrity Russophobe than
retired major-general Robert H. Scales said so, the one who is wanted by
Russian police for calling for the killing of Russian citizens.

There were no mocking Tweets this time, nobody offered to send diapers to
America for Mr. Scales.

While retired US army general's story was unfolding in Russia, the US State
Department announced the renewal of its crusade against what it called "Russian
propaganda," heralding the increase in spending on the program, including a
$500,000 grant to train journalists to fight "Moscow lies" in the Baltic states
alone. If the point is to counter Russian rhetoric, the State Department might
do better to spend its half million keeping General Scales away from
microphones and keyboards.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.unz.com/proberts/us-has-been-planning-to-wipe-out-russia-since-1945/>
US Has Been Planning to Wipe Out Russia Since 1945

[Oleg Smirnov]

Thoughts from South Africa (ANC <http://bit.ly/1UA0Uwz> document)

<http://www.anc.org.za/docs/umrabulo/2015/ngc_disc_docsy.pdf>

.. The rise of China as the second strongest economy, with the re-emergence of
economies of Russia, and major countries of the South, is gradually redefining
the world towards a multi-polar order. Therefore, the growing influence of China
on the global economy is an important factor in the balance of global power
relations.

Further giving credence to "shifting balance of forces", as opposed to static
observation, of the dominant US led unipolar world, is the emergence of BRICS
constituted by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The formation of
BRICS as a powerful political and socio economic bloc is necessarily not just
about the size of the population of the member states but also the abundance of
the requisite markets.

.. The US does not appreciate the resurgence of China and Russia as dominant
factors in the arena of international power relations. It has instead declared a
cold war against these two emerging world powers.

- The US is bent on portraying China as the world's worst polluter and a threat
to the environment with the intention being to suggest that China is but a paper
tiger whose economic rise is not sustainable.

- The US, backed by its ideological apparatus, has tried a repeat of the
Tiananmen Square against the Chinese government by parading to the world counter
revolution as a popular uprising and counter revolutionaries as human rights
activists.

- The US is exploiting China's dispute with some of its Asian neighbours over
the North and South China Sea islands to rally these neighbours against China,
including trying to build an anti-China alliance of Asian satellite statesthat
will take its ordersfrom Washington.

Russia has not been spared the wrath of US-led Western imperialism. As with
China, the Russian leadership is constantly being portrayed in the Western media
and official discourse as monsters abusing human rights. As with China, counter
revolutionary demonstrations and marches are being staged and given huge
publicity in the Western media in order to destabilise and / provoke the Russian
government.

Whatever genuine concerns may exist within the Russian population and
populations of former Soviet Union, there is a clear plot to exploit this in
order to contain the rise of Russia globally. It is an encirclement strategy
that seeks to isolate Russia in the manner that is being attempted on China as
well.

This is the context within which the crisis in Ukraine should be understood by
the world progressive forces. The war taking place in Ukraine is not about
Ukraine. Its intended target is Russia. As with China, Russia's neighbours are
being mobilised to adopt a hostile posture against Moscow, and enticed to join
the European Union and NATO. Pro-West satellite states are being cultivated or
as we saw with the coup in Ukraine, even invented, to encircle Russia and allow
their territory to be used for the deployment of NATO's hostile military
hardware faced in the direction of Russia. These Western manoeuvres, directed
from Washington, are reminiscent of Cold War. They have vowed in Washington that
there will be Russia or China to challenge the US hegemony.

Washington's sponsored destabilisation is not limited to Russia and China. We
see it unfolding in the streets of Latin America including in Venezuela which
the US has strangely declared a threat to its "national security", in the Middle
East and in African countries with the sole intention of toppling a progressive
democratically-elected governments. This has a bearing on the nature of conflict
and the scourge of terrorism we see in the world today. ..

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.unz.com/proberts/us-has-been-planning-to-wipe-out-russia-since-1945/>
US Has Been Planning to Wipe Out Russia Since 1945

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/12/europe/uk-labour-party-leader-corbyn/index.html>

London (CNN)Veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn was convincingly elected leader
of Britain's opposition Labour Party on Saturday, after a contest that
revealed deep divisions within the party's ranks.
Corbyn, a socialist who ran on an anti-austerity platform, claimed victory in
the first round of voting -- taking 59.5% of the votes cast by more than half
a million eligible Labour Party members and supporters. .. "Going to war
creates a legacy of bitterness and problems," he said. "Let us be a force for
change in the world, a force for humanity in the world, a force for peace in
the world, and a force that recognizes we cannot go on like this .."

...

If I was a Briton then I would perhaps not share some of Mr Corbyn's accents
and proposals, but he is certainly a sane political figure, and he looks not
as hypocrite as those who run Britain presently.

The fact that people have supported a politician with pronounced anti-war
attitudes is a signal to the US hawks / neocons / interventionists that people
in Europe begin to tire of the insanity of the US foreign policy makers.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
Thoughts from South Africa (ANC <http://bit.ly/1UA0Uwz> document)
<http://www.anc.org.za/docs/umrabulo/2015/ngc_disc_docsy.pdf>

[Oleg Smirnov]

<https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/14/a-challenge-to-neoliberal-orthodoxy/>

A Challenge to Neoliberal Orthodoxy

September 14, 2015

Conventional thinkers say Jeremy Corbyn's election to head Britain's
opposition Labour Party and Bernie Sanders's surge against Hillary Clinton are
passing fancies that will fade as the summer ends, but Nicolas J S Davies sees
the hope for an inspiring new politics.
By Nicolas J S Davies

.. The rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s succeeded in marginalizing
progressive politics for a generation in the U.S. and U.K., reducing most
political activists' view of "the possible" to focusing on single-issue
advocacy or supporting the "lesser evil" in actually existing politics - or
some ill-fitting combination of the two.

Rationalizations abound to excuse the outrages of the Clinton and Obama
administrations. Many Democrats now subscribe to a myth of the Presidency as a
powerless office where a fine speech from the "bully pulpit" counts for more
than actual policy decisions that bring death or misery to millions - and yet
the same people still hold President George W. Bush responsible for his
actions!

Such cognitive dissonance is an essential, paralyzing element in the
marginalization of participatory democracy under neoliberalism. People
consider themselves sophisticated for accepting the glaring contradictions and
compartmentalizations of a "political reality" that is really based on the
endless and uncritical repetition of myths and misinformation, much of it
deliberately crafted by corporate-funded think tanks and PR firms.

Political philosopher Sheldon Wolin coined the term "inverted totalitarianism"
<http://bit.ly/1NzJP7e> to describe this political system in which traditional
tools of democracy like elections and the press have not been abolished but
simply co-opted. Wolin explains how this has led to a more effective and
sustainable concentration of wealth and political power than "classical
totalitarianism" could ever achieve.

...

The (left-)liberal, 'progressive' discourse in the West in the recent decades
was largely hijacked by 'liberal interventionism' (eg. <http://is.gd/wluzVM>)
which is in fact a sort of imperialist agenda under cover of progressiveness.

Mr. Corbyn seems to be of 'true' lefties that could withstand the temptation.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/12/europe/uk-labour-party-leader-corbyn/index.html>
London (CNN)Veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn was convincingly
elected leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party on Saturday,

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://tinyurl.com/zb23h3v> iol.co.za

US embassy fuelling regime change - Gwede

JONISAYI MAROMO / 20 February 2016

ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe set off a social media frenzy yesterday
when he charged that clandestine meetings, promoting regime change in South
Africa, were being held regularly at the US embassy in Pretoria.

"As we mobilise our people, we must say, be vigilant. You must see through
anarchy and people who are out there in a programme of regime change. We are
aware of the meetings taking place regularly at the American embassy,"
Mantashe told tens of thousands of ANC supporters at the Union Buildings in
Pretoria.

"Those meetings in the embassy are about nothing else other than mobilisation
for regime change. We're aware of a programme that takes young people to the
United States for six weeks, brings them back and plants them everywhere in
the campuses and everywhere." ..

...

There are responses to this statement in the (pro-)American media trying to
present the politician as a paranoid clown. But it is still hardly a paranoia
from a rational perspective. Taking into account the ANC's agenda (see the
link below) and the known addiction of the American policymakers to make evil
under guise of liberation and democracy it is not unlikely that the S.African
elected government risks of being subjected to the American 'regime change'
execution.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.anc.org.za/docs/umrabulo/2015/ngc_disc_docsy.pdf>

[Siri Cruz]

Post by Oleg Smirnov
"Those meetings in the embassy are about nothing else other than mobilisation
for regime change. We're aware of a programme that takes young people to the
United States for six weeks, brings them back and plants them everywhere in
the campuses and everywhere." ..

https://youngafricanleaders.state.gov/washington-fellowship/

The Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders,
begun in 2014, is the flagship program of President Obama¹s
Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) that empowers young
people through academic coursework, leadership training, and
networking. In 2016, the Fellowship will provide 1,000
outstanding young leaders from Sub-Saharan Africa with the
opportunity to hone their skills at a U.S. higher education
institution with support for professional development after
they return home.

Since this is about overthrowing South Africa, I'm sure the programme and its
details are MOST SECRET. I was only able to find this site through my elite
hacking skills.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
There are responses to this statement in the (pro-)American media trying to
present the politician as a paranoid clown. But it is still hardly a paranoia

http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-02-23-analysis-mantashes-conspiracy-t
heories/#.Vs7VpEvF_wI

Last week Friday, the African National Congress marched against
racism and they handed over a memorandum that was essentially
from themselves to themselves, calling on themselves to prevent
themselves and other selves from doing such things to all their selves.

Around the climax of this curiously omphaloskeptic endeavour,
the party¹s secretary general, none other than Gwede Mantashe,
rose to inform the crowd about how best to combat racism.

Daily Maverick is South Africa source which means they are not African. Since
you don't like what they're saying, that makes them pro-American. Actually I've
never heard of the Daily Maverick or Mantashe before, but given your history, I
know I can trust everything you claim.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
from a rational perspective. Taking into account the ANC's agenda (see the
link below) and the known addiction of the American policymakers to make evil
under guise of liberation and democracy it is not unlikely that the S.African

Does anyone in the US give a shit about RSA? Is there going to be another Gods
Must Be Crazy movie?

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/ussr-foreign-minister-nato-broke-its-promise-russia-did-not-lose-cold-war/ri9574>

USSR Foreign Minister: NATO Broke its Promise. Russia Did Not "Lose" the Cold
War

a.. It was the USSR which liberated Europe from the Cold War, not NATO...
Europe is profoundly ungrateful for this
b.. Russia didn't lose the Cold War, it ended it
c.. By the end of the Gorbachyov era, Russia was a free and open country
d.. Yeltsin was a catastrophe for Russia
e.. Today there is a vacuum of strategic thinking in the West

Boris Pankin

A very well argued and incisive piece from one of the USSR's best and brightest.

Exclusively for Russia Insider.

In August 1991 Boris Pankin, then Ambassador to Prague, was the only
high-ranking Soviet diplomat to denounce the attempted coup against Gorbachyov.
Subsequently Gorbachyov appointed him Foreign Minister. After the breakup of
the Soviet Union Yeltsin made him the first Russian Ambassador to the UK.

This paper was submitted to a Harvard University symposium held at Stockholm
University on September 3, 2015 in Stockholm.

Read it in full <http://tinyurl.com/ptxz83u>

...

This represents mostly the Gorbachyov team's perspective and vision.

Many old farts in the Usenet remain strongly fixated on the USSR, so this
reading may be of interest. There's a little doubt that the end of the USSR
was caused mainly by internal reasons, - there was a mix of many [noble and
baser] factors, and the primary were ideological, it became clear that there
is too many falsehood that could no longer meet the real life.

However, the Soviet self-dismantlement had provoked easy rationalizations in
the minds of certain groups of thinkers. For example, the post-Soviet Israeli
intellectuals developed a theory that the USSR collapsed as soon as a large
part of Jews migrated to Israel, because namely the Jews ensured functioning
of the Soviet state. Use of this theory has not led to effects discernible in
practice though. In turn, the al-Qaeda ideologists attributed the end of the
USSR to their own efforts, interpreting it as their victory in the Afghan war.
This theory led them to action - it predetermined their resolve to start new
fight against America since if it was possible to defeat one super-power then
why wouldn't be it possible to defeat yet another one. In turn, the American
ideologists attributed the Soviet end to American merits on organization of
the radical islamism movement in Afghanistan and machinations with the Saudi
oil, and thus declared the US winner of the Cold War. This fallacy produced
the most serious consequences for the world, which includes in particular the
current mess in the M. East, the immigration crisis and more.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.unz.com/proberts/us-has-been-planning-to-wipe-out-russia-since-1945/>
US Has Been Planning to Wipe Out Russia Since 1945

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://www.unz.com/tsaker/europe-in-free-fall/>

Europe in Free Fall

THE SAKER . AUGUST 27, 2015

Europe is in free fall. Nobody can doubt that any more. In fact, the EU is
simultaneously suffering from several severe problems and any one of these
could potentially become catastrophic. Let's look at them one by one.

The 28 member EU makes no economic sense ..

The EU is on the verge of a social and cultural collapse ..

The EU is just a colony of the United States ..

The EU is in a deep political crisis ..

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/08/15/russia-sanctions-cost-to-west-could-exceed-700bn-warns-think-tank/>
RUSSIA SANCTIONS COST TO WEST COULD EXCEED $700BN WARNS THINK TANK

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2015/august/26/weaponizing-migrants/>

Weaponizing Migrants

written by anne williamson wednesday august 26, 2015

Europeans ought to be demanding Uncle Sam's head on a silver platter, and those
of their own leaders on pikes.

Thanks to 25 years of lunatic US foreign policy initiatives and relentless
military aggressions, the steady drip of illegal immigration into Europe from
Africa and the Middle East has become a crisis of refugees. Not only has the US
killed and maimed at least a million people and displaced millions more, it has
destroyed the property - water, sanitation and transport systems - that support
the networks of trade and commerce essential to the survival of developed human
communities. The US has salted great swaths of the Middle East with the
desiccated and irradiated debris of war. Disease and contagions lurk in shadows
while the agents of violence march in the noonday sun.

Think about it. How many millions might truly have no place to go?

The worst consequence of the US's attempt to remodel the Middle East may prove
to be having opened the gates to a mass migration the likes of which Europe
hasn't seen for centuries. If so, then Christian Europe will be swallowed up.

Europe's decision to outsource its defense to the American occupiers after
World War II freed up the financing for an increasingly prosperous Europe to
build welfare states that in time grew so generous as to challenge the
viability of the competing structures of Church and Family and led,
higgledy-piggledy, to a demographic crisis. Fewer and fewer western European
nations enjoy a replacement birth rate. It is not improbable that a migrant
population of size composed largely of of young, unattached males
<http://bit.ly/1JDkZfe> could overwhelm Europe's single rising population of
white-haired burghers and villeins <http://bit.ly/1Vlx1T0>.

There is precedent for such an outcome.

The remnants of Rome and those tribes already settled in the west of what is
the Eurasian continent sorted themselves out through episodic wars and
fantastic intrigues into various kingdoms and principalities that became, more
or less, the prototypes of the nations of Europe.

The East, however, was shaped by ongoing mass migrations out of Asia and the
Middle East. In what is today's Ukraine, Crimea, Caucuses, and Turkey, waves of
migrants wreaked havoc on established polities.

Kingdoms and empires rose and fell. Entire populations vanished from the
historical record.

When the Russians showed up a thousand years ago, they first put down roots
along the northern slopes of the Carpathian mountains only to move onto the
open steppe near where Kiev stands today. To retain those broad, open lands
which lay across essential trade routes, the Russians were compelled to fend
off the Pechenegs, then the Torks, then the Cumans, only to succumb for nearly
300 years to the Mongols, who were led at different times by two of history's
fiercest conquerors, Ghengis Khan and Batu.

To escape the Mongol horde, the Russians migrated northward to forested lands
<http://bit.ly/1JsmJv5> so dense a horse, and thus a Mongol, could not pass.
After some centuries, the Moscow princes succeeded in throwing off the Mongol
yoke. Their reward? Two hundred more years of wars involving Poland, Lithuania,
Cossacks, and rebellious serfs before Imperial Russia could reclaim the steppes
only to have to again fight the earlier invaders' descendants then on return
trips from the West; Poland, Lithuania, and a new contender, Sweden.

It is an echo of history that Poland, Lithuania and Sweden are the very
European nations which initiated and continue to sponsor the EU's Eastern
Partnership Treaty, whose rejection by the corrupt but elected Yanukovich
government delivered the premise and the conditions for the US-manufactured
2014 coup in Ukraine. In time, Ukraine delivered to Russia at least a million
Ukrainian refugees <http://bit.ly/1PZpztI> (registered and unregistered)
fleeing the subsequent civil war in their homeland.

Once burdened with a failing Ukraine it did not know or understand, Europe then
found itself obliged to enter into the sanctions regime against Russia the US
demanded in the wake of Crimea's vote for the third time in the last quarter of
a century to exit Ukraine and re-unite with Russia. In July 2014, the US's
repeated and spurious charges that Russia was responsible for the shoot down of
a passenger jet which Ukrainian air controllers had inexplicably re-routed over
their own country's war zone in the east stage-managed the world's emotions to
a fever pitch. Absurd characterizations of, and allegations against, Vladimir
Putin littered the pages of the lamestream media.

Constant pressure from Nato alarmists and chest beaters for Europe to up its
military game succeeded in getting the EU's further agreement for the alliance
to station missiles and men along Russia's border from the Black Sea to the
Baltic, an unnecessary provocation for which only Poland and Lithuania
clamored. A posturing Nato has yet to squeeze out of the Europeans a firm
commitment to increase their contributions to Nato funding.

The Russians for their part are alert to both their Eastern border with
Ukraine, the venue of the US's most recent weapons and personnel dump, and to
possible incursions into the Caucuses along the motherland's southern border by
armed bands of ISIS fighters.

As US bellicosity continues its pursuit of mayhem in the Middle East, the
numbers of refugees arriving in Italy and Greece by boat from Libya are growing
exponentially. From refugee camps in southern Europe the migrants travel
northward to the more fiscally fit and generous welfare states.

An April estimate of an expected 300,000 refugees <http://nyti.ms/1JfbR5s> into
Germany grew to 800,000 <http://ab.co/1hvYOSg> by mid-August and that figure
too will need revision by year's end. The situation is the same across Europe.
Hungary is building a fence <http://yhoo.it/1VlxVih> along its border with
Serbia and installing 1,000s of police officers to patrol it in defiance of EU
demands for each member of the union to accept quotas of refugees. Macedonia
has declared a state of emergency <http://ab.co/1hvYOSg> over the influx, her
border police forces having been overwhelmed. The entrance to the Eurotunnel at
the port of Calais on France's northern coast is the site of daily battles
between police and migrants <http://ab.co/1LC6gFl> seeking entry into Great
Britain. Reports of loud demonstrations of citizens demanding protection have
become common while violent incidents <http://yhoo.it/1N21LXW> between locals
and migrants are on the rise.

Most telling of all is the Latvian Ambassador's recent declaration
<http://bit.ly/1JDlypo> to Nato that the biggest threat his country is facing
is not from Russia but from the inflow of Ukrainian refugees and the outflow of
its own native population.

On Thursday last, Nicolas Bonnal, writing for the French website Boulevard
Voltaire <http://bit.ly/1LC6nAG>, reported on an Austrian magazine's scoop
<http://bit.ly/1F6GzrL> - courtesy of leaks from military intelligence
stationed in Vienna - that the US government is paying guides and middlemen who
bring migrants to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea. The original Info-Direkt
article reported that the guides are well-equipped with technology, and are old
hands at working Facebook, Twitter and Skype, as were the agents who instigated
the Arab Spring.

With the targets of "color revolutions" having caught on to the CIA's game of
sedition, has inducing mass migrations meant to re-jigger the world so as to
better serve their global purposes become the very latest weapon in the US
neo-cons' arsenal?

It's hard to credit the idea that Hillary Clinton, then the US Secretary of
State, didn't understand the consequences <http://usat.ly/1EG1iCh> of the
"responsibility to protect" attack on Libya she and her foreign policy gal pals
cooked up around the boiling cauldron that is US foreign policy. Muammar
Gaddafi himself loudly warned both Italy and France, who so unwisely joined in
the US-instigated Libyan melee, of the flood of refugees that would come from
toppling his gatekeeper government.

But why would a flood of refugees into Europe interest US policymakers?

Possibly because the US's many attempts to bait Russia into attacking Ukrainian
armed forces and thereby scare up increased Nato funding from the alliance's
membership have proved a risible failure. Flooding Europe with "swarms"
<http://ab.co/1Jp3qR9> of refugees just might convince Europeans that there is
a useful purpose <http://bit.ly/1NUnfTD> an expanding Nato presence could
fulfill immediately.

Those same US policymakers are actively working to inundate the US with
millions of migrants from Mexico and Central America, another imperial
playground, on the flimsy basis of a Barack Obama Executive Order. Eager for a
youthful, docile, dependent and cheap population of worker bees, the US federal
government is now engaged in draining the last wealth <http://bit.ly/1E8u6ZL>
of the American middle class for use in settling and supporting many millions
of immigrants, whose children will become the future taxpayers and voters
<http://bit.ly/1ErzLKn> the grotesquely obese federal government requires for
its own future survival.

At last then, the long-sought weapons of mass destruction have been located. We
can see them clearly now: They are Africa's and the Middle East's desperate and
dispossessed migrants, and Central America's young and unwitting illegals, of
"the free world's" creation, and they are on the move.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.unz.com/tsaker/europe-in-free-fall/>
Europe in Free Fall

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/neocon-watch/2015/august/30/the-neocon-foreign-policy-walmart/>

The Neocon Foreign Policy Walmart

written by daniel mcadams sunday august 30, 2015

One of the most depressing things about watching -- even from a distance -- the
quadrennial race for the White House is seeing what passes for debate on the
one area where the president does have some Constitutional authority: foreign
policy.

Candidates who have spent little or no time studying or traveling to the rest
of the world, and, in the fashion of many Americans in the age of Empire, see
the rest of the world as just a series of US colonial outposts, apparently
consider foreign policy unworthy of serious consideration.

So little do Republican candidates care about foreign policy that most of them
have "outsourced" <http://bv.ms/1Lb0aeN> their foreign policy to a single
neocon-dominated foreign policy shop called the "John Hay Initiative." If you
wonder why most Republican candidates sound exactly the same on foreign policy,
it's because they are nearly all getting their advice from the same people.

When nearly all candidates look to someone like Eliot Cohen
<http://bit.ly/1hNmCRY>, a founding member of the Project for a New American
Century (PNAC), to provide an off-the-shelf foreign policy, it should be no
surprise that the "debate" in the Republican party is only over which country
to attack first.

Any candidate who thinks so little about something so important as America's
place in the world should be automatically disqualified.

But the neocons love it! The "experts" who brought us the 2003 Iraq war and the
Libya "liberation" are still in the driver's seat when it comes to foreign
policy.

"Jeb!" has John Hay Initiative members Michael Chertoff and Michael Hayden
(remember those crooks? <http://huff.to/1qMgZA6>) on board as his advisors.

Marco Rubio reportedly draws from Hay Project member Roger Zakheim
<http://bit.ly/1Ug8lOx>, the son of GW Bush administration "vulcan," Dov
Zakheim <http://bit.ly/1KVUXVH>. Zakheim père, we remember, joined with his
fellow neocons to lie the US into war with Iraq, enriching the
military-industrial complex, before absconding to the "private sector" to make
his millions from the same military-industrial complex. Zakheim quickly and
quietly left his position as the Pentagon's chief financial officer after a
trillion dollars went missing <http://bit.ly/1KVUYJ2> and the Government
Accountability Office was critical of his handling of matters.

Scott Walker, a soporific candidate who nevertheless still gives neocons like
Bill Kristol the vapors <http://bit.ly/1JqGwJ3>, also shops the neocon Walmart
of foreign policy, the John Hay Initiative. It should be no surprise, then,
that at his big foreign policy coming out speech <http://bit.ly/1JqGzEB> at the
Citadel military college Friday, he unveiled an "aggressive" foreign policy --
crying out "America will not be intimidated. And neither will I" -- as he
promised more war and vowed that "the retreat is over!"

Is this <http://bit.ly/1Kwtdv2> the retreat he is talking about?

Walker reportedly taps into the McCain Institute's David Kramer, a John Hay
member, for his foreign policy wisdom. Kramer is another PNAC alumni, also
putting in time at the CIA-affiliated Freedom House and as director of the Bush
State Department's Office of Policy Planning. This must explain Walker's
obsession with taking out Iran. He vowed to "roll back the theocrats in
Tehran," but in fact unlike the US, Tehran has not invaded another country in
hundreds of years. What's to "roll back?"

If Walker actually paid any attention to the quality of advice he gets from his
PNAC/John Hay gang he might call for his money back. Walker's speech was
peppered with macho language about "defeat[ing] the barbarians of ISIS," while
also vowing to destroy the two forces actually fighting ISIS -- Syria and Iran!
In fact, his vow to use the US military to overthrow the Syrian government
would without question result in the greatest ISIS victory to date -- control
of Syria. One need not sympathize with Assad to recognize that he is literally
the only thing keeping the whole of Syria out of the hands of ISIS.

John Hay Initiative "experts" also wrote the foreign policy speeches of
candidates Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie. No doubt they were behind
Fiorina's astonishingly ignorant vow to make her first call as president to
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to "to reassure him that we stand with the
state of Israel" and to make her second call to Iran to "to tell him that
whatever the deal is that he signed with Obama, there's a new deal and the new
deal is this: Until you submit every facility [where] you have nuclear uranium
enrichment to a full set of inspections, we're going to make it as hard as
possible for you to move money around the global financial system."

Pure PNAC.

These neocons should be in jail, not still deeply ensconced in the Beltway
foreign policy halls of power, dining in sumptuous splendor while the rest of
America is impoverished by the destructive wars they push. Their lies have cost
millions of innocent lives overseas as well. They are a cancer on the country.
Any candidate who cares so little about the issues as to accept a "virtual
staff" of foreign policy "experts" from those who have gotten every single
major foreign policy issue of our time totally and catastrophically wrong has
no business holding any elected office.

John Hay? I'd rather shop for a foreign policy expert at Walmart.

Copyright © 2015 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
Please donate to the Ron Paul Institute <http://bit.ly/1y3s3Tc>

...

America in decline.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.unz.com/tsaker/europe-in-free-fall/>
Europe in Free Fall

[Oleg Smirnov]

<https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/07/how-neocons-destabilized-europe/>

How Neocons Destabilized Europe

September 7, 2015

Exclusive: The neocon prescription of endless "regime change" is spreading chaos
across the Middle East and now into Europe, yet the neocons still control the
mainstream U.S. narrative and thus have diagnosed the problem as not enough
"regime change," as Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry

The refugee chaos that is now pushing deep into Europe - dramatized by
gut-wrenching photos of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose body washed up on a
beach in Turkey - started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and
their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East
and other parts of the world through "regime change."

Instead of the promised wonders of "democracy promotion" and "human rights,"
what these "anti-realists" have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and
destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine
and the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the
Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing - such as that there
hasn't been enough "regime change."

For instance, The Washington Post's neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt on
Monday blamed "realists" for the cascading catastrophes
<http://wapo.st/1KVjzlE>. Hiatt castigated them and President Barack Obama for
not intervening more aggressively in Syria to depose President Bashar al-Assad,
a longtime neocon target for "regime change."

But the truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced
back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal
fellow-travelers who have resisted political compromise and, in the case of
Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement
between Assad and his political opponents, those who are not terrorists.

In early 2014, the neocons and liberal hawks sabotaged Syrian peace talks in
Geneva by blocking Iran's participation and turning the peace conference into a
one-sided shouting match where U.S.-funded opposition leaders yelled at Assad's
representatives who then went home. All the while, the Post's editors and their
friends kept egging Obama to start bombing Assad's forces.

The madness of this neocon approach grew more obvious in the summer of 2014 when
the Islamic State, an Al Qaeda spinoff which had been slaughtering suspected
pro-government people in Syria, expanded its bloody campaign of beheadings back
into Iraq where this hyper-brutal movement first emerged as "Al Qaeda in Iraq"
in response to the 2003 U.S. invasion.

It should have been clear by mid-2014 that if the neocons had gotten their way
and Obama had conducted a massive U.S. bombing campaign to devastate Assad's
military, the black flag of Sunni terrorism might well be flying above the
Syrian capital of Damascus while its streets would run red with blood.

But now a year later, the likes of Hiatt still have not absorbed that lesson -
and the spreading chaos from neocon strategies is destabilizing Europe. As
shocking and disturbing as that is, none of it should have come as much of a
surprise, since the neocons have always brought chaos and dislocations in their
wake.

When I first encountered the neocons in the 1980s, they had been given Central
America to play with. President Ronald Reagan had credentialed many of them,
bringing into the U.S. government neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams and
Robert Kagan. But Reagan mostly kept them out of the big-power realms: the
Mideast and Europe.

Those strategic areas went to the "adults," people like James Baker, George
Shultz, Philip Habib and Brent Scowcroft. The poor Central Americans, as they
tried to shed generations of repression and backwardness imposed by brutal
right-wing oligarchies, faced U.S. neocon ideologues who unleashed death squads
and even genocide against peasants, students and workers
<http://bit.ly/1QlBlik>.

The result - not surprisingly - was a flood of refugees, especially from El
Salvador and Guatemala, northward to the United States. The neocon "success" in
the 1980s, crushing progressive social movements and reinforcing the oligarchic
controls, left most countries of Central America in the grip of corrupt regimes
and crime syndicates, periodically driving more waves of what Reagan called
"feet people" through Mexico to the southern U.S. border.

Messing Up the Mideast ..

Read it in full <http://bit.ly/1itVXcR>

The Death of 'Realism'

The 2003 Iraq invasion sounded the death knell for foreign policy "realism" in
Official Washington. Aging or dead, the old adult voices were silent or ignored.
From Congress and the Executive Branch to the think tanks and the mainstream
news media, almost all the "opinion leaders" were neocons and many liberals fell
into line behind Bush's case for war.

And, even though the Iraq War "group think" was almost entirely wrong, both on
the WMD justifications for war and the "cakewalk" expectations for remaking
Iraq, almost no one who promoted the fiasco suffered punishment for either the
illegality of the invasion or the absence of sanity in promoting such a
harebrained scheme.

Instead of negative repercussions, the Iraq War backers - the neocons and their
liberal-hawk accomplices - essentially solidified their control over U.S.
foreign policy and the major news media. From The New York Times and The
Washington Post to the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise
Institute, the "regime change" agenda continued to hold sway.

It didn't even matter when the sectarian warfare unleashed in Iraq left hundreds
of thousands dead, displaced millions and gave rise to Al Qaeda's ruthless Iraq
affiliate. Not even the 2008 election of Barack Obama, an Iraq War opponent,
changed this overall dynamic.

Rather than standing up to this new foreign policy establishment, Obama bowed to
it, retaining key players from President Bush's national security team, such as
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, and by hiring hawkish
Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, who became Secretary of State, and
Samantha Power at the National Security Council.

Thus, the cult of "regime change" did not just survive the Iraq disaster; it
thrived. Whenever a difficult foreign problem emerged, the go-to solution was
still "regime change," accompanied by the usual demonizing of a targeted leader,
support for the "democratic opposition" and calls for military intervention.
President Obama, arguably a "closet realist," found himself as the foot-dragger-
in-chief as he reluctantly was pulled along on one "regime change" crusade after
another.

In 2011, for instance, Secretary of State Clinton and National Security Council
aide Power persuaded Obama to join with some hot-for-war European leaders to
achieve "regime change" in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi had gone on the
offensive against groups in eastern Libya that he identified as Islamic
terrorists.

But Clinton and Power saw the case as a test for their theories of "humanitarian
warfare" - or "regime change" to remove a "bad guy" like Gaddafi from power.
Obama soon signed on and, with the U.S. military providing crucial technological
support, a devastating bombing campaign destroyed Gaddafi's army, drove him from
Tripoli, and ultimately led to his torture-murder.

'We Came, We Saw, He Died' ..

A War on Assad ..

Get Putin ..

Read it in full <http://bit.ly/1itVXcR>

A Dozen Years of Chaos

So, we can now look at the consequences and costs of the past dozen years under
the spell of neocon/liberal-hawk "regime change" strategies. According to many
estimates, the death toll in Iraq, Syria and Libya has exceeded one million with
several million more refugees flooding into - and stretching the resources - of
fragile Mideast countries.

Hundreds of thousands of other refugees and migrants have fled to Europe,
putting major strains on the Continent's social structures already stressed by
the severe recession that followed the 2008 Wall Street crash. Even without the
refugee crisis, Greece and other southern European countries would be struggling
to meet their citizens' needs.

Stepping back for a moment and assessing the full impact of neoconservative
policies, you might be amazed at how widely they have spread chaos across a
large swath of the globe. Who would have thought that the neocons would have
succeeded in destabilizing not only the Mideast but Europe as well.

And, as Europe struggles, the export markets of China are squeezed, spreading
economic instability to that crucial economy and, with its market shocks, the
reverberations rumbling back to the United States, too.

We now see the human tragedies of neocon/liberal-hawk ideologies captured in the
suffering of the Syrians and other refugees flooding Europe and the death of
children drowning as their desperate families flee the chaos created by "regime
change." But will the neocon/liberal-hawk grip on Official Washington finally be
broken? Will a debate even be allowed about the dangers of "regime change"
prescriptions in the future?

Not if the likes of The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt have anything to say about
it. The truth is that Hiatt and other neocons retain their dominance of the
mainstream U.S. news media, so all that one can expect from the various MSM
outlets is more neocon propaganda, blaming the chaos not on their policy of
"regime change" but on the failure to undertake even more "regime change."

The one hope is that many Americans will not be fooled this time and that a
belated "realism" will finally return to U.S. geopolitical strategies that will
look for obtainable compromises to restore some political order to places such
as Syria, Libya and Ukraine. Rather than more and more tough-guy/gal
confrontations, maybe there will finally be some serious efforts at
reconciliation.

But the other reality is that the interventionist forces have rooted themselves
deeply in Official Washington, inside NATO, within the mainstream news media and
even in European institutions. It will not be easy to rid the world of the grave
dangers created by neocon policies.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book,
America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here <http://bit.ly/1e1Bae7> or as
an e-book (from Amazon <http://amzn.to/1NgNymN> and barnesandnoble.com
<http://bit.ly/1QNY0rx>). You also can order Robert Parry's trilogy on the Bush
Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The
trilogy includesAmerica's Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click
here <http://bit.ly/1itVqrt>.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/neocon-watch/2015/august/30/the-neocon-foreign-policy-walmart/>
The Neocon Foreign Policy Walmart

[Oleg Smirnov]

Mr. Sarkozy, <http://tinyurl.com/p6gxssa> lefigaro.fr

We see a serious mistake which was the creations of conditions for a new cold
war with Russia. We need Russia due to Syria mess. We must turn the page of the
Cold War with Moscow .. Russia should return to the G8 ..

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/07/how-neocons-destabilized-europe/>
How Neocons Destabilized Europe

[jack595]

Post by Oleg Smirnov
Mr. Sarkozy, <http://tinyurl.com/p6gxssa> lefigaro.fr
We see a serious mistake which was the creations of conditions for a new cold
war with Russia. We need Russia due to Syria mess. We must turn the page of the
Cold War with Moscow .. Russia should return to the G8 ..

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/07/how-neocons-destabilized-europe/>
How Neocons Destabilized Europe

I realize you have no clue as to how American democracy works, and I mean works.
This is just the warm up, reality sets in about March of 2016 when all of this
back and forth settles down to a few candidates. There is no media push to any
of this and your fantasy that the media drives the democracy is inverse, the
democracy drives the media. Pay attention, you need the drill for the next
round.

[Peter Skelton]

Post by Oleg Smirnov
Mr. Sarkozy, <http://tinyurl.com/p6gxssa> lefigaro.fr
We see a serious mistake which was the creations of conditions for a new cold
war with Russia. We need Russia due to Syria mess. We must turn the page of the
Cold War with Moscow .. Russia should return to the G8 ..

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/07/how-neocons-destabilized-europe/>
How Neocons Destabilized Europe

I realize you have no clue as to how American democracy works, and I mean works.

This is just the warm up, reality sets in about March of 2016 when all of
this
back and forth settles down to a few candidates. There is no media push to
any
of this and your fantasy that the media drives the democracy is inverse, the
democracy drives the media. Pay attention, you need the drill for the next
round.

Everything after 'clue' in your post is extraneous.

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://journalitico.com/2015/09/14/nyt-asks-are-western-values-losing-their-sway/>

NYT asks: Are Western values losing their sway?

SEPTEMBER 14, 2015 / DANIELLE RYAN

Steven Erlanger in the New York Times, asks: Are Western Values Losing Their
Sway? <http://bit.ly/1LwTLIu>

Here's my two cents:

The problem with our "Western values" is not the values in themselves,
although some are certainly questionable. The real problem is the triumphalism
that came with them after the West's 'victory' at the end of the Cold War, a
dangerous triumphalism that continues today. We have utterly convinced
ourselves that everyone else wants what we have and we will use any methods,
from the most bloody and overt, to the most quiet and covert, to pass them on.

We convince ourselves it's the "right" thing to do because, we tell ourselves,
the end will justify the means. So we shut our eyes to the side-effects and
carry on with our righteous mission. This kind of skewed thinking is how you
get so-called bleeding heart liberals calling for a humane solution to a
massive humanitarian crisis on one hand, while urging more NATO bombing on the
other.

It's a contradiction that has its roots in that very idea that we need to rid
the world of the 'bad' guys we don't like and fill it with the 'good' ones we
do like. We rarely consider that this might indeed be an impossible task, or
even, God forbid, wrong. Because of course, Western values are always "right".
Or as historian Paul Robinson put it yesterday <http://bit.ly/1OWg1Px> in a
blog post about the failures of Western foreign policy:

"The idea that the underlying policy itself might be faulty is never
properly considered. That would produce far too much cognitive dissonance.
And so the disasters keep piling up."

Even a person most uninterested in geopolitics, if you ask them, will probably
tell you that Western values are universally sought after and it therefore is
a noble goal to attempt to spread them. We all witnessed the celebrations at
anchor desks across the Western world at the beginning of the Arab Spring.
What a wonderful time it was for democracy, we were told. Our values were
(supposedly) sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa like never
before and we were all getting teary-eyed just thinking about it. It doesn't
take a genius to figure out how that all turned out.

But there is not much difference between the relatively uninformed and the
supposedly highly informed. I argued on Twitter with New York Timescolumnist
Roger Cohen a few months after he made the outstandingly weak case that
refugees from the Middle East and North Africa were coming for European
values. It was for this reason, he said, that they weren't going to Russia,
for example. I argued that if Russia was on the other side of the
Mediterranean where Italy and Greece are, they probably would be. I argued
that Western values had very little, if anything, to do with the reason most
were making such treacherous trips to Europe. If values were the draw, I said,
we would not have half as much trouble with integration and assimilation
between native populations and ME/NA immigrants as we do today in places like
Britain, France and Sweden.

It is abundantly clear that the majority of refugees would not be attempting
to reach Europe if it was not for the destruction of their homes and towns and
cities; destruction caused by civil wars and doubled-down on by NATO's various
"humanitarian interventions".

Erlanger's piece today accepts that what differentiates China, with its own
mix of both authoritarian capitalism and communism, is that it has no interest
in spreading its model across the world.

"China engages with the world in its own interest, divorced from moral aims,
with little desire to proselytize."

The same, I believe, can be said for Russia.

Russia, with features of both authoritarianism and democracy, is interested in
its near abroad; places that, for obvious reasons, already share its language
and culture. Places where people feel and are Russian.

That doesn't necessarily mean Putin is on some historic mission to conquer the
Baltics and recreate 'the glories' of the Soviet Union, as Barack Obama
recently claimed. It simply means that there are certain places Moscow regard
as within its sphere of influence and thus will react more strongly to events
in those places. The problem is that Washington is utterly convinced that only
it is entitled to a sphere of influence - and that sphere can extend to any
place, at any time. Moscow, on the other hand, is simply not allowed the same
luxury, even in its own back yard.

On a wider scale, Russia, like China, has no interest in imposing its model of
governance or cultural values on the rest of the world. Russia's own very
recent history affords it the knowledge that this kind of imperialism simply
does not work, which is why we hear so much from the Kremlin about the
importance of multi-polarity and international systems based on mutual
respect, not diktats and the relinquishment of sovereignty to a self-appointed
world leader.

Western leaders and politicians cannot accept that there may be places where a
different model might work - but at the same time, their incessant
declarations of superiority are laced with hypocrisy that is increasingly hard
to stomach. Calling for one thing and doing another. Do as we say, not as we
do. Imposing and forcing values and 'democracy' on cultures that either may
not want, or be ready for it, doesn't seem very.well, democratic.

Quoting the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, Erlanger writes:

Democracy cannot be imposed, but accrues, he suggested, dependent on "a
cluster of disparate elements and conditions." It "cannot be fashioned out
of whatever people happen to be around in a given region; it cannot be
promoted from outside by strangers; and it may still be impossible when
attempted from inside by determined natives."

Either way, what most Western leaders won't tell you, is that even in places
where there is democracy or some semblance of it, it can at any moment be
disregarded if they don't like its outcome. Democracy, it seems, evaporates
and reappears exactly when Western governments want it to. If the right guy
won, it's a victory for democracy. If the wrong guy won, we must oust him
immediately, for the sake of, you guessed it, freedom and democracy.

And just like democracy disappears conveniently, so too do borders. When US or
Western "interests" are at stake, borders evaporate. Indeed the White House
proudly professed it would not be "restricted by borders" in Syria when it
felt the need to insert itself uninvited into that country's civil war. A few
months earlier however, borders were all the rage in Crimea.

Western interests are always legitimate, transparent and morally superior.
Russia's interests on the other hand, are always illegitimate, mysterious and
morally bankrupt.

That's the line and they're sticking to it.

Follow me on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ
Like 'Journalitico' on Facebook

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://www.rp.pl/artykul/61991,1230715-Kapitalizm-pozera-wlasny-ogon.html>

Capitalism devours its own tail / The world may soon enter an era where
you could become rich only by birth. Modern capitalism begins to show more
and more similarities to feudalism.

...

Pretty tough anti-capitalist writing in the mainstream Polish newspaper.
That's the fourth major newspaper in Poland, 'moderately conservative'. You
may read it in full via google translator here <http://tinyurl.com/nk5x7tl>.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://journalitico.com/2015/09/14/nyt-asks-are-western-values-losing-their-sway/>
NYT asks: Are Western values losing their sway?

[Oleg Smirnov]

.. a way of fostering ruling class solidarity ..

<http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/sam-kriss-on-pig-gate-938>

Is Britain Ruled by a Secret Pig Fucking Cabal?

by Sam Kriss September 21, 2015

.. the real question isn't why he fucked a dead pig, but why anyone else
managed to find out about it. According to the Mail's source, an anonymous MP,
the act of forbidden love was part of his initiation into Oxford's Piers
Gaveston society; it's also alleged that Count Gottfried von Bismarck, his
contemporary at the university, threw dinner parties prominently featuring
pig's heads. This was pig fucking raised to the level of high ritual. It fits
in to accounts of similar Oxford behaviour: we have heard, for instance, the
claim that one of the initiations into the Bullingdon Club, of which David
Cameron and Boris Johnson were members, is to burn a fifty-pound note in front
of a homeless person <http://bit.ly/1B1pMb6>.

But in fact, the anthropological archive is full of this stuff. Among the Tiv
people of West Africa, for instance, it's a fairly common belief that the most
powerful members of society are part of a secret organisation called the
mbatsav, who meet at night to dig up bodies from graves and eat them. The Poro
secret society of Liberia, which occasionally functions as a parallel
government, is ruled by the commandment ifa mo - do not speak of it. Some kind
of initiation rite exists in every culture: I had a Bar Mitzvah, you might
have had Confirmation, or you might have necked a pint of piss during
Fresher's Week, and David Cameron is alleged to have fucked a dead pig.

It seems that the higher up you go in society, the more cruel and grotesque
the ritual becomes. There's an obvious reason for all this: for the upper
classes, good connections really matter. If you're going to have a secret
society, first you need to have a secret. Whether it's singing in screechy
adolescent Hebrew or corpse-eating and pig fucking, these initiations help
bind people together, and a student society in which everyone knows that
everyone else has done something unspeakable to a piece of ham is bound to
stay close afterwards. If anyone breaks ranks, or acts against the interests
of the collective, they can be instantly exposed. Groups like the Bullingdon
and the Piers Gaveston societies are not just rugby clubs for the ultra-rich,
a vehicle for youthful excess; they're a way of fostering ruling class
solidarity.

In a highly stratified society like the UK, where we're still ruled by those
chinlessly perverse dweebs who can trace their ancestry to the Norman
conquest, necro-bestiality isn't a weird affectation of the aristocratic
classes but something intrinsic to the way our country is organised. In places
with a greater degree of social mobility, like much of continental Europe,
there's less of a scope for this kind of institutional ossification of
perversion. But Britain is a profoundly sick society, and where you were born
still determines how the rest of your life will pan out. The ruling classes
will go to any lengths to keep it that way. These kids know that they might
one day end up leading the country, which is why it's essential that they cum
in a pig's mouth. It's not just enjoyment, it's class warfare. ..

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.rp.pl/artykul/61991,1230715-Kapitalizm-pozera-wlasny-ogon.html>
Capitalism devours its own tail / The world may soon enter an era where
you could become rich only by birth. Modern capitalism begins to show more
and more similarities to feudalism. .. <http://tinyurl.com/nk5x7tl> ..

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/10/02/there_is_no_economic_recovery>
.. So it seems that there just becomes less and less to hold onto, less and
less that you can believe in. Everything seems to be corrupt, or corrupted.
You don't seem to be able to trust anything as real. Whatever the government
tells you, there's always now giant question marks of doubt.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/sam-kriss-on-pig-gate-938>
Is Britain Ruled by a Secret Pig Fucking Cabal?

[Oleg Smirnov]

Here comes the idea that the Atlanticist the most top elite groups must be
practicing cannibalism or something like that, as a means to provide the most
strong interdependence and unity of their members.

<http://tinyurl.com/ohf6xet> foreignpolicy.com

<http://www.robfahey.co.uk/blog/the-pm-the-pig-and-musings-on-power/>

.. The danger to Cameron is that PigGate makes him a laughing-stock - that his
seriousness as a political leader will be forever deflated by the cat calls
and innuendo that will, undoubtedly, follow him for the rest of his life. .. I
don't know if this kind of story, once attached to the person of a politician,
ever goes away. .. It is clearly a calculated attack. ..

And here, I think, is something much bigger and more interesting than the
details of Cameron's vivid indiscretion; here is a rare public example of how
power is wielded by Britain's elite, of how control is exerted over those they
wish to manipulate, and of how those groomed for success from a young age can
be destroyed should they be seen to diverge from the steps they're told to
dance.

Initiation ceremonies or "hazing" rituals - often of a painful, humiliating,
transgressive, or sexual nature - are a well-documented part of the culture of
many organizations run by and for young men, especially those in positions of
privilege or at elite institutions. Hazing is a fixture, albeit usually in a
less extreme form than many might imagine, of Greek life at U.S. colleges;
initiation rituals are relatively common in elite societies at top educational
institutions elsewhere. Such rituals are an especially important part of
groups that require extreme discipline, such as certain military units. The
primary social function served by these rituals is to accelerate and deepen
the bonds shared by members of the group - and the sense of loyalty to the
group each person holds. By committing transgressive acts together, members
develop a sense of sharing in a mutual secret, thus creating trust; by
overcoming some humiliation or pain, new members deepen their commitment to
the group. Their internal logic reasons that if they are willing to endure
such an ordeal, it must mean that the group is important and deserving of
loyalty (otherwise, they would have made a terrible mistake and gone through
all of that suffering for nothing). Through these acts, bonds are forged,
networks established; the "old school tie," used as a metaphor for Britain's
elite networks, is also a metaphor for the actions and rituals, transgressive
or otherwise, which created these networks during their members' formative
years. ..

This system is self-sustaining and decentralized. It's in the interest of
people in the group to promote the careers of their fellow group members,
precisely because they have control through their knowledge of that person's
transgressive acts; similarly, it's in the interest of that person to promote
the careers of the other members for the same reason.
.. The more horrifying and illegal the act committed, the more the network
"owns" its members. ..

...

<http://theleveller.org/2015/09/british-really-laughing/>

Burning money in front of a homeless person isn't just intended to be a nasty
prank, it serves to train a Bullingdon boy's senses, to make other humans seem
somehow less. That David Cameron and his allies George Osborne and Boris
Johnson have all done this, and that they have all presided over a sharp spike
in homelessness in London and throughout the UK, are not coincidental. The MP
who provided Lord Ashcroft with the details of the pig story attended one
meeting of the expensive club but left in disgust because 'it was all about
despising poor people'. ..

The pig scandal that now has the world laughing at Cameron wasn't from the
Bullingdon Club but the Piers Gaverston, less well-known (until this week),
but with a reputation for bizarre sexual rituals and initiation rites. Where
the Bullingdon boys built their fraternity around shared values of hating the
poor, the Piers Gaverston was about sexual humiliation and the creation of
shared secrets. Its structural function is as an agreement of mutually assured
destruction between the rulers of tomorrow - I know your secret and you know
mine, so let's stay on the same side, yeah? ..

And David Cameron himself often likes to talk about the supposed existence of
meritocracy in the United Kingdom. He, too, went to Eton before joining the
Bullingdon Club and the Piers Gaverston. He is one of the most vocal
Conservatives when it comes to championing the ideology of meritocracy,
telling poor people and ethnic minorities that their lack of social climbing
is because they lack "aspiration", and that 'free' markets (that is,
unregulated financial bonanzas, by his allegiances) "can make you a better
person".

Separate from what he says, however, his government has significantly
increased inequality and decreased social mobility, making it even harder for
people outside of his privileged background to fulfill the meritocratic values
he regularly trumpets. ..

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/sam-kriss-on-pig-gate-938>
Is Britain Ruled by a Secret Pig Fucking Cabal?

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://tinyurl.com/qjxrhbl> journal-neo.org

Cameron Establishes "Total Control" Over UK Citizens

Martin Berger 04.11.2015

In the 21st century the political scene of most Western countries has been
heavily dominated by oligarchs and their obedient puppets who are desperate to
corrode the rule of law and radically restrict the personal freedoms of local
residents. This process has been significantly aggravated by the tragic events
of 9/11 and the severe financial crisis that followed the collapse of Lehmann
Brothers in 2008. According to one of the leading advisers to President
Obama - Rahm Emanuel "it would be a shame not to take advantage of such a
situation." <http://migre.me/s5aYK>

The notorious Patriot Act has given the US government the right to spy on its
citizens, along with extending the privileges that the FBI and other national
intelligence services enjoy. It has been widely regarded as a straight-out
transformation of so-called "American democracy" into a sort of authoritarian
regime in blunt violation of the rights that the Fourth Amendment of the US
Constitution granted American citizens. Even though the Patriot Act has
recently been replaced by the so-called Freedom Act, the outrageous violations
of US citizens' human rights continues.

This US example has produced an indelible impression on the politicians of
nearly every other Western country that now are beginning to tighten control
over their own citizens in turn.

For instance, France's Prime Minister Manuel Valls has recently presented the
Council of Ministers with a draft of the French Patriotic Act. In fact he
proposed to provide security services with access to previously forbidden
methods - the right to spy on one's citizens on the Internet. To pass this law
that has been labeled as a "direct interference in private life"
<http://is.gd/b4d6GO> by certain political forces, the ruling party has been
actively exploiting the Charlie Hebdo attack along with the recent terrorist
attacks in Tunisia.

British Conservatives have approached this issue more thoroughly. In recent
years they have rallied for a major push against civil right under the guise
of "the growing terrorist and extremist threat." ..

Read more <http://bit.ly/1NJoK9V>

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://tinyurl.com/ohf6xet>
<http://theleveller.org/2015/09/british-really-laughing/>
.. Burning money in front of a homeless person isn't just intended to be a
nasty prank, it serves to train a Bullingdon boy's senses, to make other
humans seem somehow less. ..

[Oleg Smirnov]

<http://in.rbth.com/news/2015/09/11/putin-and-berlusconi-meet-in-crimea_396277>

Putin and Berlusconi meet in Crimea

11 September 2015 TASS

Italy's ex-PM Silvio Berlusconi arrived on a private visit to Crimea earlier
on Friday after spending two days in Sochi.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi met on Friday at a memorial near Mount Gasfort in the vicinity of
the Crimean city of Sevastopol.

The memorial is dedicated to soldiers of the Sardinian Kingdom killed in the
Crimean War of 1853-1856.

Berlusconi arrived on a private visit to Crimea earlier on Friday after
spending two days in Sochi.

...

You love to meditate on Putin, go here for more <http://is.gd/mJb4fy>.

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/07/how-neocons-destabilized-europe/>
How Neocons Destabilized Europe

[Oleg Smirnov]

The US establishment is crypto-cannibalistic.

<https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/02/butler-shaffer/cannibals-run-the-government/>

.. When, in 2006, White House press secretary Tony Snow casually dismissed the
deaths of 2,500 American soldiers in the Iraqi war as "it's a number," his
words reflected the indifference of human costs in calculating political
purposes. He could just as perfunctorily have been commenting on the number of
cattle slaughtered at a meat-packing plant in a given period of time. So, too,
did former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright express her disregard for the
deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children who died as a consequence of the Clinton
administration's economic boycott of that country. "The price was worth it,"
she publicly proclaimed, as though she was commenting on the beef bourguinon at
her favorite French restaurant. Of course, as with all political programs, the
costs are always borne by others, never by those who institute and profit from
them! Such is the character of cannibalism.
The cannibalistic nature of the established order manifests itself in so many
other ways ..

Read it in full <http://chilp.it/24b4476>

...

Post by Oleg Smirnov
<http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/08/15/russia-sanctions-cost-to-west-could-exceed-700bn-warns-think-tank/>
RUSSIA SANCTIONS COST TO WEST COULD EXCEED $700BN WARNS THINK TANK

[Oleg Smirnov]

<https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/09/john-v-walsh/the-jealous-bitter-criminal-us-empire/>

Letter from President Obama to President Xi On the Occasion of the 70th
Anniversary of the End of WWII.
By John V. Walsh

September 5, 2015

Dear President Xi,

On September 3, your country is hosting a commemoration of the end of World War
II on the 70th Anniversary of the day recognized as its termination in the
Asia-Pacific. You have invited both me and President Abe of Japan. We both
have chosen to refuse - just as we refused to attend the earlier commemoration
of the defeat of Fascism in Moscow last Spring.

As you very well know, Jinping, if I may use your given name, this makes the
United States look pretty mean spirited. And to put it plainly, your cooking up
these events with Vlad pisses me off. The world knows that the Chinese and
Russians made unparalleled sacrifices to defeat Nazism in the West and Japanese
militarism in the East. The world knows that China suffered almost 20 million
casualties and great atrocities exemplified by the Rape of Nanjing. And the
world knows that close to 30 million Russians gave their lives in that
struggle. The U.S. in contrast lost 460,000 souls, and so it looks pretty
shoddy when I do not show up to acknowledge your victory and the great debt we
owe China and Russia since your loss of life minimized our own. It looks bad
for us. But you know that, and you know it damned well. So do not think for a
moment that I do not see through this "parade" on September 3 as an exercise in
soft power. But I also warn you that you will not succeed, as I will make clear
below.

First let me survey the further damage that I think you and Vlad are trying to
do. Let me emphasize that word "trying," because, I repeat, you will fail. Even
as you celebrate the victory over neo-Nazism in the West, we were using
neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine and
assault Russia. And to top it off we are pushing Abe to rekindle the fascist
militarism in Japan, which he is ramming through - successfully I might add -
despite the objections of over half his population, taking the form of hundreds
of thousands demonstrating against his new militarism <http://is.gd/vdqBgE>.
Even South Korea is deserting us over this, and I might say it angers me
mightily to see the South Korean President attend your September 3
celebrations. We have warned her that she might not get re-elected if she keeps
this up. We have our ways. Ask the surviving relatives of Ngo Dinh Diem.

Yesterday it was called to my attention that SputnikNews ridiculed my White
House spokesperson <http://sptnkne.ws/EYu>, Joshua Earnest, when he said he,
and I, know nothing of your commemoration cum parade. The accompanying cartoon
was really over the top, and it was rerun in China Daily I am told. We
notice these things, especially Hillary who gets quite vexed by them. Then she
is on the phone to me, which ends up being the hardest part of my day - except
when Bibi calls.

And there are other complaints drifting in to me. Many of the countries in the
developing world are telling me that I should take the occasion to congratulate
China on its enormous progress since the end of WWII. They especially needle
me about the roughly 700 million people brought out of poverty in the last 30
years, which has accounted for almost all the progress against poverty in the
world during this period. In no uncertain terms, they say that your model is
peaceful and ours is warlike. I do not like to hear that one bit, Jinping.
Where is the respect? It really fries my derriere.

And then there is your AIIB <http://migre.me/rruDW>, on which all of our allies
deserted us, save for Japan. Larry Summers, of all people, and the
indispensible Madeline Albright complained about that and rubbed my nose in it
publicly. Finally, there is all the hype you are dishing out about the One
Belt, One Road Initiative <http://on.rt.com/i4da6v>. Enough is enough,
Jinping.

But as I said this stuff will not succeed. It will not count one wit unless
the people of the West and the American people wake up to it. That is where
you will fail. We have very sophisticated means of reaching our people. Each
of our big dailies, the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, each of
which reaches 1 million people or more weekly, not to mention the Washington
Post, will never broadcast these themes. The very fact of 700 million brought
out of poverty is rarely mentioned even in the final paragraphs of an article.
Then there is our crown jewel, National Public Radio, which might as well be
broadcasting directly from the Pentagon and State and sometimes do. NPR's
audience has a mean income of $90,000. These are our opinion receivers and
repeaters and they are very reliable. They have no idea they are in the dark.
They have been educated in the best schools. You will not catch nary a one of
them reading China Daily <http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/>, for example. In fact
you might as well stop distributing that particular rag in the U.S. It does
you no good.

One final thing, Jinping. We are tired of hearing of your philosophy of
"win-win" when it comes to relations between nations. We in Europe and the U.S.
have been in the global driver's seat for half a millennium now. We know from
our own history that interactions between nations involve win-lose, domination
and conquest. If it is true for us, how could it be otherwise for anyone else?
The mere fact of nuclear weapons will not change that. We are ready to fight
on. Exceptionalism will prevail.

And Jinping, if you think that I am uncooperative or aggressive, you ain't seen
nothin' yet. Wait until Hillary becomes president. She is a whirling dervish
when it comes to the pivot to Asia. Then you will know what standing on the
precipice of oblivion looks like.

Sincerely yours,
Barack H. Obama
President

The Best of John V. Walsh <http://chilp.it/4629459>

Post by Oleg Smirnov
The US establishment is crypto-cannibalistic.
<https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/02/butler-shaffer/cannibals-run-the-government/>