If Nietzsche was right, and what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger, we can thank the global capitalist ruling classes, the Democratic Party, and the corporate media for four more years of Donald Trump. The long-awaited Mueller report is due any day now, or so they keep telling us. Once it is delivered, and does not prove that Trump is a Russian intelligence asset, or that he personally conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton, well, things are liable to get a bit awkward. Given the amount of goalpost-moving and focus-shifting that has been going on, clearly, this is what everyone’s expecting.

Honestly, I’m a bit surprised. I was sure they were going to go ahead and fabricate some kind of “smoking gun” evidence (like the pee-stained sheets from that Moscow hotel), or coerce one of his sleazy minions into testifying that he personally saw Trump down on his knees “colluding” Putin in the back room of a Russian sauna. After all, if you’re going to accuse a sitting president of being a Russian intelligence asset, you kind of need to be able to prove it, or (a) you defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, (b) you destroy your own credibility, and (c) you present that sitting president with a powerful weapon he can use to bury you.

This is not exactly rocket science. As any seasoned badass will tell you, when you’re resolving a conflict with another seasoned badass, you don’t take out a gun unless you’re going to use it. Taking a gun out, waving it around, and not shooting the other badass with it, is generally not a winning strategy. What often happens, if you’re dumb enough to do that, is that the other badass will take your gun from you and either shoot you or beat you senseless with it.

This is what Trump is about to do with Russiagate. When the Mueller report fails to present any evidence that he “colluded” with Russia to steal the election, Trump is going to reach over, grab that report, roll it up tightly into a makeshift cudgel, and then beat the snot out of his opponents with it. He is going to explain to the American people that the Democrats, the corporate media, Hollywood, the liberal intelligentsia, and elements of the intelligence agencies conspired to try to force him out of office with an unprecedented propaganda campaign and a groundless special investigation. He is going to explain to the American people that Russiagate, from start to finish, was, in his words, a ridiculous “witch hunt,” a childish story based on nothing. Then he’s going to tell them a different story.

That story goes a little something like this …

Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president. They did this fully aware that Trump was a repulsive, narcissistic ass clown who bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy” and jabbered about building “a big, beautiful wall” and making the Mexican government pay for it. They did this fully aware of the fact that Donald Trump had zero experience in any political office whatsoever, and was a loudmouth bigot, and was possibly out of his gourd on amphetamines half the time. The American people did not care. They were so disgusted with being conned by arrogant, two-faced, establishment stooges like the Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama that they chose to put Donald Trump in office, because, fuck it, what did they have to lose?

The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people’s decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit … which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup.

This is the story Donald Trump is going to tell the American people.

A minority of ideological heretics on what passes for the American Left are going to help him tell this story, not because we support Donald Trump, but because we believe that the mass hysteria and authoritarian fanaticism that has been manufactured over the course of Russiagate represents a danger greater than Trump. It has reached some neo-Riefenstahlian level, this bug-eyed, spittle-flecked, cult-like behavior … worse even than the mass hysteria that gripped most Americans back in 2003, when they cheered on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the murder, rape, and torture of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children based on a bunch of made-up horseshit.

We are going to be vilified, we leftist heretics, for helping Trump tell Americans this story. We are going to be denounced as Trumpenleft traitors, Putin-sympathizers, and Nazi-adjacents (as we were denounced as terrorist-sympathizers and Saddam-loving traitors back in 2003). We are going to be denounced as all these things by liberals, and by other leftists. We are going to be warned that pointing out how the government, the media, and the intelligence agencies all worked together to sell people Russiagate will only get Trump reelected, and, if that happens, it will be the End of Everything.

It will not be the End of Everything.

What might, however, be the End of Everything, or might lead us down the road to the End of Everything, is if otherwise intelligent human beings continue to allow themselves to be whipped into fits of mass hysteria and run around behaving like a mindless herd of propaganda-regurgitating zombies whenever the global capitalist ruling classes tell them that “the Russians are coming!” or that “the Nazis are coming!” or that “the Terrorists are coming!”

The Russo-Nazi Terrorists are not coming. The global capitalist ruling classes are putting down a populist insurgency, delegitimizing any and all forms of dissent from their global capitalist ideology and resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism. In the process, they are conditioning people to completely abandon their critical faculties and behave like twitching Pavlovian idiots who will obediently respond to whatever stimuli or blatantly fabricated propaganda the corporate media bombards them with.

If you want a glimpse of the dystopian future … it isn’t an Orwellian boot in your face. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Study the Russiagate believers’ reactions to the Mueller report when it is finally delivered. Observe the bizarre intellectual contortions their minds perform to rationalize their behavior over the last three years. Trust me, it will not be pretty. Cognitive dissonance never is.

Or, who knows, maybe the Russiagate gang will pull a fast one at the eleventh hour, and accuse Robert Mueller of Putinist sympathies (or appearing in that FSB video of Trump’s notorious Moscow pee-party), and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the special prosecutor. That should get them through to 2020!

 

CJ Hopkins

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/03/22/mueller-dammerung/

 

Or we might be wrong... Putin did it... No he did not. So, should Mueller find Putin did it, his report would be more horseshit... like the WMDs of Saddam... See more lies about their lies as they try to fool you some more, 16 years later...

 

U.S. to ICC: We Will Break Your Legs

Andre Vltchek

Well, not exactly like that, but in a way, yes. Now, finally, ‘the gloves are off’. The U.S. is openly threatening the historically timid ICC (International Criminal Court) and its judges. And unexpectedly, the ICC is hitting back. It refuses to shut up, to kneel, and to beg for mercy.

Suddenly, even the Western mass media outlets cannot conceal the aggressive mafia-style outbursts of the U.S. government officials. On March 15, Reuters reported:

The United States will withdraw or deny visas to any International Criminal Court personnel investigating possible war crimes by U.S. forces or allies in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday.

The court, which sits in The Hague, responded that it was an independent and impartial institution and would continue to do its work “undeterred” by Washington’s actions.

The Trump administration threatened in September to ban ICC judges and prosecutors from entering the United States and sanction funds they have there if the court launched a probe of war crimes in Afghanistan.

Washington took the first step on Friday with Pompeo’s announcement.

“I’m announcing a policy of U.S. visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of U.S. personnel,” Pompeo told a news conference in Washington.

“These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis, without allies’ consent.”

And so it goes… Mike Pompeo’s arrogant facial expression appeared above countless reports and it said it all: the world has to listen to the US dictates, or else!

Naturally, there is logic (even if twisted) behind the US threats. This is an extremely dangerous slope!

No country in the post WWII era has committed so many crimes against humanity, and supported so many genocides, as the United States of America. And in summary, no other part of the world has murdered more people on our planet, than Europe. And most North Americans are descendants of the Europeans. The ‘foreign policy’ of the U.S. is directly derived from colonialist policies of the former European powers. Therefore, crimes against humanity committed by the West have never stopped; never stopped for centuries.

This simple fact had been hushed up: never really openly discussed by the mass media outlets, in classrooms, or in the courts of law.

If the ICC begins and is allowed to investigate crimes against humanity committed by the West, the entire twisted concept of the U.S. and Europe being pioneers of freedom and democracy could easily and quickly collapse.

Even criticism by Washington, Paris or London of countries such as Venezuela, China or Russia, for their “human rights violations”, would become absurd and grotesque. Entire concept of ‘regime change’ could clearly be exposed for what it always really was – lawless gangsterism.

The U.S. rulers are well aware of the fact that this is ‘extremely bad timing’ for the Empire to allow challenges from some at least marginally independent international bodies.

They try to break all dissent. Like when in 2018, the U.S. and its close ally Israel left the at least partially rebellious intellectual body of the U.N. – UNESCO.

*

The West is clearly losing the ideological war, and it is panicking. And the more it panics, the more aggressive it gets.

One country after another is being defined as ‘undemocratic’ and designated for ‘regime change’. The methods are different. There are soft coups which have succeeded in overthrowing left-leaning governments in Argentina and later in Brazil. And there are hard methods used by the Empire in and against Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, big parts of Africa, Nicaragua and North Korea.

The West openly supports genocides in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in West Papua occupied and plundered by Indonesia, in Indian occupied Kashmir, as well as the apartheid perpetrated by Israel.

The ICC is now concentrating on the crimes against humanity committed by the United States in Afghanistan, where at least 100,000 died as a result of the near two decades of NATO occupation. These crimes are real and undisputable. I have been working in Afghanistan, and could testify that the West (and particularly the U.S. and U.K.) brought this proud country into a despicable state.

But Afghanistan could be just the beginning; a proverbial Pandora box could open from there.

Most likely, if they take place, the trials against the U.S. and its crimes, would not right away prevent the terror the West is spreading all around the world. But they would open discussion, at least in the countries that have been victims of terrible injustice. Such trials would also help to realign the world: definitely towards Russia and China, and back towards socialism in Latin America and most likely in Africa and parts of Asia.

*

Pompeo’s speech was so extreme that it could be easily defined as counter-productive for the Empire.

Even the mainstream Western press had to react. Even the Western ‘human rights organizations’ felt obliged to protest.

On March 15, AP published an unprecedented report:

 

Human Rights Watch called it “a thuggish attempt to penalize investigators” at the ICC.

“The Trump administration is trying an end run around accountability,” it said. “Taking action against those who work for the ICC sends a clear message to torturers and murderers alike: Their crimes may continue unchecked.”

Amnesty International described the move as “the latest attack on international justice and international institutions by an administration hellbent on rolling back human rights protections.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents three people before the ICC who say they were tortured in Afghanistan, called the decision “misguided and dangerous” and “an unprecedented attempt to skirt international accountability for well-documented war crimes that haunt our clients to this day.”

 

A great part of the world is already horrified by the latest attacks of the West against Venezuela, and by attempts to push countries like China, Russia and North Korea towards military conflict.

Such a barefaced shove for impunity will not go well in many parts of the world.

It was always understood that the West has been forcing the planet to accept its ‘exceptionalism’. But it was understood only or predominantly by a well-informed minority of the people.

The latest headlines will be reaching the masses, on all continents.

Mr. Pompeo made one huge tactical mistake. He touched the ‘big topic’ that was always supposed to be ‘understood’ but unpronounced. Now it is out in the open.

The next step could be the acknowledgment that international law does not apply to the West.

Once this undisputable fact is pronounced, what may follow could be an outrage, and finally, refusal to accept the status quo, at least by several countries, and by billions of people worldwide.

It appears that the Empire has gone one step too far. As a result, paradoxically, its impunity could be really in jeopardy.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/03/23/u-s-to-icc-we-will-break-your-legs/

 

 

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The new Grand Strategy of the United States

by Thierry Meyssan

Many people think that the United States is very active, but does not succeed in much. For example, it is said that its wars in the Greater Middle East are a succession of failures. But for Thierry Meyssan, the USA has a coherent military, commercial and diplomatic strategy. According to its own objectives, it advances patiently, and is crowned with success.

It is commonly believed in the United States that the country has no Grand Strategy since the end of the Cold War.

A Grand Strategy is a vision of the world that one seeks to impose, and that all administrations must respect. So, even if you lose in one particular theatre of war, the fight continues in others, and finally ends in triumph. At the end of the Second World War, Washington chose to follow the directives set by ambassador George Keenan in his famous diplomatic telegramme. It proposed describing an alleged Soviet expansionism in order to justify containment of the USSR. Indeed, although the USA had lost the wars in Korea and Vietnam, it finished by prevailing.

It is very rare to be able to rethink a Grand Strategy, even if there were others during that period, in particular, with Charles De Gaulle in France.

Over the last eighteen years, Washington has been able to progressively set new objectives and new tactics with which to attain them.

1991-2001: a period of uncertainty

When the Soviet Union collapsed on 25 December 1991, Father Bush’s USA supposed that they no longer had any rivals. The victorious President by default demobilised 1 million soldiers and imagined a world of peace and prosperity. He liberalised the transfer of capitals so that the capitalists would be able to get richer and, he believed, thus enrich their fellow citizens.

However, capitalism is not a political project, but a means of making money. The major US businesses – not the federal state – therefore allied themselves with the Chinese Communist Party (the reason for Deng Xiaoping’s famous « journey to the South »). They delocalised their businesses with very low added value from the West to China, where the workers were uneducated, but their wages were on average 20 times lower. The long process of the de-industrialisation of the West had begun.

In order to manage its transnational affairs, the Grand Capital moved its assets to countries with low taxation rates, where it realised that it could avoid its social responsibilities. These countries, whose fiscal exemption and discretion are indispensable for international commerce, suddenly found themselves swept along on a gigantic wave of fiscal optimisation, even a massive fraud system, from which they benefited in silence. The reign of Finance over the economy was beginning.

Military Strategy

In 2001, Secretary for Defense and permanent member of the « Continuity of Government ») [1] Donald Rumsfeld, created the Office of Force Transformation, which he handed to Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. This man had already computerised the armies, and was now set to modify their mission.

Without the Soviet Union, the world had become unipolar, which is to say no longer governed by the Security Council, but by the United States alone. In order to maintain its dominant position, it was obliged to « lose some to gain more », in other words, to divide Humanity in two. On one side, the stable states, meaning the members of the G8 - Russia included - and their allies), and on the other side, the rest of the world, viewed as a simple reservoir of natural resources. Washington no longer considered access to these resources as vital for itself, but intended for them to become accessible to the stable states only by permission of the USA. From that point on, it would be necessary to destroy – preventively – all the state structures in these reservoirs of resources, so that no-one could either challenge the will of the top world power, or do without it [2].

Since then, this strategy has been implemented ceaselessly. It began in the Greater Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Yemen). However, contrary to what had been announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, (Pivot to Asia), it was not continued into the Far East, due to the military development of China, but in the Caribbean Basin (Venezuela, Nicaragua).

Diplomatic Strategy

In 2012, President Barack Obama took up the leitmotiv of the Republican Party and made the exploitation of oil and gas by hydraulic fracturing a national priority. Within a few years, the United States multiplied its investments and became the world’s major producer of hydrocarbons, reversing the paradigms of international relations. In 2018, the ex-director of the oil equipment provider Sentry International, Mike Pompeo, became the director of the CIA , then Secretary of State. He created the Bureau of Energy Resources, which he handed to Francis Fannon. The BER is the equivalent of what the Office of Force Transformation had been for the Pentagon. He set up a policy which was entirely concentrated on taking control of the world market for hydrocarbons [3]. To do so, he imagined a new type of alliance, like those of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific region. It was no longer a case of creating military blocs like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quads), but organising these alliances around objectives of economic growth, on the basis of guaranteed access to sources of energy.

This concept was integrated into the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy. It was no longer a case of grabbing the hydrocarbons from the rest of the world (Washington has absolutely no need of them), but to determine who may have them to use for their own development, and who will be deprived of them. This is a total reversal of the doctrine of the rarefaction of oil, promoted by the Rockefellers and the Club of Rome since the 1960’s, then by Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group. From then on, the United States decided that not only had oil not disappeared, but that despite the drastic increase in demand, Humanity had enough to last at least another century.

Using many different pretexts, Pompeo has blocked Iran’s access to the world market, then that of Venezuela, and finally, has maintained US troops in the East of Syria to prevent anyone from exploiting the oil fields that have been discovered there [4]. Simultaneously, he is increasing pressure on the European Union to give up on the Russian gas pipeline Nord Steam 2 and is also pressuring Turkey to give up Turkish Stream.

Commercial Strategy

In 2017, President Donald Trump attempted to repatriate some of the jobs which had been delocalised from the United States to Asia and the European Union. Basing himself on the advice of left-wing economist Peter Navarro [5], he put an end to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the same time, he set prohibitive Customs taxes on German cars and most Chinese products. He completed these with a fiscal reform which encouraged the repatriation of capital. This policy has already enabled the re-balancing of commerce and the relaunching of the job market.

The military, economic and diplomatic systems are now complete. Each chapter is articulated with the others. Everyone knows what they have to do.

The main force of this new Grand Strategy resides in the fact that it has not been understood by the elites of the rest of the world. Washington therefore retains the effect of surprise, reinforced by the deliberately chaotic communications of Donald Trump. If we look at the facts instead of the Presidential tweets, we note the advance of the United States after the double period of uncertainty under Presidents Clinton and Obama.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation 

Pete Kimberley

 

 

Read more:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article205782.html

 

 

 

 

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See also: 

"The Age of Deceit"

 

I suggest there that Capitalism is only a process not a philosophy. Capitalism is only the value-added exteriorisation of wants using the illusion of need... in whichever philosophical framework we choose.

 

“THE ART OF WAR”

The « American Party » within the institutions of the European Union

by Manlio Dinucci

The European Parliament has just adopted a resolution which requires that the Union stop considering Russia as a strategic partner, but rather as an enemy of humanity. At the same time, the Commission sent a warning about the Chinese threat. Everything is unfolding as if the United States were manœuvering the Union into playing a part in their own supremacist strategy.

« Russia can no longer be considered as a strategic partner, and the European Union must be ready to impose further sanctions if it continues to violate international law » - this is the resolution approved by the European Parliament on 12 Mars with 402 votes for, 163 against, and 89 abstentions [1]. The resolution, presented by Latvian parliamentarian Sandra Kalniete, denies above all any legitimacy for the Presidential elections in Russia, qualifying them as « non-democratic », and therefore presenting President Putin as a usurper.

She accuses Russia not only of « violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and Georgia », but also the « intervention in Syria and interference in countries such as Libya », and, in Europe, of « interference intended to influence elections and increase tensions ». She accuses Russia of « violation of the arms control agreements », and shackles it with the responsibility of having buried the INF Treaty. Besides this, she accuses Russia of « important violations of human rights in Russia, including torture and extra-judicial executions », and « assassinations perpetrated by Russian Intelligence agents by means of chemical weapons on European soil ».

After these and other accusations, the European Parliament declared that Nord Stream 2 – the gas pipeline designed to double the supply of Russian gas to Germany across the Baltic Sea - « increases European dependence on Russian gas, threatens the European interior market and its strategic interests […] and must therefore be ended ».

The resolution of the European Parliament is a faithful repetition, not only in its content but even in its wording, of the accusations that the USA and NATO aim at Russia, and more importantly, it faithfully parrots their demand to block Nord Stream 2 – the object of Washington’s strategy, aimed at reducing the supply of Russian energy to the European Union, in order to replace them with supplies coming from the United States, or at least, from US companies. In the same context, certain communications were addressed by the European Commission to those of its members [2], including Italy, who harboured the intention to join the Chinese initiative of the New Silk Road. The Commission alleges that China is a partner but also an economic competitor and, what is of capital importance, « a systemic rival which promotes alternative forms of governance », in other words alternative models of governance which so far have been dominated by the Western powers.

The Commission warns that above all, it is necessary to « safeguard the critical digital infrastructures from the potentially serious threats to security » posed by the 5G networks furnished by Chinese companies like Huawei, and banned by the United States. The European Commission faithfully echoes the US warning to its allies. The Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, US General Scaparrotti, specified that these fifth generation ultra-rapid mobile networks will play an increasingly important role in the war-making capacities of NATO – consequently no « amateurism » by the allies will be allowed.

All this confirms the influence brought to bear by the « American Party », a powerful transversal camp which is orienting the policies of the EU along the strategic lines of the USA and NATO.

By creating the false image of a dangerous Russia and China, the institutions of the European Union are preparing public opinion to accept what the United States are now preparing for the « defence » of Europe. The United States - declared a Pentagon spokesperson on CNN – are getting ready to test ground-based ballistic missiles (forbidden by the INF Treaty buried by Washington), that is to say new Euromissiles which will once again make Europe the base and at the same time, the target of a nuclear war.

Manlio Dinucci

Translation 
Pete Kimberley

Source 
Il Manifesto (Italy)

 

Read all: https://www.voltairenet.org/article205720.html

 

 

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From Eric Zuesse

Unlike America under Donald Trump, who is proudly psychopathic and went so far as to blurt out that his followers would accept his leadership even if he were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, the European Union is so rabidly hypocritical (Trump would probably call it “politically correct”) that its leaders routinely moralize about ‘human rights and democracy’ even while their governments indiscriminately rob and slaughter people in foreign lands (as will be documented here).

EU leaders assist U.S.-led atrocities while using prettier language to describe their alleged motivation for these policies. Though the U.S. Government also occasionally employs such verbal sucker-punches (insincere or “politically correct” rhetoric), such moralizing is now the exception for the U.S. Government, and is no longer (as it had been under the immediately prior U.S. President, Barack Obama) the routine American practice — very much like the EU’s was, and still remains: such ‘idealistic’ hypocrisy.

But even Obama wasn’t as hypocritical as EU leaders still are. The biggest difference between the U.S. and the EU is that, whereas even under America’s Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning (and continuing to be predominantly sanctified) President Obama (the invader of Libya, Syria, Yemen, and more), America’s head-of-state repeatedly said that America is “the one indispensable nation” — meaning that all other nations are “dispensable.”

By contrast, there is no EU leader, and not even any European head-of-state, who says, in the modern era, anything of the sort. Adolf Hitler infamously did it when reasserting “Deutschland über alles!” (i.e, that Germany is the one indispensable nation). But modern Europe’s leaders know better than to copy such rhetoric. (Trump’s version, of course, is “America first,” but this can mean many different things, and not only mean that “America is the one indispensable nation.” Obama’s version was far less ambiguous than Trump’s is, because Obama’s clearly means that every other nation is “dispensable,” and that only America is not. And, yet, still, Europe’s leaders accepted it — they accepted that their nations were and are “dispensable.” After all: they are vassals.)

America’s leaders are simply more honest about their psychopathy than modern Europe’s are. In fact, ever since at least the time of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, “Greed is good” has been America’s unofficial, but clearly dominant, political philosophy — virtually the official American philosophy. How many European nations today publicly and proudly assert anything like that? Do any?

A recent example of the EU’s hyper-hypocrisy was headlined at the far-right UAWire Ukrainian news-site on March 31st, “EU urges Russia to stop attacks on Crimean Tatars”, which reported that:

The EU decisively condemns the arrest of 23 Crimean Tatars in police raids by the Russian occupation authorities in Crimea on 27 and 28 March, said EU Spokesperson for EU Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Maja Kocijancic in a statement.

“A court in the Crimean peninsula, illegally annexed from Ukraine by Russia, has ruled that all 23 Crimean Tatars detained on 27 March and 28 March will be held in pre-trial detention until 15 May. They are accused of belonging to the organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned in Russia but not in Ukraine. The European Union does not recognise the enforcement of Russian legislation in Crimea and Sevastopol and expects all illegally detained Ukrainians to be released without delay,” Kocijancic stated.

“The recent detentions, as well as the prior searches of their private property, constitute the latest targeting of Crimean Tatars, human rights defenders, and people who have spoken out peacefully against the illegal annexation by Russia of the Crimean peninsula,” the EU spokesperson stressed. …

 

Here is what Wikipedia says about that banned-by-Russia group:

Hizb ut-Tahrir (Arabic: حزب التحرير) (Translation: Party of Liberation) is an international, pan-Islamist political organisation, which describes its ideology as Islam, and its aim as the re-establishment of the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) to resume the Islamic way of life in the Muslim world. The caliphate would unite the Muslim community (Ummah)[4] upon their Islamic creed and implement the Shariah, so as to then carry the proselytising of Islam to the rest of the world.[5] …

Hizb ut-Tahrir has been banned in countries such as Germany, Russia, China, Egypt, Turkey,[14] and all Arab countries except Lebanon, Yemen, and the UAE.[15][16] In July 2017, the Indonesian government formally revoked Hizbut ut-Tahrir’s charter, citing incompatibility with government regulations on extremism and national ideology.[17] …

They declare the necessity of jihad so that Da’wah will be carried “to all mankind” and will “bring them into the Khilafah state,” and the importance of declaring “Jihad against the Kuffar without any lenience or hesitation;” (Ummah’s Charter),[97][117] as well as the need to fight unbelievers who refuse to be ruled by Islam, even if they pay tribute (The Islamic Personality).[97][118]

 

Do Europeans really want people such as this to be increasing in the EU?

The Ukrainian regime that Obama had installed in February 2014 thinks it’s fine, but do Europeans, really? Obama had fooled Russia’s Government, at least until his 2012 re-election, to think that he wasn’t aiming like all his predecessors since at least the time of Reagan were aiming — for the U.S. Government ultimately to conquer and absorb Russia into the steadily growing U.S. empire — but after the bloody U.S. coup right on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine in 2014, the EU has been clearly the U.S. regime’s vassal in this conquer-Russia enterprise — participating in it, though reluctantly.

The EU’s leadership has consistently been working in secret to assist jihadists — mass-murderers and terrorists — whenever jihadists are fighting in the U.S.-led international war against Russia and against any nation whose leadership (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Yanukovych, and Nicolas Maduro) are either allied with or even just friendly toward Russia. Syria, and its President, Bashar al-Assad, constitute one particular example of this EU hypocrisy.

Here are examples of this U.S.-EU support for jihadists that are trying to overthrow a Russia-friendly government:

On 10 December 2012, AFP bannered “Jihadists seize key north Syria army base”, and reported that, “Jihadists led by the radical Al-Nusra Front seized a strategic army base in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo on Monday, in a fresh setback for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. … On the political front, the EU gave a vital boost to the newly-formed Syrian opposition coalition, describing it as the ‘legitimate representatives’ of the Syrian people following talks in Brussels with its leader Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib.”

On that very same day, December 10th, Britain’s Telegraph headlined and sub-headed “Syrian rebels defy US and pledge allegiance to jihadi group: Rebel groups across Syria are defying the United States by pledging their allegiance to a group that Washington will designate today a terrorist organization for its alleged links to al-Qaeda.” That report opened: “A total of 29 opposition groups, including fighting ‘brigades’ and civilian committees, have signed a petition calling for mass demonstrations in support of Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist group which the White House believes is an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq.” So: no one could reasonably doubt that America’s alleged ‘rebels’ in Syria were, in fact, loyal to al-Nusra. Yet, the EU and U.S. continued supporting them.

Also on that same day, Bill Roggio at Long War Journal bannered, “Al Nusrah Front, foreign jihadists seize key Syrian base in Aleppo”, and he reported that, “The Syrian government has warned that rebels may also use chemical weapons after the Al Nusrah Front took control of a chlorine factory in Aleppo last week. Islamists hold sway over new rebel military command.” So: it was already clear, even then, that the ‘rebels’ were interested in perpetrating against civilians a chemical-weapons attack that their supporters in the U.S. and EU could then blame against Syria’s Government as being an alleged reason to invade Syria by their own forces in order to ‘protect the Syrian people and establish democracy and human rights there’, or similar lies.

The next day, December 11th, Roggio reported that “The Al Nusrah Front has by far taken the lead among the jihadist groups in executing suicide and other complex attacks against the Syrian military. The terror group is known to conduct joint operations with other Syrian jihadist organizations.”

And, on the very next day, December 12th, Roggio headlined “Syrian National Coalition urges US to drop Al Nusrah terrorism designation”. Anyone who, after this, didn’t know that the U.S. and EU were supporting jihadists to take control over Syria, was very deceived, because the truth was now known, and was then being subsequently hidden from the public, by almost all of the subsequent ‘news’-reporting. But there were a few exceptions:

On 26 January 2013, Roggio reported that,

The Al Nusrah Front has now claimed credit for 46 of the 55 suicide attacks that have taken place in Syria since December 2011, according to a tally of the operations by The Long War Journal (note that multiple suicide bombers deployed in a single operaton are counted as part of a single attack).

Al Nusrah spearheads military assaults

Al Nusrah has also served as the vanguard for jihadist forces in the major attacks on Syrian military bases. In concert with allied jihadist groups such as the Ahrar al Sham, the Islamic Vanguard, Mujahedeen Shura Council, the Muhajireen Group, and Chechen fighters, the terror group has overrun three large Syrian installations since last fall. 

 

On 20 April 2013, Reuters headlined “Rebels battle with tribesmen over oil in Syria’s east” and reported that, “The EU said this week it wants to allow Syria’s opposition to sell crude in an effort to tilt the balance of power towards the rebels.” The EU supported and backed the ‘rebels’ seizure and black-market sale of whatever oil they could steal from Syria. This was the EU’s ‘humanitarianism’.

On 22 April 2013, the AP headlined “EU lifts Syria oil embargo to bolster rebels”and opened: “The European Union on Monday lifted its oil embargo on Syria to provide more economic support to the forces fighting to oust President Bashar Assad’s regime. The decision will allow for crude exports from rebel-held territory.”

On 1 May 2013, TIME bannered “Syria’s Opposition Hopes to Win the War by Selling Oil” and reported that, “Without an embargo, European companies can now legally begin importing barrels of oil directly from rebel groups, which have seized several oil fields in recent months, mostly around the eastern area of Deir Ezzor. That would provide the opposition with its first reliable source of income since the revolt erupted in Feb. 2011, and in theory hasten the downfall of Bashar Assad’s regime.” No mention was made, in any of this reporting, that this constituted aggression by the EU against the sovereign nation of Syria under the U.N.’s Charter and was therefore an international war-crime. The Western press didn’t care about such things — but only about ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ and other such billionaires’ bumper-stickers for suckers.

On 22 February 2019, one of the U.N.’s top experts on international law, Alfred de Zayas, was interviewed for a half hour on the ways in which America and its allies are blatantly violating international law by attempting a coup to overthrow Venezuela’s Government, and by going even further and imposing sanctions against Venezuela’s Government because it was resisting this (in effect) economic invasion-by-means-of-sanctions. The EU is one of these invading countries, but some of its constituent states oppose the U.S.-sponsored invasion.

On 31 March 2019, I headlined “EU Joins NATO’s War Against Russia” and reported on the EU’s knee-jerk increase of economic sanctions against Russia as being the initial phase — the sanctions phase — of the U.S. regime’s wars to overthrow the leaders of nations that are friendly toward Russia (e.g., Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Viktor Yanukovych, and now Nicolas Maduro), and now (ever since the 2012 Magnitsky Act sanctions fraud against Russia) increasingly to apply Washington’s economic sanctions against Russia itself.

In international affairs, the EU therefore is clearly a stooge of the constantly aggressive U.S. regime.

After all, the U.S. regime had initiated and led the creation of the European Union. This scheme started as soon as FDR died and Harry S. Truman became America’s President. The death of FDR was also, in a sense, the death of any real democracy in the United States. Truman was forced onto the Democratic Party’s Presidential ticket in 1944 by the Democratic Party’s centi-millionaires against the will of FDR.

Truman and Churchill started the Cold War, which increasingly became mass thought-control in America (culminating with Joseph R. McCarthy) and with the CIA’s operations Gladio in Europe and Mockingbird in the U.S. itself.

First, NATO, and then the EU, were born as part of that secret U.S. strategy to conquer Russia even after the end of the U.S.S.R and of its communism and of its Warsaw Pact counterbalance to America’s NATO anti-Russian military alliance. Ever since that time (1991), America’s controlling owners of international corporations (our billionaires) have also controlled — via European nations’ own super-rich — first, Europe’s national Governments, and then the EU itself. It secretly remains true even after the 1991 end of the Cold War on Russia’s side.

Consequently: when there’s a choice to be made between supporting jihadists (or other extremists such as — in Ukraine — nazis) or else to side with Russia (or any nation that’s friendly toward Russia), the American team always back the jihadists or other extremists, and they say it’s being done ‘for human rights and democracy’ and other such hypocrisies, while they perpetrate actual war-crimes, and make fools of their own publics, in order ultimately to conquer Russia. That’s doing it the “diplomatic” way, and they don’t like Trump’s doing it the “Greed is good” way. The directness of his greed makes themselves look bad. That’s why these super-hypocrites preferred Obama.

Originally posted at strategic-culture.org

 

https://off-guardian.org/2019/04/16/the-rabidly-hypocritical-eu/

 

 

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According to Peskov, Russia will not intervene in the matter.

On August 21, The Washington Post reported that the US was discussing an opportunity to make annual payments to Denmark as part of the deal to purchase Greenland for $600 million. In addition, the USA would be ready to make a lump sum payment to Denmark as an incentive to hand over the island to the USA. 

On August 16, it became known that US President Donald Trump was considering a possibility to buy Greenland. He discussed the question with his advisers, who found the plan economically feasible. Later, Donald Trump confirmed his interest in acquiring the island and compared the  possible purchase of Greenland to a major real estate deal. Danish Prime Minister refused to discuss the purchase. Trump later canceled his visit to Copenhagen that he had scheduled for early September.

Читайте больше на http://www.pravdareport.com/news/russia/142659-greenland/

 

 

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 Global Reform and How the US Hurts Itself

 

by Ted Snider Posted on July 25, 2022

 

Two of the biggest international crises confronting the US today are Russia’s war in Ukraine and the comatose renegotiations of the nuclear agreement with Iran. From an American foreign policy perspective, nothing could be more desirable than reform in the leadership of those two countries. But both Russia and Iran have, in the past, offered the US the reform it desires. And in both cases, the US undermined those attempts and destroyed what it most desired.

Putin, until recently, was never anti-West. Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at Kent, who has written extensively on Putin, has called Putin “the most European leader Russia has ever had.” Putin continued in a recent line of reformers who sought partnership in a "greater West" and who, Sakwa says, attempted “to forge a closer relationship with the European Union.” Stephen Cohen, who was Professor Emeritus of Russian studies and politics at Princeton, has pointed out that Putin “long pursued negotiations with the West over the objections of his own hardliners.”

It was not until 2012 that Putin accepted that the US would deny Russia a transformed international community that transcended hostile blocs and offer only a subordinate role as a defeated member of a US led unipolar world and left the reformist path.

But Putin was not the first Russian president to have his reformist path blocked by the US. Every president since the collapse of the Soviet Union had taken that path only to see it demolished by the US.

Reform of the sort that the US hoped for began with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1990, Gorbachev was promised by the West that NATO would not expand east toward Russia’s borders. The breaking of that promise, according to Alexander Lukin in a 2000 essay entitled "NATO and Russia after the Kosovo Crisis," "delivered a serious blow to Russian reformers and supporters of democratization." Lukin argues that the demonstration that the West could not be negotiated with or partnered with "provided additional arguments to those communist and nationalist forces which maintain that the West has always been a hostile force and is trying to encircle Russia."

Gorbachev delivered the kind of reform the US ordered, and the US refused delivery.

Delivery was refused again when Boris Yeltsin obliged. Lukin says that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, pro-Western reformers came to power in Moscow who "pursued a policy of close co-operation with the West." He explains that "They fulfilled Western recommendations and requests, both in foreign and domestic policy, in the anticipation of joining the Western family of nations." What they got in return was economic and political "catastrophe . . . [and] a scornful, almost colonial attitude on the part of the West towards Moscow." The reformers felt betrayed, and Moscow had to reorient its path.

Yeltsin and the reformists were betrayed by the US both economically and politically. Russian reformists trusted the US promise to help them transition to membership in the Western economy. That trust was brutally betrayed, and “some two-thirds of [Russia’s] people [were put] into poverty and misery," according to Cohen. The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." It was, in Cohen’s words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime,” featuring “mass poverty, plunging life expectancy, the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia’s wealth, and more." By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." That was the result of trusting the US to help transition Russia into the global economic community.

The reformers were betrayed not only in their attempts to westernize Russia’s economy but also in their attempts to join the community of democracies. The 1996 Russian election “is often considered the moment when Russian democracy died," Sakwa says. And it did not die of natural causes. The US killed it. 

By 1996, Yeltsin’s approval rating had plunged to only 6%. But that did not stop him from winning the election. With direct support from the White House, American political consultants secretly assumed management of Yeltsin’s campaign. "Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers, drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin’s reelection headquarters in 1996." They even pressured an opposing candidate to drop out of the election. A massive US backed loan from the IMF was, as the New York Times reported, “expected to be helpful to President Boris N. Yeltsin in the presidential election in June." He did.

Gorbachev’s perestroyka put Russia on a path of reform. Yeltsin walked that path. But Lukin says that the US crushing of those "attempts at reform by Yeltsin’s pro-Western governments were the first serious blow for the ‘true believers’ in Western justice."

Broken promises made to Gorbachev about NATO expansion, US murdering of Russia’s attempt at economic and democratic reform, and the bombing of Yugoslavia without Security Council approval all combined to abort the very reform in Russia that the US said it wanted.

The US did the same thing in Iran. They called for reform and then discredited the very reformers they called for. A long line of Iranian presidents, including Hashemi Rafsanjani and Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, were elected as reformers who wanted to free Iran from international isolation by improving relations with the US. The foundation of their policy, Trita Parsi says in a recent interview, "was that much of Iran’s problems will be resolved if Iran can resolve its problems with the United States. To do so, it has to give something to get something. Everything is not America’s fault; Iran has also made many mistakes."

And that they did. Rafsanjani tried to give something to get something. He gave the US a promise that Iran would exert its regional influence and intervene to help win the release of American hostages being held in Lebanon. Iran wanted to get American acceptance of Iran as a regional power. So, they were willing to give the US the benefits of their being a regional power.

President H.W. Bush promised that Iran’s help would “be long remembered” and that, in return, Iran would get something because “goodwill begets goodwill.” But for forging the reformist path, Rafsanjani got nothing. Iran did what it promised to do; America did not do what it promised to do. Instead, Bush betrayed Rafsanjani and did nothing in return: the US sent word that Rafsanjani should expect no American reciprocation. Like in Russia, the reformists were discredited.

Rafsanjani would try to demonstrate the desired reform one more time. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, he kept Iran officially neutral. But the official neutrality was practical siding with the US. While Iran rejected Iraqi pleas for help on the grounds of that neutrality, they allowed the US to use Iranian airspace. Once again, though, Iranian reformers gave but did not get. Though Rafsanjani had hoped to end Iran’s international isolation by helping the Americans, when the US convened the Israeli-Palestinian Madrid Conference, they invited nearly every affected nation, including Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, but snubbed Iran, perpetuating Iran’s international isolation even though they were demonstrating the reforms the US sought.

The next president of Iran, Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, kept the reformist dream alive. He tried to improve relations with the US by altering Iran’s past actions and giving something to the US. And Khatami gave a lot. He rejected terrorism; accepted a two-state solution, implicitly recognizing the State of Israel; aided the US in its fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda; played a crucial role in setting up Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government and arrested hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who escaped across its borders.

After giving, the reformer got nothing. George W. Bush replied by putting Iran in the Axis of Evil. Khatami was stunned. The reformers were discredited.

But Iran was not done. In 2013, they elected another reformer, Hassan Rouhani, as president. Rouhani would place Iran’s future on the reformist promise that Iran could escape international isolation by improving relations with the US and the West by entering into negotiations with them. 

The crippling blow to that promise would be dealt by Donald Trump. When Trump broke America’s promise and illegally pulled out of the JCPOA nuclear agreement, Rouhani and the moderates were discredited, and Iran’s hardliners, with their warnings that the US would repay what they received from Iran with nothing but broken promises, were vindicated.

The fatal blow was dealt by Biden. When Trump pulled the US out of the nuclear agreement, for the first full year, Iran remained in complete compliance. For a very long time after that, Iran stayed in the deal, gradually increasing its nuclear activity but staying in compliance because paragraph 36 of the JCPOA allows Iran to cease its commitments if another signatory ceases to honor its commitments. Even still, Iran made clear that all of its increased nuclear activity could be instantly reversed if the US came back to the deal. Iran was patiently waiting out Trump’s term in office with the reasonable expectation that Obama’s former Vice President would bring the US back into the deal the Obama administration signed.

When Biden delayed America’s return to the talks, refused to promise an end to sanctions, refused to delist Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the US list of foreign terrorist organizations and threw up endless roadblocks, he put the return to the JCPOA into a coma and dealt the fatal blow to the reformists.

Trump crippled the reformists; Biden killed them. Parsi says that "the reformists were now completely delegitimized by not only Trump leaving the deal but by Biden not returning to it." The US demanded reform from Iran, but when Iran delivered, the US refused delivery and discredited the reformers.

In both Russia and Iran, US calls for reform were answered; in both Russia and Iran, the US discredited the reformers and killed the reforms.

 

Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2022/07/24/global-reform-and-how-the-us-hurts-itself/

 

 

READ FROM TOP. THE USA WANT TO OWN THE ENTIRE WORLD AND WILL ACT FOR THE USA, NO-ONE ELSE. THE US PLAY A DIRTY DANGEROUS GAME. SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

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Declassified files show that the U.K. Foreign Office’s propaganda unit glossed over Washington’s complicity in civilian bloodshed during its devastating war in Vietnam, John McEvoy reports.

 

 

 

By John McEvoy
Declassified U.K.

• IRD operated in the U.K., sending material to dozens of British journalists and political figures to “support the U.S. cause”
• IRD sought to rehabilitate a Vietnamese Hitler admirer
• It offered “special” assistance to Washington over the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident
• And it directly assisted South Vietnam’s regime, regarding it as an “emergency target”

 

 

The British Foreign Office provided key propaganda support to the U.S. during its war in Vietnam, chiefly through its Cold War propaganda arm, the Information Research Department (IRD).

Throughout the 1960s, this support involved helping the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese regime to set up its own propaganda unit and whitewashing Washington’s image over civilian bloodshed.

It also entailed distributing material to hundreds of British political and media figures in order to sanitise U.S. atrocities and make the British public less critical of the war.

Remarkably, Britain even offered to provide the U.S. with “special” support during the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, which Washington used to cynically and dramatically escalate its war effort in Vietnam.

Britain was not only interested in currying favour in the so-called special relationship. Like the U.S., Britain wanted to contain a radical nationalist movement in Vietnam which threatened to set an example of successful independent development in South East Asia.

These documents demonstrate the lengths that Britain was prepared to go to support Washington’s war, which resulted in the deaths of 2-to-3 million people.

‘Emergency Target’

In September 1961, a British Advisory Mission (BRIAM) arrived in Saigon “to offer advice to the Vietnamese Government on how to go about the problem of destroying the Communist threat”.

A key pillar of British advice would be in the field of propaganda.

In December 1961, the British ambassador in Saigon judged that South Vietnamese ruler Ngo Dinh Diem needed to improve his unpopular regime’s “information services,” but democratic reform was out of the question.

According to the head of BRIAM, Robert Thompson, “much was made of the fact that the administration was not democratic, but democracy does not work in all countries and could not do so in South Vietnam in the present circumstances”.

In other words, Washington’s puppet was unlikely to win a fair election and democracy thus had to be withheld.

“A key pillar of British advice would be in the field of propaganda”

As a result, the IRD’s output in Vietnam required “strengthening,” with one British embassy official in Saigon, the capital in the south, writing: “The fact is that Vietnam must now be regarded as an emergency target [for the IRD]”.

Britain’s initial propaganda objectives would be to “hit the peasant on the rice field,” to “help build loyalty among government officials by giving them good exposure,” and “to insure the population is informed of what is happening in Hanoi,” the capital of North Vietnam.

To this end, the Foreign Office embarked on helping the South Vietnamese regime “on the setting-up of a central office to study, analyse and expose Communist tactics” — a replica of Britain’s IRD.

 

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/12/12/britains-secret-propaganda-on-vietnam-war/

 

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FOR PEOPLE WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND OR ONLY HAVE A VAGUE IDEA OF HEGEMONY, PROFESSOR John Mearsheimer EXPLAINS THIS TO AN AUDIENCE OF HUNGARIANS:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shf1JlbQSjs

 

 

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MEP Clare Daly - speech from 24 Jun 2023

 

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the heartland explained...

 

https://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/29838

 

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