Why the US Opposes Russia in Syria

Now that Russia is involved in Syria, the idiotic psychos who run US foreign policy have decided to turn this into another US-Russia proxy war just like Afghanistan, where we supported psycho jihadi Al Qaeda types against another secular but brutal regime.

The man behind that great idea was Mr. Brezhinski, who is now nearly calling for the US to attack Russia. Brezhinski has been a Russia hater his whole life. His family are Polish nobility who supported fascists, and the Polish nobility and fascists hate nothing so much as Russians.

When the USSR fell, nothing changed in Brezhinski’s mind as his beef was always with Russia itself, not with the USSR. Most of the US Cold Warriors followed suit and began very provocative activities against Russia including extending NATO towards Russia. As long as Yeltsin and the other US satraps were in power, we were quite happy. The US spent the entire 90’s allying with the Russian Mafia and bankers in New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv in stripping bare almost everything in Russia that could be sold. Many Russian Jews made alliances with Jews in Tel Aviv, London and New York to help strip the country bare.

For the Jews, this was apparently paybacks, as Jews have been Russia-haters for a very long time now. For the bankers, it was just the usual thievery. With the election of Putin, Russia declared independence from the US and ended its status as a US colony. The fact that Russia decolonized itself from the US and refuses to obey us any longer is the reason that the Deep State has been conjuring up all of this anti-Putin propaganda.

These Deep State scumbags are militarists, and like all militarists, they always need an enemy. If they don’t have one, they go out and make one up, or they create enemies by provoking various entities. Americans are so stupid that they blindly go along with whoever the government and media says is the enemy du jour.

Freedom and Democracy!

Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow a foreign government since the Second World War. (* indicates successful ouster of a government)

  • China 1949 to early 1960s
  • Albania 1949-53
  • East Germany 1950s
  • Iran 1953 *
  • Guatemala 1954 *
  • Costa Rica mid-1950s
  • Syria 1956-7
  • Egypt 1957
  • Indonesia 1957-8
  • British Guiana 1953-64 *
  • Iraq 1963 *
  • North Vietnam 1945-73
  • Cambodia 1955-70 *
  • Laos 1958 *, 1959 *, 1960 *
  • Ecuador 1960-63 *
  • Congo 1960 *
  • France 1965
  • Brazil 1962-64 *
  • Dominican Republic 1963 *
  • Cuba 1959 to present
  • Bolivia 1964 *
  • Indonesia 1965 *
  • Ghana 1966 *
  • Chile 1964-73 *
  • Greece 1967 *
  • Costa Rica 1970-71
  • Bolivia 1971 *
  • Australia 1973-75 *
  • Angola 1975, 1980s
  • Zaire 1975
  • Portugal 1974-76 *
  • Jamaica 1976-80 *
  • Seychelles 1979-81
  • Chad 1981-82 *
  • Grenada 1983 *
  • South Yemen 1982-84
  • Suriname 1982-84
  • Fiji 1987 *
  • Libya 1980s
  • Nicaragua 1981-90 *
  • Panama 1989 *
  • Bulgaria 1990 *
  • Albania 1991 *
  • Iraq 1991
  • Afghanistan 1980s *
  • Somalia 1993
  • Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
  • Ecuador 2000 *
  • Afghanistan 2001 *
  • Venezuela 2002 *
  • Iraq 2003 *
  • Haiti 2004 *
  • Somalia 2007 to present
  • Libya 2011*
  • Syria 2012

"Thinking the Unthinkable"

This is an old article from the Saker that really needs to be read. In it, the Saker suggests the various responses the US/NATO might make to intervene in the war. I agree with him that the Pentagon is generally full of sane people who do not want to risk all-out war with Russia. However, the US civilian leadership has gone insane, and I believe that they have been insane and drunk on power and stupid for some time now, maybe even a couple of decades. This are the people who really worry me, not the generals. And sadly, I believe that Saker’s most apocalyptic scenarios are probably very much possible. The Ukraine mess has the potential to be utterly terrifying; in fact, I would argue that it already is. Why do most Americans, and most in the West even, not care about this Ukraine mess? Because Americans no longer care about anything we do overseas and they are lulled into a false sense of security by the corporate takeover of the media which turned the US media into a state propaganda organ. Americans are fat, lazy, stupid, apathetic and ignorant. They don’t care what we do overseas. In fact, they love it whenever we attack and kill people. The more the merrier. We can kill as many people as we want to overseas as long as parades of soldiers are not coming back in body bags. This was the only reason for the opposition to the Vietnam War – too many Americans were being killed. Really the only thing Americans seem to understand and the only way to get through to them is to kill lots of US soldiers in a war with an easy out. In any case like that, the US public will simply bail and for good reason. There is nothing too evil or sinister that the US can do overseas because the vast majority of Americans continue to believe in the Indispensable Nation, the City on the Hill, and Great and Good America that fights for freedom and democracy, confronting Evil everywhere on Earth. The idea that America itself might be the Evil, and that folks we are fighting are the Good Guys is simply too much for most Americans to deal with. They simply flat out refuse to believe it. The Americans are always the Good Guys and our enemies are always the Bad Guys. Even Democratic Party liberals hold this attitude as one of their core beliefs. If you tell these liberals otherwise, they start jumping up and down, screaming and yelling and ordering you to get out of their homes. US patriotardism runs extremely deep in society. I estimate 8 In fact, for much of my life, I believed the bolded lie myself until I finally wised up and learned the very painful truth.  

Thinking the Unthinkable

By Saker

Introduction

I have been putting off writing about this topic for a very long while. In fact, I wrote several articles trying to explain the self-evident truism that the US/NATO/EU does not have a military option in the Ukrainian war. First, in an article entitled Remembering the Important Lessons of the Cold War, I tried to explain that the reason the Cold War did not turn into a hot shooting war is that both sides understood that they simply could never win and that any escalation in strikes and counter-strikes could very rapidly lead to a intercontinental nuclear war, something which neither side was willing to risk. In a piece entitled Making Sense of Obama’s Billion Dollar Hammer, I tried to show that all the money the US will be pouring into “European security” is just a grandiose bribe for some European elites and that it had no real effect on the ground. A few days later I posted an article entitled Why the US-Russian Nuclear Balance is as Solid as Ever in which I tried to dispel the myth prevalent in the West about the putative state of disrepair of the Russian military in general and of the Russian nuclear forces in particular. Lastly, in a piece entitled Short Reminder about US and Russian Nuclear Weapons, I tried to show that in reality it was the US nuclear forces who were in a state of disrepair. And over and over, in many comments, I tried to lay out the reasons why I simply did not believe that the US/NATO/EU would dare to attack Russia. In summary, I will say this: the US is not nearly as powerful as US propaganda claims. Without going into long debates about what “victory” and “defeat” mean, I will just say that in my personal opinion is that the last time the US military fought well was in Korea, and even there it had to accept a draw. After that, it was all downhill. This is not the fault of the US solider, by the way, but instead is caused by the fact that big money and politics got so heavily involved in the US military that they corrupted everything. This is most evident in the USAF which still has superb pilots but who are given a terrible choice: either fly on good but old aircraft or fly on new but terrible ones (I believe that given the choice, most would chose the former). As for the European NATO allies, they are such a joke that they hardly deserve mention. They even look bad on a parade. As for a military option in the Ukraine, it appears unthinkable to me not only because, frankly, I don’t see a single military in the West capable of taking on the Russian military in full-scale battle but also because geography powerfully argues against such a crazy idea (the very same geography which would make it impossible for Russia to try to invade western or even central Europe). And yet, something in all this very logical reasoning felt wrong to me. A few days ago it finally hit me. What bothered me was this:

The American Duck

Among the many beautiful and witty expressions and neologisms Americans use, I always loved this one: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. This so-called “Duck test” is funny, but it is also a powerful logical method which ended up chewing at me day after day after day. Here I was, all sure and certain that the US/NATO/EU would never consider such a ludicrous notion as a military attack on Russia or Russian forces. But kept hearing the voice of the American Duck telling me: look at what they are doing, what does that look like to you? Suspend your conclusions and just tell me what are you observing? Tell me, if they had decided to escalate to the point of a military confrontation with Russia, would they be doing things differently? And a few days ago, I threw in the towel (at the duck, of course) and had to accept that while I did not know what they were thinking or what their intentions really were, it sure looked to me like the western plutocrats had decided to escalate the crisis has much as possible. In truth, I have to admit that when I studied the theory of deterrence in the 1980’s, my teachers always insisted that this theory of deterrence was predicated on what they called a “rational player”. To put it simply – how do you deter a lunatic? Or a desperate man with nothing to lose? Or a person hell-bent on mutual destruction? The truth is, you cannot. Deterrence assumes a rational actor making a logical decision about unacceptable costs. As far as I know, nobody has ever developed a theory of deterrence applicable to a madman. When I initially wrote my pieces explaining why I believed that a US/NATO/EU attack was impossible, a lot readers posted comments saying that while maybe the top US military command was still mainly composed of rational men, the US imperial elites had clearly gone crazy a long time ago and that they were so stuck in their arrogance, imperial hubris, delusions of invincibility and knee-jerk and systematic use of violence that they could no more be considered as rational. At the time I replied that, yeah, sure, maybe, but what is the point of analyzing something crazy? How do you try to make sense of the suicidally insane? And yet, this is what I propose to do today. I will try as best I can to try to place myself in the mind of these lunatics and see what they could try doing and what the consequences of that would be. I will go through several possible plans that these crazies might have starting from the most limited one and then going up the insanity slope.

Plan One: a Symbolic and Limited Intervention

This plan is already underway. We know that there are US military advisers in the Ukraine, including at least one general, we know that the Dutch and Australians will be sending in a lightly armed force to “protect” the investigators at the crash site of MH17 (although how a few men armed with assault rifles can protect anybody from Ukie artillery, tank or mortar fire is anybody’s guess). Then there are all the reports of foreign mercenaries, mostly US and Polish, fighting with the Ukie death squads. There is also some good evidence that Poland is sending military equipment, including aircraft and possibly crews. Well, all of that is dumb and serves very little useful purpose, but that is what the West is so good at: pretending. If this plan stays at this level, I would say that it is not very important. But, alas, there is a nastier possibility here:

Plan Two: A Tripwire Force

This is just an extension of plan one: bring in a few men and then have them killed. This would trigger the needed “popular outrage” (carefully fanned and reported by the corporate media) to force the Europeans to accept more US sanctions in Europe or even some kind of “EU-mandated peacekeeping force”. Of course, if the Russians or Novorussians do not take the bait and fail to kill the “observers”, US/NATO false flag teams could easily do that. Just imagine what a heavy mortar strike on a building with these OSCE observers would look like. The junta in Kiev would be more than happy to “invite” such a “peacekeeping” force into Novorussia and since this would be an “invited” force, no UNSC Resolution would be needed. Finally, such a “peacekeeping” force would be regularly reinforced and augmented until it could basically cover the flanks of the Ukies in their attacks against Novorussia. This force would also assume the command and control of Ukie forces, something which the Ukies could greatly benefit from (their current command and control is a mess). Plans One and Two assume that Russian forces stay on the other side of the border and that the only opposition to such a deployment could come from the Novorussians. But what if the Russians decided to move into Novorussia either to protect the locals or to stop this limited US/NATO/EU “peacekeeping force”? Then the US/NATO/EU would have to take a dramatic escalatory step and send in a much bigger force, more capable of defending itself.

Plan Three: UPROFOR on the Dniepr?

This is the Yugoslav scenario. The West would send in something on the order of 10 battalions which would each be given an area of responsibility for “peacekeeping”. Then police forces would be also sent to “maintain law and order,” and EU commissars would be sent in to “help” the local population “express their will” and “organize” a local government. Soon there would be some kind of EU-run election, and all the Novorussian forces would be declared “bandits” from which the local population need to be “protected”. Since Strelkov himself fought in Yugoslavia as did many other Russians, I don’t believe that the Russians or Novorussians would fall for this one. I think that Russia would express its opposition to such a plan and that if she was ignored, she would move in her own forces along the line of contact. This might be the US/NATO/EU end goal: to create a Korea-like “line of demarcation” which would isolate the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics from the rest of Novorussia and the rest of the Ukraine. This would mean getting plenty of Kosovo-like “Camp Bonsteels” all along the Russian border, and it would make it look like the “Wartime President of the One Indispensable Nation stopped the Russian Bear”. Finally, it would create a perfect Cold War-like environment in which the western

Plan Four: Operation Storm in Novorussia and Crimea?

I would not put it past the folks in the Pentagon and Mons to try to pull off an “Operation Storm” in Novorussia and even possibly Crimea. That is the scenario Glazev fears: the US/NATO/EU would put enough forces inside the Ukraine to allow it to survive long enough to mobilize a sufficient number of men and equipment for a lightning-fast attack on Novorossia and even possibly Crimea. And in theory, if we assume that Banderstan does not collapse under its own weight and economic disaster, the Ukraine has the resources to mobilize far more men and equipment that the tiny People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk or even Crimea. But that again assumes that Russia will let that happen, which she won’t, so now we have to look at the really crazy plans:

Plan Five: First “Desert Steppe Shield,” Then “Desert Steppe Storm”

That is a crazy notion: to do with Russia what the US did with Iraq. First, to place down a “protection force” in the Ukraine, isolate Russia, and then attack in a full-depth and full-scale determined attack. We are definitely talking about a continental war with a fantastic potential to turn into a world war. This plan would have be based on two crucial assumptions:

  1.  The US/NATO/EU conventional forces would be capable of defeating the Russian military.
  2. If facing conventional defeat, Russia would not use nuclear weapons.

I think that both of these assumptions are deeply mistaken. The first one is based on a mix of propaganda, bean counting and ignorance. The propaganda is something which western military are very good at. They are not. Most western armies are a pathetic joke, and those who can fight well (the Brits, the Turks) are too little to matter. That leaves the US military which have capabilities far in excess of what its NATO allies can muster. Just as in WWII all the serious fighting had to be done by German units, in case of a WWIII (or IV?), all the serious fighting would have to be done by Americans. The problem is that the Americans would have an extremely hard time bringing in enough forces to really make the difference. In any case, I have the biggest doubt about the current fighting capabilities of the US Army and Marine Corps. Faced with a Russian battalion defending its own soil, I think that an equivalent US Army/Marine force would get slaughtered. The “bean counting” is when you compare all the NATO APC’s or tanks to the number available to the Russian military. The corporate media loves these sorts of charts in which soldiers, APC’s, tanks, aircraft and other gear are compared. Professional analysts never use them simply because they are meaningless. What matters is how much of that gear is actually available for battle, the kind of tactics used, the training and morale of the soldiers, the skills of their commanding officers, and stuff which is never mentioned: supplies, logistics, petroleum, lubricants, ammunition, lines of supply, medical standards, and even food and weather. Bean counters simply never see that. But one could argue that the number of trucks is more important to a military than the number of tanks. Yet trucks are never counted. But yes, on paper NATO looks huge. Even though most NATO gear could not even survive your average Ukrainian road, never mind the winter. But let us assume that the Hollywood image of the US military is true: invincible, best trained, best armed, with a fantastic morale, led by the very best of the best officers, it would easily defeat the primitive Russian military, armed with antiquated weapons and commanded by fat drunken generals. Okay, and then what? If the official Russian nuclear deterrence doctrine is examined, in this case Russia would use nuclear weapons. Since even in Hollywood movies nobody makes the claim that the US anti-missile systems could stop Iskanders, cruise missiles or even gravity bombs, we would have to accept that the invincible US force would be turned into radioactive particulates and that in turn would leave the US President two terrible choices: a) take the loss and stop b) retaliate, and the second option would have to include the location from where the strike came from: Russia proper. That, of course, would place the following choices for the Russian President: a) take the loss or b) strike at the continental United States. At this points nuclear mushrooms would start appearing all over the map. Now please make no mistake: Russia can not only destroy Mons, the Pentagon and Cheyenne Mountain (just a matter of placing enough warheads on the right spot) but also every single major city in the United States. Sure, the USA can retaliate in kind, but what kind of consolation would that be for anybody left? I cannot believe that the US Deep State would truly, deliberately, want to start a planetary nuclear war. For one thing, US leaders are cowards, and they will not want to take such a monumental decision. A far more likely version is that being stupid, arrogant cowards, they will stumble upon just that outcome. Here is how:

Plan Six: American Football’s “Hail Mary”

In American football there is a specific pass which is used only when seconds are left on the clock, and your team is badly losing anyway. Basically it works like this: every single person who is not defending the quarterback rushes to the end zone, as do all the defenders, and the quarterback then just throws the ball straight into that zone with the very slim hope that one of his own players will catch it and score a touchdown. This is called a “Hail Mary” for very good reason as only a miracle makes such a desperate plan work. Most of the time the ball is either fumbled or caught by the other team. But, very rarely, it works. I can very much imagine a desperate Obama trying to show the American people that he “has hair on his chest” and that he is not going to let “regional power” challenge the “indispensable nation”. So what he and, really, his administration risks doing is the following: to play a game of chicken hoping against all odds that the Russian will yield. This is my worst nightmare and the worst possible assumption to make because Russia cannot yield. In March of this year I issued a warning which I entitled Obama just made things much, much worse in the Ukraine – now Russia is ready for war. What prompted me to issue that warning was the fact that the Council of the Russian Federation has just unanimously passed a resolution allowing Putin to use Russian armed forces in the Ukraine. Since then, this resolution has been repealed at Putin’s request and for obvious political motives, but the mood and determination are still there. In fact, I think that it has grown much stronger. There has been much useless speculation about Putin, his motives and strategy. This is way bigger than just Putin. If the US/NATO/EU really push too far, and that includes a genocide in Novorussia, an attack on Crimea or an attack on Russian forces, Russia will go to war, Putin or no Putin. And Putin knows that. His real base of support is not the Russian elites (who mostly fear him), but the Russian people (with whom his current rating are higher than ever before). And Putin himself openly spoke about the “threats to Russian sovereignty” though he did add that because of the Russian nuclear forces, there was, in his opinion, no immediate threat to Russian territory. If the US decides to play a game of chicken with Russia, then it will do the same thing as a car driver playing a game of chicken against an incoming train: regardless of the train’s driver, the train is on tracks and its momentum is too great: it cannot stop or veer away. The problem is that the USA has a long record of making absolutely irresponsible statements which end up putting them into a corner from which they cannot bulge without losing face. Just look at the MH17 disaster: the Obama administration immediately rushed to blame the Russians for it, but what will it do when the evidence to the contrary comes out? What if Obama also draws a red line somewhere (it does not really matter where) and then forces Russia to cross it? Sadly, I can imagine the USA declaring that the US/NATO will defend the Ukie airspace. I think that they are dumb enough to try to seize a Russian ship entering or leaving the Black Sea. Remember – these are the folks who hijacked the aircraft of Bolivian President Evo Morales to try to find Snowden on board. These are the folks who regularly kidnap Russian citizens worldwide (the last time the son of a well-know Russian member of Parliament who was kidnapped in the Maldive Islands). And, of course, these are the folks who did 9/11. Their arrogance knows no limits because they are profoundly evil sociopaths. For them, the organization of false flag operations is a normal standard procedure. They almost triggered a war between the DPRK and South Korea by sinking a South Korean military vessel. They used chemical weapons in Syria not once, but several times. And the last time we had a Democrat in the White House, he was crazy enough to send two US Aircraft Carrier Groups into the Strait of Taiwan to threaten China.

My Biggest Fears

This is my biggest fear: some kind of desperate “Hail Mary” maneuver in which the US will try to convince Russia that “look, we are crazy enough to start this thing, so you better back off” not realizing that Russia cannot back off. The other thing which really scares me is that during the Cuban Missile Crisis everybody was aware of the stakes, and most people were truly terrified. Now, thanks to the propaganda of the corporate media, almost nobody is afraid and hardly anybody is paying attention. Russia and the USA are on a clear collision course and nobody cares! How come? Because if 9/11 proved anything, it is that there are things which most people are simply unwilling to contemplate, no matter how close and real they are. It would only make sense that the Empire of Illusion would be populated by a people in total denial. After all, illusion and denial usually go hand in hand. Most of you, dear readers and friends, seem to be sharing with me a sense of total distrust in the sanity of our leaders. When I asked you whether you believed that the US/NATO were crazy enough to use military forces against Russia, an overwhelming number of you answered “yes,” and a good part of you were even emphatically sure of that. Why? Because we all know how crazy and deluded our Imperial Overlords are. Crazy and deluded enough not to quality as “rational actor”? Crazy and deluded enough to play a game a chicken with a train? Crazy and deluded enough to risk the planet on “Hail Mary? Alas, I think that this is a very real possibility.

But What Does Uncle Sam Really Want?

There is a gradual realization in Russia that for Uncle Sam this is not about the Ukraine. It is about Russia and specifically about regime change in Russia. A vast majority of Russian experts seem to believe that the US wants to overthrow Putin and that this entire war in the Ukraine is a means to achieve that. As a very cynical joke going around now says “Obama is willing to fight Putin down to the very last Ukrainian”. I think that this is correct. The US hopes that one of the following will happen:

  1. A Russian military intervention in Novorussia which will allow the US to restart a Cold War v2 on steroids and which will also fully re-enslave Europe to the USA. Putin would then be blamed for falling in the US trap.
  2. The creation of a US-run “Banderastan” in the Ukraine. That would ‘contain’ and destabilize Russia. Again, Putin would be blamed for letting that happen.
  3. A “nationalist Maidan” in Russia: this is what is behind the current Putin-bashing campaign in the blogosphere: to paint Putin as a weak and/or corrupt man, who traded Crimea for the Donbass (you know the tune – these folks even comment on this blog). These efforts are supported and sometimes even financed by Russian oligarchs who have a great deal of money involved in the EU and don’t need the current tensions. Here Putin would be blamed for not doing enough.

In all three cases, Putin would risk a (patriotically) color coded revolution which would, inevitably, bring either crazy rogue or a clueless fossil to power (a la Zhirinovsky or Zuganov) or, much better, a pro-American “liberal” (a la Medvedev). I think that all of these plans will fail. Putin will not give Uncle Sam the intervention he wants. Instead, Russia continue to support the Resistance in Novorussia until Banderastan goes “belly up”, i.e. for another 30-60 days or so. As for the “nationalist Maidan”, the Russian people see straight through this “black PR campaign” and their support for Putin is higher than it ever was. It’s not Putin who does not want to intervene overtly in the Donbass, it is the Russian people. The attempts at stirring up anti-Putin by first stirring up anti-Strelkov feelings have completely failed and, in fact, they have backfired. A lot of these “hurray-patriots” are now overly called “useful idiots” for the CIA or even provocateurs. Finally, while they are at this point in time only rumors, there seem to be more and more specialists of the opinion that MH17 was a deliberate false flag by the US. If the news that the Ukies did it ever becomes public, then the entire destabilization plan will go down the tubes. At this point, I would not put anything, no matter how crazy, past the US Deep State. And that is a very scary thought. The Saker

A Brief History of the Neoconservatives

Jason Y writes:

How does this relate to the neocons, as some have said they had Trotskyite roots? I always had a hard time understanding this. I mean, how could W. Bush, the furthest thing from a leftist or communist you can think of, could be in with communists?

I am not sure. Many of the Trots were Jewish. For whatever reason, many Trots turned into neocons. They began turning away from Communism with the revelations about Stalin and Stalinism, including Khrushchev’s secret speech. A lot of them simply left Communism and formed the anti-Communist Left, or became anti-Communist liberals like my later father. The CIA set up a number of organizations and journals to work out of starting in the 1950’s. One was called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It was during the 6-Day War that many really turned against the Left. As I said, most were Jews, and Jews the world over who had never cared much about Israel rallied round the Israeli flag in 1967. This was the start of this group’s big break with the Left. The Vietnam War was going on too at this time, and many of this group were pro-war. They were sickened by the pro-Viet Cong and what they saw as anti-patriotic attitudes of the antiwar crowd. Many of this crowd were older conservative Jewish guys, and they were disgusted and sickened by the counterculture, especially by the fact that many of its leaders were Jewish, which they saw as bringing shame on the Jews. This group began to merge with Jewish conservatives who had always been around but had not been very common. This goes back to the time when Jews first came here and many were poor and living as renters. Many of their landlords were rich Jews. A lot of these poor Jewish renters became leftwingers and specialized in taking their Jewish slumlords to court all the time. This caused a major split in Jewish society and the Jewish landlords saw the Jewish leftwing tenants as some sort of treasonous “enemies of the people.” This group nevertheless stayed with the Democratic Party, but they had started to become the rightwing of the Democratic Party. In the 1970’s, they began to congregate around Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s office. Jackson was known as “the Senator from Boeing” and he was widely known as a super hawk. He strongly supported Israel and the Vietnam War. Support for Israel and the Vietnam War became intertwined in this crowd. In the 1970’s, some early proto-neoconservative publications came out, mostly published by Jewish rightwing Democrats. When the Reagan Administration came around, many of these proto-neocons got jobs in the Reagan Administration. Most of them specialized in Cold War politics where they become wild, crazed, fanatical Cold Warriors. Particular focus was on ramping up military spending and opposing nuclear arms reduction. They made alliances with such characters as Frank Gaffney, a wild-eyed Cold Warrior. This was the trajectory of characters like Richard Perle who cut their teeth as Cold Warriors under Reagan. Paul Nitze was another proto-neocon from this era. Jean Kirkpatrick can also be seen as a proto-neocon. Really Reagan’s foreign policy was already a neocon activist foreign policy as we supported fascists and mass murderers the world over in the name of opposing the USSR. I am not quite sure what happened to the neocons during the 1990’s. I think they may have formed a lot of their classic neocon organizations. Some of them worked closely with Israel’s rightwing government during this period. With Bush’s selection and theft of the election in 2000, many neocons ascended into power. After 9-11, they gained a lot of prominence. Both Trotskyites and neocons could be seen as radical revolutionaries. Generally conservatives are supposed to be cautious folks. The Trotskyite plan was always “world revolution.” Since socialism in one country was not possible, Communist revolutions the world over would have to be sparked in order to ensure that large states like the USSR could succeed. The neocons are also wild revolutionaries like the neocons and they also believe in a sort of world revolution involving attacking and undermining their enemies all over the world and instituting regime change in many enemies of the US.

The CIA Is Everywhere

You know, I used to hate this guy, but I think now I am actually starting to like him. For some reason, he reminds me of Oliver Stone. The former governor of Minnesota and former US Navy Seal has some interesting tales to tell about the CIA. It seems they are everywhere. They are probably under your bed as you are reading this as a matter of fact. Personally, I think the Agency is completely out of control. We never used to have a CIA. We went through all of WW2 without one and we one anyway. The birth of the CIA occurred in 1946 when Wartime Intelligence was folded into the US state as a permanent entity. That is around the time when the National Security State was birthed. It’s nice to blame rogues like John Foster Dulles, but I really blame Truman for this whole mess. Truman birthed the CIA, the National Security State, and he really ramped up the Cold War like crazy. I used to be fond of him as a domestic liberal. But like most Democratic Party domestic liberals, he was completely reactionary when it came to US foreign policy.

The Germans Are Falling Back into Their Old Habits

From the Saker. Great piece, made a lot of people really mad. Good!

The Russian Appeal to Germany

by Egor Prosvirnin

My name is Egor Prosvirnin, I am the chief editor of the Russian site sputnikipogrom.com which advocates European values. I’ve heard that one of the aspects of life that Europeans and Germans especially cherish is history. If we were to recall recent history, we would remember that a vast army of 300,000 Soviet troops along with 5,000 tanks, 1,500 aircraft and 10,000 artillery pieces (including tactical nuclear weapons) simply left the then just-united Germany without firing a shot.

It was an operation unprecedented in scope and brevity, when the entire Soviet army withdrew literally to open fields. Tens of thousands of Soviet officers, obeying the orders of the supreme command, went from their warm barracks to live in moldy tents set up in the middle of sodden snow-covered fields. In many instances along with their families.

For what?

For hope. Hope that the dark pages of history between our two countries were finally and forever past. Hope that we no longer have to keep armies of tanks in the center of Europe, and that Europe would respect and consider our interests. Hope that in a united Germany we would have a good friend and ally, with whom Russia would fulfill the dream of Charles de Gaulle of a united Europe stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

When our armies were leaving Germany, our soldiers were told that Germany had recognized and redeemed its mistakes of the past, there were no undecided issues with Germany, and that we would no longer hear German voices calling for retribution against Russia, therefore we did not need our Army of tanks positioned in the middle of Europe.

From that moment, Russians and Germans were friends, and friends have no need for vast armadas of armor and tanks. Russians should cease being afraid of a united Germany and disarm.

And we disarmed. And for 20 years we felt that we did the right thing, that the past is forgotten forever, and that the Germans appreciated how readily we closed all the bases and brought all the troops home (although there are American bases in Germany to date).

In good times our friends know us; in troubled times we come to know our friends; and troubled times did come via the Ukrainian crisis. It became clear that the Germans do not remember the good. It turned out that the Germans did not learn the lessons of history, it seems that the Germans viewed the voluntary dismantling and withdrawal of our war machine not as humanism and goodwill, but weakness.

It turns out that when the Americans spoke loudly and sharply with the German chancellor, whom they for all these years have kept under surveillance like some sticky-fingered housemaid, the entire German society leaped up like a submissive dog running obediently to its American master…. even when the conflict with Russia goes against German economic and political interests.

It seems therefore that if one blunts their sword, removes their armor, ceases the Soviet-era preparations for World War III, and is reaching out to the Germans, the Germans will spit in your extended hand at the first opportunity. It turns out that Russians are yet again “Untermensch”, who can be savaged with impunity on the pages of the German press and punitive sanctions demanded from the rostrum of the Bundestag, while disallowing an opportunity for Russia to openly and equitably argue its case.

It turns out, however, that the Ukrainian government can without any liability prohibit the Russian language, jail Russian activists, target residential neighborhoods with volleys of artillery, kill thousands of civilians who happen to be mostly Russian – and that’s OK. It is OK because it’s a “democracy”, and it suits Germany because Russians are “Untermensch”, because Russians are Jews whose blood for Germans is worth nothing.

And what’s more, for trying to defend themselves, for attempting to return fire against the Ukrainian armed forces, Russians should be punished, publicly harassed, their will to resist broken, and then forced into an international Russian ghetto.

Then burn that ghetto, as the Trade Unions building in Odessa was burned with 49 pro-Russian protesters inside. Do you know how the Ukrainian social networks responded to this holocaust? By referring to the dead as “Colorado Shishkebabs”(*) – this is what tens of thousands of people in the Ukrainian social networks wrote, including indecent sayings copied into photos of the charred bodies.

We are again the subhumans, we are again nothing but animals that Ukrainian Nazis may kill with impunity, creating a “Russian-frei Ukraina”.

According to the data collected by Human Rights Watch, only during this past July the Ukrainians killed one thousand one hundred fifty peaceful Russians in the eastern part of the country, and these killings continue daily. Where are your protests, Germany? Where are your sanctions against Ukraine? Where is your vaunted humanism that you profess to have learned since 1945 by recognizing the errors from your past?

Saur-Mogila, which is located on strategic heights and is a memorial to Russian soldiers who died there 70 years ago during a fierce battle with the Wehrmacht, has once again been stormed. This time by the Ukrainian battalion “Azov” wearing their Wolfsangel patches, a symbol of the 2nd, 4th and 34th SS divisions, and you are silent!

Russian militia are ducking behind the granite statues of Soviet soldiers from neo-Nazi bullets fired by “the National Guard” of Ukraine, and you dare to agree with the American nonsense about “Russian aggression”! Ukrainians shoot cities with ballistic missiles, leaving craters in places homes once stood, and you impose sanctions not against Ukraine but against Russia!

Again, troops are killing unarmed Russian civilians, and you are debating whether it is time to start delivering weapons to these murderers so that they can kill more Russians? All of your vaunted “politics of memory” and “learning from the past” is simply a pile of dog shit, as again before your eyes unarmed civilians are butchered, and you applaud this and promise these Ukrainian murderers fresh financing.

You have not learned humanism, you Germans. You have not learned responsibility. You have not learned to resist Evil and tell that Evil clearly to its face, “No, you are the killer, I will not help you, you must stop the killing immediately.” You have not learned to be a responsible, independent, free people, who are capable of giving good in return for good.

You are slaves who think good is a weakness.

In 1934, Hitler drove you like sheep, and in 2014 Obama is your shepherd. If tomorrow in Germany, the Americans open a concentration camp for Russians, half of you will immediately submit their curriculum vitae for jobs as operators of the gas chambers, and your press will start to explain how this camp is patriotic and good for the German economy. It would then follow that killing these Russian “Untermensch”, crafting lampshades out of their skin for daring to resist, and sending this nicely packaged to Washington to please your American ally.

Germans have failed their test. When Evil has returned again to Europe, you do not even attempt to resist it, and immediately fall prostrate at its feet like a slave after the eagerly-awaited, long delayed return of your master. Serve Evil, impose sanctions, support the murder of Russians, supply weapons to the killers of Russians, justify this genocide – the end of your story will be familiar, because Evil cannot win.

I will conclude this text with a popular quote from the famous American stateswoman Ms. Victoria Nuland, who obviously makes the decisions in Ukraine instead of your Chancellor:

“Fuck the EU”.

Like it or not, but admit that the Americans are a smart people capable of accurately determining the “price” of a united Germany and a united Europe.

source: http://sputnikipogrom.com/europe/germany/18213/russian-appeal/

More Anti-Russian Lies

rantus writes:

First off: according to whom? Well, according to my wife’s grandfather who lived through it. When he was a kid he watched Russian troops massacre people out in the woods for days on end. He hid in the trees until it was over. He grew up in Poland, and was a staunch anti-communist because of what he saw them do to the Polish people. He spent three years in a communist prison because he refused to join the Communist Party. The reason I bring up Stalin is because he’s the one who populated Ukraine in the East with Russians. Ukraine is not Russia, that’s just another fairytale that Russophiles promote. Russian has been terrorizing Ukraine into submission for quite a long time. I bring up Stalin because he literally reshaped the nation of Ukraine through his policies of ethnic cleansing and the execution of the native intelligentsia, just like the soviets did in Poland. Oh, that and systematic rape and murder. Putin longs for that empire to be restored. You romanticize it because you think that the US is corrupt. It may well be, but I’ll take it any day compared to living under a despot like Putin. And if you actually paid any attention, the vast majority of Ukrainians want an independent country, not a Russian satellite state.

These could be considered Cold War lies of US imperialism, but more properly these are the Cold War lies of those in Eastern Europe and parts of the USSR who hated the USSR. So it is East European anti-Soviet propaganda. Now I see! Rantus is a Polish Russophobe by proxy! I get it now. Never listen to a Polish Russophobe. Or a Baltic, Finnish, Ukrainian, Czech, Romanian or Bulgarian one. They hated Communism, and to them, Russia = Communism. They are not rational, will never be rational, and many of them are fascists, especially the Nazi type of fascists. This is especially true of Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian nationalists, most of whom are fascists and in particular, Nazi-type fascists. In East Europe, many to most Russia-haters are fascists, often Nazi-type fascists. However Polish nationalists are not Nazis. They had a very bad experience with Nazism, worse than with the Communists. But Polish nationalists definitely hate Jews. Many Hungarian and Romanian nationalists are fascists, typically Nazi-type fascists. With Czech, Slovak and Bulgarian nationalists, I do not think they are so fascist and Nazi-like. Czech nationalists in particular are quite progressive. Check out Milan Kundera. Of course, Russia abandoned Communism long ago and is now just another capitalist country. The Poles have always hated Russia and have long harbored an official policy to destroy Russia by breaking it into small pieces. This policy was officially dreamed up around 1920, and many documents were written in support of this policy. You can still read them to this day. At the moment, Georgia, Poland, the Baltics and Ukraine still support this “Destroy Russia” plan as official government policy. The Poles have been attacking Russia forever. This goes all the way back to the 1600’s and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Poles have conquered parts of Russia, mostly the Western Ukraine, many times. The conflict goes back to West versus East, Catholicism versus Orthodoxy, Rome versus Antioch. There is more to it than that, but you get the picture. Bottom line is that Poland is a long-term deadly enemy of the Russian people and the Russians have a right to be wary of them. The Poles have never dropped their “Destroy Russia” plan, so I do not see why Russia should be nice to them. In 1920, the Russia-Polish War was fought. Although the West has been lying about this war forever, the truth is that Polish attacked Russia out of the blue for no good reason during this war. There really is no such thing as the Ukraine. It has never really existed as an independent state, except for two years from 1919-1921 and a few years during World War 2 when a Nazi puppet state, similar to the French Vichy, the Croatian Ustasha and the Romanian Iron Cross regimes, ruled for a few years. Western Ukraine was only connected to the Eastern Ukraine by Stalin’s annexation of part of Poland in 1939. Before that, this fake Ukraine country was always part of Poland. Everything from Kiev east was always part of Russia, known as Malorussia and Novorussia. There was a Ukrainian SSR that was part of a the USSR, but it was just a state in the USSR, not a nation-state. It was put together by gluing all sorts of strange regions together for no particular reason. The present borders of Ukraine have no legitimacy whatsoever. However, I will grant that in terms of a real Ukrainian nation exists in the sense that nations exist independent of nation-states. Therefore, everything from Kiev west I would call the true, pure Ukrainian nation, now the Ukrainian nation-state. The rest is just Russia. Crimea was always a part of Russia. So was Novorussia. However, I am willing to grant the Ukrainian nation any territories to the east of Kiev that want to join it since rejoining Malorussia to Russia does not make sense logically. However, central and east Ukraine may not want to be part of this Nazi regime. Already Transcarpathia is in open rebellion. They have declared independence and there are armed roadblocks all over the land. They only let authorized people through. The Transcarpathians want nothing to do with this Nazi regime. There are strong signs that Kharkiv does not want to be part of this Nazi country either, but they decided not to have an independence referendum. It is true that the USSR committed many crimes against Poland under Stalin. I do not condone that. And forcing Communism on the Poles never worked. Stalin said it was like trying to put a saddle on a cow. This very Catholic country never liked Communism, however most Polish nationalists are socialist-type people. I also agree that the USSR committed many crimes against the Ukrainian people, including a genocide of 390,000 people during the anti-kulak campaign. The leading figures and intellectuals of most nations of the USSR were decimated by Stalin in 1938 during his purges. The Ukies were not singled out. There was no Holodomor. It never even happened. There was a famine, but it was not a deliberate or terror famine. Anyway the Western Ukrainian Ukies were not part of the Holodomor as they were living in Poland at the time. After Stalin died, Khrushchev came in. He was a Ukrainian and he did many good things for the Ukrainian people. He annexed Crimea to the Ukraine, riding roughshod over history in doing so. It is time to let bygones be bygones. The USSR is over and done with. The West Ukies were Nazi sympathizers who worked closely with the Nazis, set up a Nazi government, and participated gleefully in the Jew roundups and Jew-killing. And the commenter’s relative may be interested to know that his cherished Ukie nationalists (the direct ancestors of the present Nazi regime) slaughtered 100,000 Poles in West Ukraine while their Nazi state was in power. The man who did this was their national hero, a man named Stephan Bandera. Bandera is the finest hero of Ukrainian nationalism, and there are statues of him all over the new Ukraine. The Ukies have never apologized or renounced Banderist doctrine. In fact, a good name for the new Ukraine would be “Banderistan.” It is beyond me why Russia should tolerate a psychotic, murderously hostile Ukie Nazi government on their border. In fact, they should not and cannot tolerate it at all. They really need to overthrow that Nazi government in Kiev. Let the Nazis go back west of Kiev to Banderastan where they can seig-Heil until they get tired of it and return to their senses. The commenter makes a typical patriotard comment when he asks, “Where would you rather live, the US or Russia?” If you say the US, then you must support the US and hate Russia. If you say Russia, then they will tell you to leave the US and go live in Russia. This is the way the patriotard thinks. Nations fighting for good against evil should be supported whether you want to go live there or not. Your own nation should be opposed when it fights for evil against good (as the US usually does) even if it is a pretty nice place to live. To the patriotard, “nice place to live” means “the foreign policy is perfect” and “my country right or wrong.” Similarly, “lousy place to live” means “evil country with evil intentions that is an enemy of America.” It’s insane, but US patriotardism never makes sense anyway.

US Supported Ukrainian Nazi Calls for Killing 1.5 Million Novorussians

This Ukrainian Nazi journalist is named Bogdan Boutkevitch. He is a well-known Nazi reporter who writes frequently for Nazi publications such as Ukrainian Weekly and appears regularly on Nazi TV. The TV station that aired his interview, Hromadske TV, is 10 So there you have it, Holocaust survivor George Soros is supporting Nazis in the Ukraine. It’s a bit hard to figure, but he’s also supporting Jew-Nazis in Israel, so I guess it all makes sense somehow. Soros and the rest of the heavily-Jewish US mass media has apparently decided to throw down with these Nazis as a proxy force to destroy what they truly hate which is Russia. For what I have heard, Soros has an extreme, nearly maniacal hatred of Russia dating back to his experiences in Communist Hungary. Also, lately Soros has been trying to overthrow the Russian government via his NGO’s, color revolutions and all his other fancy tricks. Pussy Riot was heavily backed by Soros as a wedge issue to damage his hated Russia. Soros and other US Deep State members have been saying that they want a color revolution in Russia for some time now. They want Putin gone. This whole fight is really about the dollar and US hegemony. Putin is seen as as the one man who is standing in the way of the domination of the dollar as world fiat currency and the consequent US hegemony as Dictator of the World. Because Putin is standing in the way of these profound interests of the US Deep State and the banksters, Putin must be destroyed. I believe that the Deep State/banksters will even go to war with Russia to keep their fiat currency and world domination. There is simply too much at stake this time. The US Jewish elite has tied its wagon to US imperialism since the end of World War 2. They allied with the US around the Cold War, which enabled these Jews to work with and support many Nazis and fascists in Europe. For instance, the Gladio Stay Behind Network, a mostly fascist web of connected paramilitaries, was set up in all of Europe in case of a Soviet conquest of Western Europe. In that case, the Gladio Network would form the “stay-behind forces,” the guerrillas who worked behind Soviet lines to disrupt the new Soviet rule. The Right Sector and Svoboda fascist forces are part of the Gladio Network that the West set up, and now our fascist proxy army is being used against as the need arises. The brownshirts and stormtroopers of the Ukrainian government. They are very heavily involved in the fighting in the East, forming much of the fanatical Ukrainian National Guard. These are their private thugs, their private paramilitary street forces. Apparently Soros is also involved in funding these Nazi brownshirts and stormtroopers now rampaging across the Ukraine. Senator John McCain had his photo taken with his arm around the leader of one of these fascist street gangs. Also these gangs were used to by the West in the Maidan protests to overthrow the Yanukovitch regime. The Israelis also appear to be supporting the Ukrainian Nazis, probably because they are in a deep alliance with the US. However, Israeli support for the Nazis is fairly weak. In addition, Israel has excellent relations with the Putin government. Not all Jews in the world are supporting the Nazis in the Ukraine. For instance, the Russian Jews are 10 There are some Ukie Jews supporting the Nazi government, in fact, one of the richest men in the Ukraine is a Jewish oligarch from Dnepropetrovsk. He has set up a particularly brutal and vicious fascist paramilitary which is fighting now in the Donbass. It is thought that his notorious private army was behind the downing of the jetliner. He has also issued calls for genocide, recently calling for killing all of the Russians of Novorussia. On the other hand, the Jews of Novorussia tend to support the Novorussians. So there is no real Jewish position on Novorussia; instead, most Jews are simply following the national interests of whatever region they live in in the conflict. This man’s opinions are not particularly unique for a Ukie. In truth, the Ukies are more Russophobic fascists than pure Nazis, but that’s a distinction without a difference. All fascists are really the same, it is only that some are worse than others. This is really a repeat of World War 2, when the Ukies in the West Ukraine supported the Nazis via their leader Bandera and the Russian Ukies in the East Ukraine supported Stalin and fought Hitler. Jews who lived in Western Ukraine at the time of the Nazi invasion said that the West Ukrainians treated them terribly, throwing them out of their homes, stealing their stuff and cursing them as they fled the area. These Jews have never forgotten. The Western Ukies not only allied with the Nazis, but they also assisted the Nazis in carrying out pogroms of the Jews. In this way, they were no different than most nationalist groups in Eastern Europe, most of whom also embraced the Nazis when they marched in and gleefully helped the Nazis in the Jew-slaughter. It was certainly the case in Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. The Vichy French also rounded up some Jews for their Nazi buddies. Notice that this man uses Nazis-style language. He refers to a “surplus population” in the East. This is Nazi-talk. Nazis talked of “useless eaters,” who were the people who needed killing. There is nothing unique about this man and his views. Most Western Ukrainians think like this. Why do you think I call them Nazis? The ex-President, the female oligarch Yulia Timoshenko (the gas queen) has issued calls for dropping nuclear weapons on East Ukraine. And she is considered to be a moderate. Timoshenko is a murderer. She has had at least four or five people killed and possibly more. After she and her allies lost a recent election, Yulia and her friends (who include much of the current regime) roamed around killing the leaders of the party that had beaten them in the election. She is also horribly corrupt, and she deserved every minute she spent in jail. When she was thrown in jail, all the West screamed to let their Nazi Queen free. This is America’s hero in the Ukraine.

Bogdan Boutkevitch: You Need to Kill 1.5 Million People in Donbass

Preamble: Hromadske TV is now officially the Ukrainian version of Rwandan RTLM. Just like RTLM called for the extermination of the Tutsi, calling them Inyenzi, or cockroaches, so now Hromadske TV is legitimizing the genocide of the population of Novorossiya. From Inyenzi to Colorados, we have come full circle. Hromadske TV, this mouthpiece of Ukrainian genocide, is financed directly by US and Dutch embassies. The blood of the population of Novorossiya is on all our hands – we have allowed this to happen. Please circulate this as widely as you can and stand witness to this Holocaust. Hromadske TV is Financed Directly by US and Dutch Embassies Hromadske

  1. Link to the Hromadske TV Annual Financial Report, 2013 – the US and Dutch embassies and George Soros implicated.
  2. Link to the Hromadske TV Annual Financial Report, 2014 – again, clear evidence of US financing of this genocidal TV Station.

Transcript: “It’s perfectly simple. You need to kill 1.5 million people in Donbass”

Translated from Ukrainian by Valentina Lisitsa

Bogdan Boutkevitch: Ok, you ask me “How can this be happening?” Well, it happens because Donbass, in general, is not simply a region in a very depressed condition, it has got a whole number of problems, the biggest of which is that it is severely overpopulated with people nobody has any use for. Trust me I know perfectly well what I am saying. If we take, for example, just the Donetsk oblast, there are approximately 4 million inhabitants, at least 1.5 million of which are superfluous. That’s what I mean: we don’t need to [try to] “understand” Donbass, we need to understand Ukrainian national interests. Donbass must be exploited as a resource, which it is. I don’t claim to have a quick solution recipe, but the most important thing that must be done – no matter how cruel it may sound – is that there is a certain category of people that must be exterminated.

How the East Was Won – The Destruction of Eastern Europe by the US and its Allies

We are pleased to publish this first testimony of a francophone reader of vineyardsaker. Filo is of Yugoslavian origin. He emigrated to the West in the 70’s, and tells us of his disillusionment on the Western model as well as that of an entire people. The French Saker Editors

1989, The Year the West Did Everything Wrong

by Filo

I was born a long time ago, in a country that was said to be situated between two blocks: that of the East and that of the West. A nonaligned country. Above all, an untroubled and peaceful country. I was born and lived there the first twenty years of my life. Enough for me to be able to perceive and understand the life of my country, engage in my studies and in my first experiences. As early as 1960, socialist Yugoslavia was forced by the West and the IMF to open itself to a market economy and to start making economic reforms. Poorly prepared and ill-protected, state companies rapidly went into an economic crisis. Mass unemployment appeared. In short, we became easy prey, exploitable at will. The country was invaded by entrepreneurs and businessmen from Germany, Austria, Netherlands, and Switzerland, all attracted by low-cost manpower. Many Yugoslavians became “gastarbeiters”, immigrant workers. When this situation reached its apex, there were in the West up to 2.5 million Yugoslavian workers according to estimates. In 1970, I was among those who followed this course. I landed in the middle of an economic boom. I remember, my eyes wide open, being astonished by all of these ostentatious signs of wealth, by the presence of banks everywhere. Although I was not born in capitalism, a question worried me: How can all of these banks be profitable? I finally understood much later. I will not say more about it now because I would like to keep that topic for another article. Inevitably, I compared this new world I was discovering to the world I had just left. I was first struck by the amount of falsehood and manipulation in the written or broadcast media. These media were full of glorification of the Western society, presented as being superior in every aspect. The others, the Eastern countries, were systematically criticized and slandered. Yugoslavia often was simply lumped together with the other countries of the Eastern Bloc. I had just discovered that the media of my country were much more objective, more moderate, less dishonest, and overall more democratic.

The Period of Illusions

The year 1989, right after the Berlin wall had fallen, was meant to be the Year Zero for the whole of mankind. At least, that was what we thought at the time. A new start of a world without wars, without poverty. A world of happiness for all, in which we were finally going to live together. No more divisions or hostility, no longer this imminent fear of a forthcoming war. In the East, they believed in it so much that, led by illusions, they began to dream with their eyes wide open of a new world of coexistence and sharing. They imagined and persuaded themselves that the Western World was a world suspended between earth and sky. A myth that had suddenly become touchable, within hand’s reach. They were probably in a state of mind similar to that of the Amerindians at the beginning of the conquest of the Far West; very naive. Truly ingenuous. Then, history did nothing else but repeat itself. Because history always repeats itself. Only the context changes. Too bad the West did not understand, did not want to seize such historical opportunity to open itself and welcome, in full frankness and mutual respect, this world from the East that came peacefully seeking a reciprocal coexistence.

Lies and Mental Aberrations

Since the end of World War II, Western propaganda, particularly the American variety, has never ceased to aim at the East a quasi-obsessional hammering of idyllic messages and images of a Western World bathing into perfect happiness. Applied equally in the West, this propaganda was mixed with images and stories of the world behind the “iron curtain”, the reality of which was utterly distorted and darkened. The goal was to create (and they succeeded) what was later called the “American leadership”. To define it, I offer to define “leadership” as a whole set of illusions and mental aberrations about the existence of a world to which everyone would like to belong. In reality, it is a world that does not exist and never existed. This world is also called « “The American Dream”. In short, a game of fools. A fabric of lies in which we believed. Still today, it has become clear that the reality of yesterday and that of today are a permanent fabric of lies. Americans in particular live in a permanent lie and have since the creation of their country. It started with the myth of the Far West put into images by Hollywood in an idyllic manner. The reality is entirely different and has been twisted around. Twenty million American Indians at the arrival of European settlers at the beginning of the conquest; at the end, less than a century later, only 60,000 were left. It is the largest genocide in human history. To date, no condemnation. The truth barely transpires today. Still, the Western world is entirely used to the sleep-inducing image of “the American friend” wrapped into the aura of “the savior the Free World”. A friend who, according to the legend, first came to save Europe and the world during the First World War. What a blessing! And who returned again, during the Second World War. The American savior succeeded in stopping the evil Soviets at “Checkpoint Charlie.” The whole Western world barely dodged a disaster. Whew! At this checkpoint, the Americans and their European lackeys tried to create a myth to go along with the Hollywood sauce. Big kitsch, yes! At the beginning of this month of June 2014, during the commemoration of the Normandy landings, I was amazed to see how Americans continue to falsify history and blatantly lie. With the help of European cowards of course. To maintain a permanent psychosis, the Americans were threatening and provocative, as much towards their opponents as towards their own people and the population of the Allies. Such a behavior caused similar reactions among their opponents until the introduction on both sides of a true paranoia. I believe that the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the crash of the “Prague Spring” in 1968 are direct consequences of this escalation of paranoia between the two Blocs. The Americans can be credited for the direct initiative of this escalation. One day we will know the truth about this period known as the “Cold War.” We even have a duty to know the truth and the whole truth. It is important to be reminded that “walls” are first and foremost within our own minds. But, regarding the other Wall that fell in 1989, it is clear that it is still there in the minds of today’s Western policymakers. It is not yet destroyed. This is especially the case with regard to the Americans, subject to a total mental aberration.

Back to Reason: Four Examples

Unfortunately, we were bound to quickly become disillusioned and understand that we would not enter into a new era of peace and prosperity. It was all lies and promises from the West. Their intentions were far from sincere and honest, and they never intended to deal with us as equals. Their only endgame was as Western conqueror, triumphant and vengeful. Wishing to enslave us in order to better exploit us. For them, we were only consumers of their capitalist products; a potential market, and nothing more. To support and confirm my statements, I offer four examples among many others:

  1. In our “liberated” countries, Western manufacturers implemented a dairy and food industry supplanting what was already there, regardless of the existing agricultural environment. The domino effect was instantaneous, and the farmers of these countries were ruined.
  2. We were discredited and treated as “sheep to shear” in favor of the capitalist banking and its usurious system. Putting their hands in the banks of the conquered countries, the “banksters” have imposed their methods and systems: Western-type mortgages, but with interest rates sometimes up to five times higher than those of West. Self-authorized robbery, yes! Especially because they were loans in euros, Swiss francs or dollars, modeled on the fluctuation of exchange rates. The destructive effect was guaranteed within a year after the loans were made. Result: a lot of ruined people and exorbitant suicide rates.
  3. The Westerners also robbed us of all of the wealth and raw materials in our soils. They systematically bought our raw materials at a fraction of their market value, often bribing local potentates to acquire both the mines and the factories that reprocessed these raw materials. In return, they gave us vague promises of investments and employment for the local population which never arrived.
  4. More directly, they sent an army of occupation. Example of such a deceit: Kosovo and “Bondsteel”, 40,000 m2, the largest U.S. base ever built in Europe. In 1999, the U.S. imposed on a puppet government in Pristina a 99 year lease, where the subsoil is rich in mercury, silver and lead. I am convinced that Americans began looting it immediately. The day they leave, there will be nothing left in the subsoil but gaping holes. The American army also uses this base as one of their secret prisons.

After blowing in like a hurricane, the Westerners triggered a tsunami effect.

Western Arrogance

These Western acts of triumphal conquerors were particularly stupid. We were open to them, and we wanted to learn from them, but also we wanted to pass on our own knowledge. In the field of culture, we could have had a very rich exchange: for us culture has always been very important, and we take great care of it. Contrary to this, we were treated with a wave of violence, spite and humiliation. Curiously, I find some similarities between these events and those that occurred at the time of the Mayan and Aztec civilizations, when savage conquistadors looted and destroyed civilizations that were far more advanced than their own. I am deeply convinced that the West in this year 1989 did not understand what had just happened. Together we could have built a new world, instead of just destroying what already existed. The confidence that was then lost will never be regained.

In the Year 1989, Westerners Blew It!

For example, the Germans believed in the coming of a 4th Reich. Genscher, at the time Minister of Foreign Affairs and former a SS officer, began to secretly visit the former Axis countries. He was forcibly expelled from the Baltic countries by the Soviets. Mitterrand’s France was first opposed to German reunification. Backed as usual by the U.S., the UK was waiting for a signal from the Americans. The U.S. acted as if they understood everything; but they mainly pretended they did. They immediately applied (once more) their “Shock Doctrine”- immediate gains for sure, but very stupid in the mid to long term.

Those Who Saw Through It All

I think the only ones who got it all in 1989 were the Russians. Not the Russia of Mikhail Gorbachev and his entourage, but the Russians in the background, the strategists who acted immediately and started to create today’s Russia. They understood that German unification would be, at least for the next twenty years, like slamming an economic brake on the new reunified Germany and by extension on the Western economy, and that this length of time would enable a modernizing Russia to recover economically and militarily. Today one must admit that they were visionaries who were absolutely right. The stupidity and greed of Westerners in general and Americans in particular have led to where we are now, a dead end without alternative. Today the West has lost its hegemony over the world. The failure of its policy since 1989 is complete! Recent events such as those in Syria demonstrate this well.

The effects of this global deception

“At the time, I was young, very naive and very stupid, and I sincerely believed that the Soviet Union was a deadly threat to Western Europe and that the only thing that stood between them, the evil Communists, and we, the Free World, was the military power of NATO,” the Saker stressed in a text published in March 2014 [1].

How true is this sentence of the Saker’s. Unfortunately we were young and naive, our naivete bordering on stupidity. Especially since the American style has always been the same – simple, too simple, downright simplistic.

The End of the USSR

The Russians are a nation of spontaneously and naturally friendly people; they voluntarily dropped “the wall” thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev’s naivety. Although, as regards the naivete of Gorbachev, head of the USSR from 1985-91, there remain some doubts to this day. According to the latest news, an inquest has just started in Moscow to determine whether the fall of the USSR was simple naivete or a case of high treason. The only result produced by his “perestroika” (reconstruction) was an economic, military and political weakening of the USSR and its subsequent disintegration. The ruble was became worthless and people started throwing rubles out of their windows in disgust. In spite of all this, even today, he says he is satisfied with what he did. In 1990, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Later, with the collapse of the USSR, it was rumored that the Prize was a reward given to Gorbachev by the Americans for “letting the fox into the hen house.” Then, another strike of bad luck for the Russians hit. Either a real string of bad luck, or the result of a large-scale corruption: the arrival of Boris Yeltsin. Notorious drunkard, yes. For eight years, Russia had an open door to all possible abuses and looting. Russia saw the appearance of vultures nicknamed “oligarchs.” Enriched overnight, they became billionaires. Some of the best known among them: Khodorovsky, Abramovich, Berezowsky, Navalny, etc. A real scourge for Russia. Boris Yeltsin himself considerably benefited from the situation. In Switzerland, he has been investigated for corruption. He presumably received bribes from a civil engineering company in Tessin, led by an Albanian who was mysteriously contracted to renovate the Kremlin. During his reign, privatizations prevailed. All that could be privatized and sold cheaply went to either oligarchs or foreigners, in particular Americans. Hence, Americans treated themselves to buying a military industrial complex in the north of Russia. Immediately after this purchase, they froze all of the activities with the company so as to harm the Russians. With Boris Yeltsin, a chronic alcoholic, Russia became the laughingstock of the West. Bill Clinton, at that time the U.S. president, was accustomed, at each meeting with Yeltsin, to laugh himself to tears. Forced but triumphant laugh of course! Russia, a great heroic nation, saw its dignity trampled. Westerners, Americans in particular, stupid and vengeful, behaved like bulls in a china shop: looting, humiliation, and harassment of all kinds ruled the day, both towards Russia and towards other so-called Communist countries.

The Ceausescu Trial in Romania

Coup in Romania. Sloppy and expeditious trial of the Ceausescu couple. Death sentence and immediate execution of the couple. Judgment by two judges who were taken by force to an improvised courtroom site that looked like a grade school classroom. Shortly after the trial, the two judges committed suicide.

The Destruction of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Now, here is the height of Western stupidity: the destruction of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, under the false pretext that the people who composed it no longer wanted to live together. A pretext as cowardly as it is deceitful. Witness of it is the fact that it took Westerners almost twenty years to destroy it (from 1991-2006). A great and beautiful country, a Europe in miniature. A country of 24 million inhabitants and a territory of nearly 260,000 square kilometers (half of France). A sweet mixing of populations, cultures, and religions. An incredible diversity of cultures, arts and foods. During the Cold War, the country had perfectly fulfilled its buffer role between East and West. Unfortunately the West had ideas of conquest and domination. I’m sure that the West had always and only ever wanted to take advantage of the Yugoslav position between the two Blocs, and that’s all. As disposable as a Kleenex, discarded once it has served. Thrown out to the dogs of Western wars, all for more dough for their arm dealers.

Dough, the Only Real Western Value!

At the end of the Cold War, the old demons awoke. First, among the Germans and the Austrians (memories of 1st and 2nd World Wars). But also at the Vatican, who saw an opportunity to settle disputes with the Orthodox Church. Westerners played on the antagonisms that were unique to this land in order to destroy it. Such an act is cowardly, criminal and stupid, and it caused a lot of suffering, hundreds of thousands of deaths and as much destruction. Remember that in a house there are walls that are said to be load-bearing. One should never touch them, because of the risk of seeing the house collapse. Yugoslavia, for Europe in any case, was one of those bearing walls. And our stupid Western leaders destroyed it. Since then, the house has kept cracking and threatening to collapse. I feel that the destruction of this country will be fatal to the destroyers and that the Yugoslavian national anthem might as well be the Western funeral song. In the case of Yugoslavia, the West has shown a staggering political illiteracy and a stunning cultural ignorance.

And What About Russia in All This?

The Russians said, “Never again!” And they kept their word. Once Yeltsin was thrown in the dumpster of history, the Russians chose the best among them. VV Putin. A president and a very talented and intelligent politician. Someone who holds life principles which he applies. In less than 15 years, he managed to return glory and power to Russia. Today, not only is his country no longer the laughingstock of the West, but on the contrary, Russia has become a  major geopolitical actor on the world stage. On the military level, its role is just as important. The Russians have caught up and even surpassed the Americans in this area. NATO has found a Russian opponent who managed to halt its progression towards the east. The lying behavior of Westerners in the face of Russia is now being turned against them.

“The day the sun will rise above Russia, NATO will melt,” Slobodan Milosevic (former President of Serbia) said.

Milosevic “committed suicide” in 2006 at the hand of his jailers in the prison of the ICC in The Hague. According to British media, his trial was moving inexorably towards a nonsuit, that is a dismissal of charges.

And Finally, What About the West in All This?

In 1989, a Russian visionary declared: “Communism and capitalism are the heads and tails of the same coin. Now we let down our communism. How long after that, do you think your capitalism will hold?”

Today, results agree entirely with him.

Conclusion

Forty-four years have passed since my arrival in the West. I am a full citizen of my adopted country (Switzerland). From the beginning, I had the desire and made the effort to integrate into this country. But I always refused to assimilate. Since the beginning, I was aware of the benefits of having been born and raised in another country, another political system, before arriving here. I have always taken advantage of this asset and used it in every opportunity that presented itself. I especially used it to understand and analyze some features and paradoxes of the West. For example, very quickly, I had to admit the evidence that Westerners were viscerally anti-Communists, including towards such rather tempered form of that of Yugoslavian Communism, which was quite diluted from its original form. For years I asked myself why. A paradox that I wanted to elucidate at all costs. And I finally understood. It’s huge, because in reality it is the keystone of the West itself. The cause is capitalism itself. Since its beginning, by its very definition, it is an economic concept that is not viable. Therefore, it was doomed to fail from the beginning. The reasons and causes of its inevitable failure I will address in my next article. Filo, for vineyardsaker.fr June 2014 [1] http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.fr/2014/03/today-every-free-person-in-world-has-won.html Source: http://www.vineyardsaker.fr/2014/07/15/1989-lannee-ou-loccident-a-tout-rate-par-filo/

Democratic Party Liberals Are Militarists

And they always have been. Their current incarnation in the US is in the form of “The Cruise Missile Left” and “The Humanitarian Bomber Left”. They are the ones who ramped up the Vietnam War and expanded it to its greatest extent. Let us look at the record of the two first post-WW2 Democratic Presidents and their incredible militarism and very rightwing foreign policy. Democratic Party liberals did the following things: Under Democratic Party liberal Harry Truman:

  • Engaged in a massive campaign to hide and secrete away Nazis after World War 2 so the CIA could use them to fight Communism.
  • Installed military rule in Japan. The first act of the military government was outlaw all labor unions.
  • Overthrew the democratic government of Greece with a rightwing monarchist coup and then helped the new Greek fascist government as they murdered 12,000 Greek Communists and threw another 40,000 in prison, thus starting the Greek Civil War.
  • Supported the Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist UNO as it waged its anti-Soviet guerrilla campaign in the Ukraine.
  • Supported and assisted the South Korean government while they murdered 200,000 South Koreans in the face of a Communist insurgency from 1945-1950.
  • Destroyed every city in North Korea, often with firebombs, bombed dams causing rivers to flood. North Korea was so devastated after this that most of the population was living underground in tunnels, shelters or caves. All in all, 3 million North Koreans were killed in the war, mostly by US bombs.
  • Assisted the French colonialists in the fight against the anti-colonialist Viet Minh.
  • Assisted the British colonialists in the fight against the anti-colonialist Malay guerrillas.
  • Assisted Chiang Kai Shek when he consolidated his rule in Taiwan by installing military rule, outlawing all languages but Chinese and murdering 100,000 people, mostly Leftists.
  • Set up the fascist Gladio stay-behind network all across Europe. This was a group of fascists who would “stay behind” after a Soviet invasion to fight an insurgency against the Soviets. The Gladio network subsequently caused all sorts of problems, including a wave of fascist terror bombings in the Years of Lead in the 1970’s.
  • Illegally interfered with the Italian elections after the war to keep the Italian Communist Party from winning.
  • Threatened to drop nuclear bombs on both North Korea and China if they didn’t say uncle.

Under Democratic Party liberal John F. Kennedy:

  • Stepped up the Vietnam War by vastly increasing the number of advisers into the tens of thousands.
  • Invaded Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
  • Supported a savage government and state death squads in Guatemala that slaughtered 5-10,000 people while fighting an insurgency.
  • Supported the French colonists versus the FLN anti-colonialists during the Algerian Civil War.
  • Initiated a violent coup that overthrew President Diem of South Vietnam, killing him because he was getting in the way of US plans.
  • Imposed an embargo on Cuba which idiotically continues to this very day.
  • Waged a guerrilla war called Operation Mongoose in Cuba where 10,000 people were killed, often civilians. They would get in boats and cruise along the beaches on Cuba, killing beachgoers with machine guns. They set off bombs in factories full of workers, killing up to 100 people at a time. The US began its endless efforts to murder Fidel Castro.
  • Started a lying campaign that the Castro government was going to take parents’ children away from so they could be raised by the state. 10,000 Cuban children fled the island with their parents.

The US Has Been Backing Islamic Fundamentalists (Al Qaeda/ISIS/Ayatollahs) for 50 Years

As a counterweight to secular nationalists who were anti-Empire, anti-Israel, opposed the colonization of their land by the West, including the US, and wanted first and foremost to help their people first. In other words, they were patriots, not country-sellers. There is nothing the US hates more than a true patriotic nationalist regime. Patriotic nationalist regimes will always oppose US imperialism and will not allow their countries to be colonized by the US. They will always put their people first and the exploiting multinational corporations second. The CIA has been overthrowing these regimes as “bad for business” since the early 1950’s in Iran and Guatemala. The Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS were all more or less created by the US and its allies. Inadvertently? Perhaps. Ever since their birth, it’s been nothing but blowback. And now the ISIS Blowback is happening in Iraq.

Tightening the U.S. Grip on Western Europe: Washington’s Iron Curtain in Ukraine

From CounterPunch, June 6-8, 2014. This article has everything you need to know about what is going on in the Ukraine right now. If you read it, you will see that the story she is telling is completely the opposite of what the US media is telling you. That is because the media is lying to you. As far as I can tell, everything Johnstone writes here is 10

Tightening the U.S. Grip on Western Europe: Washington’s Iron Curtain in Ukraine

by Diana Johnstone

NATO leaders are currently acting out a deliberate charade in Europe, designed to reconstruct an Iron Curtain between Russia and the West. With astonishing unanimity, NATO leaders feign surprise at events they planned months in advance. Events that they deliberately triggered are being misrepresented as sudden, astonishing, unjustified “Russian aggression”. The United States and the European Union undertook an aggressive provocation in Ukraine that they knew would force Russia to react defensively, one way or another. They could not be sure exactly how Russian president Vladimir Putin would react when he saw that the United States was manipulating political conflict in Ukraine to install a pro-Western government intent on joining NATO. This was not a mere matter of a “sphere of influence” in Russia’s “near abroad”, but a matter of life and death to the Russian Navy, as well as a grave national security threat on Russia’s border. A trap was thereby set for Putin. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t. He could under-react, and betray Russia’s basic national interests, allowing NATO to advance its hostile forces to an ideal attack position. Or he could over-react, by sending Russian forces to invade Ukraine. The West was ready for this, prepared to scream that Putin was “the new Hitler”, poised to overrun poor, helpless Europe, which could only be saved (again) by the generous Americans. In reality, the Russian defensive move was a very reasonable middle course. Thanks to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans felt Russian, having been Russian citizens until Khrushchev frivolously bestowed the territory on Ukraine in 1954, a peaceful democratic solution was found. Crimeans voted for their return to Russia in a referendum which was perfectly legal according to international law, although in violation of the Ukrainian constitution, which was by then in tatters having just been violated by the overthrow of the country’s duly elected president, Victor Yanukovych, facilitated by violent militias. The change of status of Crimea was achieved without bloodshed, by the ballot box. Nevertheless, the cries of indignation from the West were every bit as hysterically hostile as if Putin had overreacted and subjected Ukraine to a U.S.-style bombing campaign, or invaded the country outright – which they may have expected him to do. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry led the chorus of self-righteous indignation, accusing Russia of the sort of thing his own government is in the habit of doing. “You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests. This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext”, Kerry pontificated. “It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century”. Instead of laughing at this hypocrisy, U.S. media, politicians and punditry zealously took up the theme of Putin’s unacceptable expansionist aggression. The Europeans followed with a weak, obedient echo.

It Was All Planned at Yalta

In September 2013, one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, Viktor Pinchuk, paid for an elite strategic conference on Ukraine’s future that was held in the same Palace in Yalta, Crimea, where Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met to decide the future of Europe in 1945. The Economist, one of the elite media reporting on what it called a “display of fierce diplomacy”, stated that: “The future of Ukraine, a country of 48m people, and of Europe was being decided in real time.” The participants included Bill and Hillary Clinton, former CIA head General David Petraeus, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, former World Bank head Robert Zoellick, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, Shimon Peres, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mario Monti, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite, and Poland’s influential foreign minister Radek Sikorski. Both President Viktor Yanukovych, deposed five months later, and his recently elected successor Petro Poroshenko were present. Former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson was there to talk about the shale-gas revolution which the United States hopes to use to weaken Russia by substituting fracking for Russia’s natural gas reserves. The center of discussion was the “Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement” (DCFTA) between Ukraine and the European Union, and the prospect of Ukraine’s integration with the West. The general tone was euphoria over the prospect of breaking Ukraine’s ties with Russia in favor of the West. Conspiracy against Russia? Not at all. Unlike Bilderberg, the proceedings were not secret. Facing a dozen or so American VIPs and a large sampling of the European political elite was a Putin adviser named Sergei Glazyev, who made Russia’s position perfectly clear. Glazyev injected a note of political and economic realism into the conference. Forbes reported at the time on the “stark difference” between the Russian and Western views “not over the advisability of Ukraine’s integration with the EU but over its likely impact.” In contrast to Western euphoria, the Russian view was based on “very specific and pointed economic criticisms” about the Trade Agreement’s impact on Ukraine’s economy, noting that Ukraine was running an enormous foreign accounts deficit, funded with foreign borrowing, and that the resulting substantial increase in Western imports could only swell the deficit. Ukraine “will either default on its debts or require a sizable bailout”. The Forbes reporter concluded that “the Russian position is far closer to the truth than the happy talk coming from Brussels and Kiev.” As for the political impact, Glazyev pointed out that the Russian-speaking minority in Eastern Ukraine might move to split the country in protest against cutting ties with Russia, and that Russia would be legally entitled to support them, according to The Times of London. In short, while planning to incorporate Ukraine into the Western sphere, Western leaders were perfectly aware that this move would entail serious problems with Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and with Russia itself. Rather than seeking to work out a compromise, Western leaders decided to forge ahead and to blame Russia for whatever would go wrong. What went wrong first was that Yanukovych got cold feet faced with the economic collapse implied by the Trade Agreement with the European Union. He postponed signing, hoping for a better deal. Since none of this was explained clearly to the Ukrainian public, outraged protests ensued, which were rapidly exploited by the United States… against Russia.

Ukraine as Bridge…Or Achilles Heel

Ukraine, a term meaning borderland, is a country without clearly fixed historical borders that has been stretched too far to the East and too far to the West. The Soviet Union was responsible for this, but the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the result is a country without a unified identity and which emerges as a problem for itself and for its neighbors. It was extended too far East, incorporating territory that might as well have been Russian, as part of a general policy to distinguish the USSR from the Tsarist empire, enlarging Ukraine at the expense of its Russian component and demonstrating that the Soviet Union was really a union among equal socialist republics. So long as the whole Soviet Union was run by the Communist leadership, these borders didn’t matter too much. It was extended too far West at the end of World War II. The victorious Soviet Union extended Ukraine’s border to include Western regions, dominated by the city variously named Lviv, Lwow, Lemberg or Lvov, depending on whether it belonged to Lithuania, Poland, the Hapsburg Empire or the USSR, a region which was a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiments. This was no doubt conceived as a defensive move, to neutralize hostile elements, but it created the fundamentally divided nation that today constitutes the perfect troubled waters for hostile fishing. The Forbes report cited above pointed out that: “For most of the past five years, Ukraine was basically playing a double game, telling the EU that it was interested in signing the DCFTA while telling the Russians that it was interested in joining the customs union.” Either Yanukovych could not make up his mind, or was trying to squeeze the best deal out of both sides, or was seeking the highest bidder. In any case, he was never “Moscow’s man”, and his downfall owes a lot no doubt to his own role in playing both ends against the middle. His was a dangerous game of pitting greater powers against each other. It is safe to say that what was needed was something that so far seems totally lacking in Ukraine: a leadership that recognizes the divided nature of the country and works diplomatically to find a solution that satisfies both the local populations and their historic ties with the Catholic West and with Russia. In short, Ukraine could be a bridge between East and West – and this, incidentally, has been precisely the Russian position. The Russian position has not been to split Ukraine, much less to conquer it, but to facilitate the country’s role as bridge. This would involve a degree of federalism, of local government, which so far is entirely lacking in the country, with local governors selected not by election but by the central government in Kiev. A federal Ukraine could both develop relations with the EU and maintain its vital (and profitable) economic relations with Russia. But this arrangement calls for Western readiness to cooperate with Russia. The United States has plainly vetoed this possibility, preferring to exploit the crisis to brand Russia “the enemy”.

Plan A and Plan B

U.S. policy, already evident at the September 2013 Yalta meeting, was carried out on the ground by Victoria Nuland, former adviser to Dick Cheney, deputy ambassador to NATO, spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton, wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan. Her leading role in the Ukraine events proves that the neo-con influence in the State Department, established under Bush II, was retained by Obama, whose only visible contribution to foreign policy change has been the presence of a man of African descent in the presidency, calculated to impress the world with U.S. multicultural virtue. Like most other recent presidents, Obama is there as a temporary salesman for policies made and executed by others. As Victoria Nuland boasted in Washington, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has spent five billion dollars to gain political influence in Ukraine (this is called “promoting democracy”). This investment is not “for oil”, or for any immediate economic advantage. The primary motives are geopolitical, because Ukraine is Russia’s Achilles’ heel, the territory with the greatest potential for causing trouble to Russia. What called public attention to Victoria Nuland’s role in the Ukrainian crisis was her use of a naughty word, when she told the U.S. ambassador, “Fuck the EU”. But the fuss over her bad language veiled her bad intentions. The issue was who should take power away from the elected president Viktor Yanukovych. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party been promoting former boxer Vitaly Klitschko as its candidate. Nuland’s rude rebuff signified that the United States, not Germany or the EU, was to choose the next leader, and that was not Klitschko but “Yats”. And indeed it was Yats, Arseniy Yatsenyuk , a second-string US-sponsored technocrat known for his enthusiasm for IMF austerity policies and NATO membership, who got the job. This put a U.S. sponsored government, enforced in the streets by fascist militia with little electoral clout but plenty of armed meanness, in a position to manage the May 25 elections, from which the Russophone East was largely excluded. Plan A for the Victoria Nuland putsch was probably to install, rapidly, a government in Kiev that would join NATO, thus formally setting the stage for the United States to take possession of Russia’s indispensable Black Sea naval base at Sebastopol in Crimea. Reincorporating Crimea into Russia was Putin’s necessary defensive move to prevent this. But the Nuland gambit was in fact a win-win ploy. If Russia failed to defend itself, it risked losing its entire southern fleet – a total national disaster. On the other hand, if Russia reacted, as was most likely, the US thereby won a political victory that was perhaps its main objective. Putin’s totally defensive move is portrayed by the Western mainstream media, echoing political leaders, as unprovoked “Russian expansionism”, which the propaganda machine compares to Hitler grabbing Czechoslovakia and Poland. Thus a blatant Western provocation, using Ukrainian political confusion against a fundamentally defensive Russia, has astonishingly succeeded in producing a total change in the artificial Zeitgeist produced by Western mass media. Suddenly, we are told that the “freedom-loving West” is faced with the threat of “aggressive Russian expansionism”. Some forty years ago, Soviet leaders gave away the store under the illusion that peaceful renunciation on their part could lead to a friendly partnership with the West, and especially with the United States. But those in the United States who never wanted to end the Cold War are having their revenge. Never mind “communism”; if, instead of advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia’s current leader is simply old-fashioned in certain ways, Western media can fabricate a monster out of that. The United States needs an enemy to save the world from.

The Protection Racket Returns

But first of all, the United States needs Russia as an enemy in order to “save Europe”, which is another way to say, in order to continue to dominate Europe. Washington policy-makers seemed to be worried that Obama’s swing to Asia and neglect of Europe might weaken U.S. control of its NATO allies. The May 25 European Parliament elections revealed a large measure of disaffection with the European Union. This disaffection, notably in France, is linked to a growing realization that the EU, far from being a potential alternative to the United States, is in reality a mechanism that locks European countries into U.S.-defined globalization, economic decline and U.S. foreign policy, wars and all. Ukraine is not the only entity that has been overextended. So has the EU. With 28 members of diverse language, culture, history and mentality, the EU is unable to agree on any foreign policy other than the one Washington imposes. The extension of the EU to former Eastern European satellites has totally broken whatever deep consensus might have been possible among the countries of the original Economic Community: France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux states. Poland and the Baltic States see EU membership as useful, but their hearts are in America – where many of their most influential leaders have been educated and trained. Washington is able to exploit the anti-communist, anti-Russian and even pro-Nazi nostalgia of northeastern Europe to raise the false cry of “the Russians are coming!” in order to obstruct the growing economic partnership between the old EU, notably Germany, and Russia. Russia is no threat. But to vociferous Russophobes in the Baltic States, Western Ukraine and Poland, the very existence of Russia is a threat. Encouraged by the United States and NATO, this endemic hostility is the political basis for the new “iron curtain” meant to achieve the aim spelled out in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard: keeping the Eurasian continent divided in order to perpetuate U.S. world hegemony. The old Cold War served that purpose, cementing U.S. military presence and political influence in Western Europe. A new Cold War can prevent U.S. influence from being diluted by good relations between Western Europe and Russia. Obama has come to Europe ostentatiously promising to “protect” Europe by basing more troops in regions as close as possible to Russia, while at the same time ordering Russia to withdraw its own troops, on its own territory, still farther away from troubled Ukraine. This appears designed to humiliate Putin and deprive him of political support at home, at a time when protests are rising in Eastern Ukraine against the Russian leader for abandoning them to killers sent from Kiev. To tighten the U.S. grip on Europe, the United States is using the artificial crisis to demand that its indebted allies spend more on “defense”, notably by purchasing U.S. weapons systems. Although the U.S. is still far from being able to meet Europe’s energy needs from the new U.S. fracking boom, this prospect is being hailed as a substitute for Russia’s natural gas sales – stigmatized as a “way of exercising political pressure”, something of which hypothetical U.S. energy sales are presumed to be innocent. Pressure is being brought against Bulgaria and even Serbia to block construction of the South Stream pipeline that would bring Russian gas into the Balkans and southern Europe.

From D-Day to Dooms Day

Today, June 6, the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landing is being played in Normandy as a gigantic celebration of American domination, with Obama heading an all-star cast of European leaders. The last of the aged surviving soldiers and aviators present are like the ghosts of a more innocent age when the United States was only at the start of its new career as world master. They were real, but the rest is a charade. French television is awash with the tears of young villagers in Normandy who have been taught that the United States is some sort of Guardian Angel, which sent its boys to die on the shores of Normandy out of pure love for France. This idealized image of the past is implicitly projected on the future. In seventy years, the Cold War, a dominant propaganda narrative and above all Hollywood have convinced the French, and most of the West, that D-Day was the turning point that won World War II and saved Europe from Nazi Germany. Vladimir Putin came to the celebration, and has been elaborately shunned by Obama, self-appointed arbiter of Virtue. The Russians are paying tribute to the D-Day operation which liberated France from Nazi occupation, but they – and historians – know what most of the West has forgotten: that the Wehrmacht was decisively defeated not by the Normandy landing, but by the Red Army. If the vast bulk of German forces had not been pinned down fighting a losing war on the Eastern front, nobody would celebrate D-Day as it is being celebrated today. Putin is widely credited as being “the best chess player”, who won the first round of the Ukrainian crisis. He has no doubt done the best he could, faced with the crisis foisted on him. But the U.S. has whole ranks of pawns which Putin does not have. And this is not only a chess game, but chess combined with poker combined with Russian roulette. The United States is ready to take risks that the more prudent Russian leaders prefer to avoid… as long as possible. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the current charade is the servility of the “old” Europeans. Apparently abandoning all Europe’s accumulated wisdom, drawn from its wars and tragedies, and even oblivious to their own best interests, today’s European leaders seem ready to follow their American protectors to another D-Day … D for Doom. Can the presence of a peace-seeking Russian leader in Normandy make a difference? All it would take would be for mass media to tell the truth, and for Europe to produce reasonably wise and courageous leaders, for the whole fake war machine to lose its luster, and for truth to begin to dawn. A peaceful Europe is still possible, but for how long? Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions.

"New Cold War," Same Old Imperialism

This guy is a Trotskyite, but I often agree with his analysis of capitalism and US imperialism, which is 10 First of all, he is correct that the US was an imperialist country long before the Cold War and even before there was a Soviet Union. The Monroe Doctrine, still in effect today, was an imperialist policy. The US was actually a formal imperialist power around the turn on the century, and in a way, it still is now as the US retains colonies and refuses to free them as the UN has demanded. Everything else he says is also right on.

The New “Cold War” Is The Same Old U.S. Imperialist War

by Steven Argue

Cartoon depicting the brutal and murderous U.S. colonization of the Philippines long before there was a Soviet Union. As many in the U.S. today declare that Russian opposition to U.S. aggression in Ukraine and Syria are indicators of a new “cold war”, it is important to remember what the so-called “Cold War” was in the first place during the time of the USSR. Before the so-called “war on terror” there was the Persian Gulf War, and before there even was a Soviet Union there was “the war to end all wars”, “the white man’s burden”, and “manifest destiny”. All of these were / are to justify one of the most bloodthirsty imperialist systems that has ever existed on the face of the Earth, that of U.S. imperialism. The fact that the U.S. used the existence of the Soviet Union to justify their blood thirsty imperialist wars, coups, and dictatorships in places like Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, etc. simply had nothing to do with any reality of an actual war between the USSR of the time and the USA. The so-called “cold war” was nothing but a hot U.S. imperialist war against the people of the world, a war that continues under different names. Today, as usual, the USA is on a drive to overthrow every independent nation in the world. This has continued under Obama with his overthrow of elected governments of Ukraine and Honduras, putting a death squad government in power in Honduras and a murderous fascist junta in power in Kiev that includes open neo-Nazis who hate Ukraine’s national minorities, including Russians. Likewise, Obama waged a bombing and proxy war in Libya that overthrew that country’s government, a government that committed the crime of spending some its oil money on providing everyone with free housing, education, and health care. This gave the Libyan people a far higher life expectancy than other oil rich countries in Africa ruled by U.S. backed dictators. Likewise, the United States is currently trying to overthrow the elected capitalist government of Venezuela for similar “crimes” of disrupting total capitalist profit by spending oil money on the people. In Libya, the imperialists brought to power genocidal religious fanatics who committed ethnic cleansing against Black Africans, commits rampant torture and murder, and is allowing the imperialist oil companies to rob Libya of its natural resources unhindered by pesky spending on human needs. Likewise in Syria, the United States is giving weapons to genocidal religious fanatics that have slaughtered religious and ethnic minorities. Russia is in the cross-hairs of U.S. imperialism today, in part for strongly opposing U.S. imperialist intervention in Syria and Ukraine. Russia itself today is a weak capitalist country, but for the U.S. imperialists, it is not weak enough. An important adviser to the Obama administration is Brzezinski whose plans for Russia include economic isolation, regime change, and then breaking Russia into three pieces. Russia itself is not an imperialist power in any Marxist sense. Russia has more foreign direct investment coming into the country than going out. Likewise, Ukraine has had very little foreign direct investment from Russia and very large amounts coming in from the EU. U.S. and EU imperialist strategy in the region has been to force a government on Ukraine that carries out IMF austerity and isolates Russia. They got this with the February coup along with a government that is likely to be friendly to imperialist exploitation of gas reserves through environmentally devastating fracking in western Ukraine. Russia, on the other hand, is merely trying to maintain trading partners as the United States tries to isolate it and is not trying to dictate what sort of economies and austerity countries around them maintain. While United States imperialist policy is one of forcing austerity and privatization on countries, Russia has been equally capable of trading with countries that maintain planned socialist economies, to the benefit of the working class, like the planned socialist economy of Belarus. Meanwhile, such countries, like Belarus and Cuba, are under U.S.economic blockade because their planned socialist economies and independent governments prevent large amounts of foreign imperialist exploitation. To the extent that Russia is now providing a small counterweight to blood thirsty and rapacious U.S. imperialism, the imperialists are building up NATO forces, pouring on lies similar to Bush’s lies of weapons of mass destruction, and speaking as if the so-called “cold war””is back. Yet, then and now, the so-called “cold war” has never been anything but a hot U.S. imperialist war against the people of the world. – Steven Argue of the Revolutionary Tendency

Junta Suffers Worst Losses Ever

Major battle. 6 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 8 more were wounded when they ran into a patriot ambush outside Kramatorsk. This is interesting as the patriots have usually just been fighting back against the junta troops. Now it looks like they are starting to go on the offensive. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Soviet Citizens Ate Just as Well As West Europeans

Steve writes, quoting a British author.

“While most citizens struggled to survive… a secret elite enjoyed great privileges: special living spaces, special hospitals, special schools, special lanes along which the Politburo’s limousines roared at 90mph.”

Yes, the elite lived somewhat better than the masses, but compare how much better the elite lives than the masses under capitalism to the privileges of the elite in the USSR and there is no comparison. Western elites have lifestyles dramatically superior by many times over those of the masses. The Soviet elite only lived somewhat better. The differences were not that dramatic. This same author also wrote that the USSR was one of the most unequal states on Earth. No! Not so! Anyway, since when do capitalists have issues with inequality? They should be praising the inequalities of the USSR to the skies as a glorious capitalist feature of the system. They didn’t struggle to survive! That’s bullshit! For instance, food. They go on and on about food shortages. maybe there were some. But you know what? In the USSR, people at just as well as West Europeans did! In some cases, better. They ate just as much bread products, fruits, vegetables and meat as West Europeans. Also just as much or more meat – fish, beef, pork. They ate just as much food in just as good a variety as you Brits did! So they had an excellent and nutritious diet. They can go on and on about food shortages all they want to, but if they ate just as well as West Europeans, what differences does it make if some stuff was out of stock sometimes? They still ate just as well. In one place, some stuff was out of stock, in the other place, the shelves were full, but each one ate just as well as the other. Now, some West Europeans may have eaten more luxury foods, shall we call them, then the Soviets did. But were those luxury foods available to all Soviets? It’s true that Americans ate more of most types of food than Soviets did, but Americans also ate more of most types of food than West Europeans.

Four Left Latin American Governments Quit OAS Defense Treaty

Four leftwing Latin American nations quit the OAS defense treaty, asking for changes in the document. The OAS has always been the whore of the US, a sickening and reactionary organization. They threw Cuba out for no good reason long ago. These heroic Latin American nations are doing what should have been done long ago. The OAS is just shit, a Cold War creation of the Yankee dogs. Get rid of it already. Yankee go home! The nations are Nicaragua, led by the Sandinista hero Daniel Ortega, Venezuela, led by Hugo Chavez, Ecuador, led by Rafael Correa and Bolivia, led by Evo Morales. I am reminded of the words of the former Sandinista national anthem:

America, enemy of mankind!

Anti-Americanism – the Soviet and Nazi Cases

Here.

Isn’t that a great philosophy? Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. We have to see where the anti-Americans are coming from and why. Let us look first at the Soviet and Nazi cases. Later on we will deal with other types of anti-Americanism.

In the 20th Century, some anti-Americanism was coming from Nazi Germany. I think we can dispense with this critique.

Another line came from the USSR. However, this line was exaggerated in many ways. For instance, it played up US racism, which was good. In fact, it was Soviet anti-Americanism that prompted the Civil Rights struggle. The Soviet attack on freedom of the press was interesting. The opposition press in the US is legal, although Americans hate the opposition media. All US major media is controlled as part of the corporate-rich dictatorship with neoliberal corporate capitalism at home and imperialism abroad as its dual agenda.

On those two issues, the entire US media is in agreement. Only some are further to the right than others. There is no aspect of the US mass media that opposes the corporate-rich neoliberal project at home and the rightwing imperialist and neoliberal project abroad. However, in the USSR, if you published an opposition press, you went to prison. Here in the US, it’s legal, but no one can read you, see you on TV or hear you on the radio. You’re legal but invisible.

You can form any poliitcal party you want in the US. On the dual party of the corporate-rich dictatorship stands a chance, but you won’t go to prison for forming a party. You generally won’t go to prison for your beliefs, although the rightwing Republican regimes will often try to dig up dirt on you to destroy you (see the Juan Cole case). In recent years, domestic dissidents have been banned from flying on US jets as part of an insane no-fly list.

People on the list include famous singers and university professors. According to the fascist US rulers, the 2 million Americans on the no-fly list, including Cat Stevens and various college lecturers, are in danger of perpetrating an attack on a jetliner so they must be banned from flying. It is apparent that we no longer have freedom of thought in America. The no-fly list is a fascist project.

We do have freedom of assembly in the US, but the corporate-rich dictatorship simply ignores rallies, even of millions of people. The world saw the largest rallies in its history in the run-up to the Nazi-like War on the Iraqi People. The imperialists and their lackeys simply blew off the rallies and went ahead with the war.

It’s probable that no rallies of any size in the US will affect the US rich-corporate dictatorship in any way. Further, the media always lies about rallies, downplaying rallies against the elites, underreporting their crowds and or just refusing to report on them altogether.

In the USSR, opposition rallies and parties were banned, and freedom of thought if exercized, could put you in prison. In the US, we have those freedoms, but they are pretty worthless, since there is a 2-party dictatorship in power, most popular rallies are ignored by the feudal elite and freedom of thought is an interesting experiment with no consequences on the body politic.

One thing I will agree is that the US mass media is absolutely as controlled and dishonest as Pravda was under the USSR. It’s a propaganda system and the whole media sings the same basic song. The media is about as honest as Pravda was. The difference is that US morons actually believe the rightwing media of their feudal masters, whereas Soviets usually laughed at Soviet media as a pack of lies. Arguably, the US propaganda model is much more effective.

In summary, most of the Soviet critique of the US domestic policy rested on thin grounds. On the other hand, US freedoms are much exaggerated. True, these freedoms were outlawed in the USSR and an attempt to utilize them could put you in prison. Prison is no fun. On the other hand, a good argument can be made that US freedoms, while they indeed exist, are nearly worthless in terms of changing the rigged system which is nearly a rich-corporate dictatorship de facto if not de jure.

US Foreign Policy in a Nutshell

Smedly Butler, US general, War Is a Racket:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916.

I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Everything Butler wrote is correct. Not only that, but the US is still doing this. The Cold War is over, and we haven’t changed

Butler sums up US imperialism (US foreign policy is simply US imperialism and vice versa) in a nutshell. And that’s US foreign policy as it was, as it is, and as it will be into the forseeable future. US foreign policy has the support of the entire US political class, both parties, every US administration, the entire US media and most crucially the US rich and US big business, who frankly run this country as a sort of a dictatorship.

It’s a dictatorship because there is no opposition. There’s no opposition press. There’s no opposition party. There are never any US administrations that oppose the essentials of US corporate capitalism and its corollary, US imperialism.*

US imperialism simply means that the US is constantly intervening all over the globe in the interests of the US rich and US corporations. As the middle classes, working classes and poor are attacked by the moneyed classes who control the US, so the US military is used by the US moneyed class as their private army. When you join the US military, you are joining the rich man’s army.

The US military is the army of the rich and the army of the corporations. The purpose of the US military is to go around the world attacking the middle and working classes and poor who are going up against the US rich and businesses their elite allies. That’s what those ~170 or so bases are there for.

If you’re not from the moneyed classes, why in God’s name have you joined the Army of the Rich, the army of your class enemies? Why are willing to go off and fight, get hurt and die for your rich enemies? What’s wrong with you?

*FDR was probably the most progressive President that the US has ever had. The Good Neighbor Policy, initiated in 1934, was the only time in US history that the US has had an anti-imperialist attitude towards Latin America. In addition to the Great Anti-Fascist War (WW2) that he waged and his progressive policies at home, FDR goes down in history as the greatest progressive US President of the 20th Century.

Bill Clinton did a few anti-imperialist things here and there. He restored Leftist Aristide to power in Haiti via US Marines. He proposed several frank humanitarian interventions in which US imperialism had no interests whatsoever (whenever anyone says “US interests” they mean the interests of US imperialism).

He apologized to Guatemalans for overthrowing the pro-people government in 1954, which led to 35 years of rightwing governments that slaughtered 200,000 Guatemalans in cold blood, with the total support of both US political parties and administrations of both parties.

By contrast to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama is simply a US imperialist dog of the worst order. And Hilary Clinton, once in office as Secretary of State, has turned into a nasty, monstrous rightwing witch, a murderous agent of imperialism. Hilary Clinton was much better as Bill’s wife when he was in office. Since 2008, she’s turned into a reactionary monstrosity.

"What Is Critical Race Theory?" by Alpha Unit

I first heard of Critical Race Theory about two years ago. I wasn’t sure what it was, but some of the things attributed to it seemed familiar – like the idea of “institutional racism.” That’s something I’d first heard of back during the 1980s, I believe. And I remember hearing Spike Lee and others saying that Blacks couldn’t be racist. What I’ve found out since then is that, in these parts, you don’t want to be labeled a Critical Race Theorist. It’s almost like being called a son of a bitch, or something worse. “What exactly is a Critical Race Theorist?” I wondered. Critical Race Theory originated among legal scholars, I discovered. It’s about what the law represents and how it is applied, with its focus on how it is applied when it comes to race. Law professor Richard Delgado was one of the founders of Critical Race Theory. Along with Jean Stefancic, he wrote Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, in which the authors explain how it came about.

Critical Race Theory sprang up in the mid-1970s, as a number of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the country realized that the heady advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back. Realizing that new theories and strategies were needed to combat the subtler forms of racism that were gaining ground, early writers such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado put their minds to the task. They were soon joined by others, and the group held its first conference at a convent outside Madison, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1989.

Delgado and Stefancic inform us that Critical Race Theory borrows from two previous movements – critical legal studies and radical feminism. From critical legal studies, it got the principle of legal indeterminacy – the idea that not every legal case has one correct outcome. Also, it borrowed the idea that favorable precedent (like Brown v. Board of Education, for example) tends to deteriorate over time. From feminism, it borrowed insights into the relationship between power and the construction of social roles. Among the central tenets of Critical Race Theory are beliefs – not uniformly agreed upon, by the way – that:

  1. Racism is normal, not aberrant, in American society.
  2. White-on-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.
  3. Race and races are products of social thought and relations (“social construction” thesis).
  4. Everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances.
  5. Minority status brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism, so their stories should be told.

Derrick Bell is the intellectual founding father of Critical Race Theory. In 1980, he published in the Harvard Law Review an article that addressed the second central tenet listed above. Titled Faces at the Bottom of the Well, published in 1992, he posits that racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of American society. His message is that even though racism will never be eradicated, Blacks and others must still stand in the way of the powers that be:

Continued struggle can bring about unexpected benefits and gains that in themselves justify continued endeavor.

In other words, he’s telling Blacks, “Racism is here to stay. Deal with it.” There’s a Critical Race Theorist some people out there ought to be able to handle.

References

Bell, Derrick A. 1980. “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press.

Do Capitalists Support Pubic Health and Education?

Repost from the old site. In a response to my post, The Paradox of Capitalist Regulation, brilliant British commenter huy suggests that capitalists nowadays are enlightened enough to see that public health and education are needed for the workforce. I argue otherwise below. Huy:

I would say that history has taught capitalism that free education and law and order run by the state is essential for capitalism to work, as without those things capitalism fails.It looks like capitalism is learning across the globe that free and equal health provided by the state is also essential for capitalism to run (from a free market economic point of view). Socialism wants national health and education for the benefit of the people, while capitalism wants national health and education for the benefit of the market and growth of the economy, An economy with higher-skilled, more versatile workers who are in good health is a more productive one. I consider myself vey leftwing and technocratic, and I’m deeply in favour of the free market, but only if the state provides good free education and health for all, minimum wage, poverty benefits, unemployment benefits and the chance for adults to get apprenticeships and qualifications for free when ever they need to or want to (within reason) so as to allow the lower-skilled workers to keep up with the fast pace of the free market and all the job cuts and creations that come with it. The free market is humanity’s best hope for destroying poverty, but only if it is galvanized by the state properly, whereby social mobility and equal opportunity and social justice and lack of social deprivation is followed through. This makes both moral and economic sense.

I respond: If you look at the 3rd World, the capitalist classes there do not want public education and they certainly do not want state health care. Even here in the US, the capitalist class has waged all-out war on public education and national health care through the Republican Party, although the Democratic Party also now seems to oppose national health care. In parts of the world where national health care has been put in, the capitalists and their rightwing parties quickly wage ideological warfare to get rid of it. Europe is an unusual case, probably due to circumstances discussed in my earlier post, For Justice, A River of Blood. Europe was a very rightwing place in the 1930’s. WW2 completely destroyed most of the European Right, defeated all rightwing governments, killed, wounded or imprisoned many of the rightwingers themselves, destroyed or made illegal their organizations and dissolved much of their wealth and power, and more importantly, humiliated them and completely discredited rightwing ideology. As a consequence, the Right was in disarray for decades after WW2 in Europe, and they have not yet regained their power. After the war, there was a Cold War threat from the USSR and from Left groups all over the rest of Europe. In order to co-opt the Soviet model and the West European Left, the ruling classes in Europe cut deals with workers, consumers and society in which a Social Contract was erected in the form of a socialism called variously the social market or social democracy. Due to the decimation and discrediting of the European Right, even European elites and media bought into social democratic ideology. Hence we see in France large Leftwing papers like Liberation, huge Euro-Communist parties getting 10-3 Elites in Scandinavia formed collegial relations with Communist and Leftist states and Leftist guerrillas on the basis that they were all socialists. For instance, Scandinavian governments had friendly relations with Sandinista Nicaragua, Cuba and Vietnam, along with the FMLN and FARC guerrillas in El Salvador and Colombia. Scandinavian governments gave generous aid to the Third World, often in pro-people forms with no capitalist or reactionary strings attached. This had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of West European Communists. In a relatively just social democratic society, most saw little need for revolution. In Europe, even the capitalists have gone along with national health care, although in the UK they have been whittling away at it since Thatcher. European executives love their free national health care and paid six week vacations. However, in much of the rest of the world, capitalists have rolled back national health and education. In China, national health care is apparently gone as a right. In Russia, too, it scarcely exists anymore, while education has been decimated along with educated persons and professions. In some East European states like Bulgaria, health care has been devastated. The first thing the hero of both US parties, Nicaraguan President Violeta Chamorro, did when the Sandinistas were voted out was to get rid of free public education and free national health care. In Canada right now, the rightwing party and the business class have declared war on the national health care system (an ongoing project for a good 15 years or so now), but it is popular, so they have to tread lightly. If the business classes in the US supported public education and national health care, we would not have a decades-long war against both of them waged by the party of business, the Republican Party, and supported by the business class in its entirety. It is true that some more enlightened US capitalists (especially big businesses) do support public education and even national health care, but they are an exception. In this sense, the US small business class is even more reactionary than US big businesses. The US small business class supported Ross Perot and Ron Paul and are often far to the Right of the corporate guys. This rightwing populism can and does lead to fascism. Small business and the petit bourgeois were the army behind fascism in Nazi Germany and have led many far-right movements in the US too. The petit bourgeois resents the plutocratic elites for screwing them, but on the other hand also resents the working classes for being unionized and making good money via union wages. They feel oppressed by both groups. Also, many petit bourgeois did not go to college, so they resent those white collar workers (seen as intellectuals and professionals) who got degrees and the resulting higher-paying jobs. The petit bourgeois work in offices, banks and stores as clerks, tellers, low-ranking managers, etc. This class sector is often equated with something like the lower middle class. They often have no class consciousness at all, which is why they are often fodder for the Far Right. What you are advocating above, huy, is not the free market at all, since the free market advocates getting rid of most to all government spending and regulation. Instead, you are advocating for socialism in one of its many forms. This form being the social market or social democracy. I am a strong supporter of social democracy along the lines of the European model. The social market is a regulated capitalism with many government programs as a safety net and considerable government involvement in and even ownership of parts of the economy. In Sweden, 9 Government involvement in the economy takes the form of industry guidance as a corporatist element. Ownership of aspects of the economy takes the form of ownership of large industries like aircraft and ship building, national airlines, vehicle manufacturing, national rail, etc. It’s worked quite well. Keep in mind that capitalists are loath to invest in industries like ship building in which it may take 100 years to make your first profit. These industries need to be state-run for a long time. Further, passenger rail is almost never profitable for the private sector, so they just don’t run passenger trains. Since it operates at a loss as its nature, it must be run by the state. This is what is so sick about the endless demands on Amtrak to make a profit – it is almost impossible for Amtrak to make a profit, because large passenger rail networks almost never do. In order to profit, they would have to charge so much money that they would hardly get any passengers. In the same way, city buses never run at a profit either, hence we never see the private sector running passenger buses inside cities. Do you see any private rail lines running passenger rail in any areas of the US? Of course not. Why? Because it’s not profitable. Passenger rail must be run by the state for it to exist at all. Demands for Amtrak to run a profit are perverse, dishonest and wrong. How many Americans think Amtrak needs to run a profit? Of those with an opinion, possibly most. This is what rightwing propaganda will do to you.

New BS from Kevin MacDonald

The increasingly anti-Semitic Kevin MacDonald has a new article up about the fascist and Czarist Solzhenitsyn’s new book about Russia and the Jews. The 19th chapter has just been translated. The book is the usual anti-Semitic palaver from Solzhenitsyn. The Jewish neocons and Cold War liberals have always had a tough time with Solzhenitsyn. They loved him for bashing their hated USSR, which they hated mostly because it would not let many Jews emigrate to Israel and because these US Jews were now lined up with the US in the Cold War. So the fascist Solzhenitsyn was their hero, but at the same time, he was an anti-Semite! Oh, how to deal with this condundrum. The Jewish Cold War liberals and neocons simply avoided this difficult question by refusing to discuss their hero’s anti-Semitism. There is also a photo of a “Holodomor victim” in the article. It is probably from the famine of 1921, as that is where most photos of “Holodomor victims” are from. Visitors to the famine region during the famine noted that people were well-dressed and rations were very tight. One visitor noted one obviously malnourished young boy standing in line with his mother to get rations. No one else was obviously malnourished. As noted, most deaths were due to disease anyway. There was no Holodomor. The Holodomor – the deliberate terror famine that murdered 5-10 million Ukrainians – simply never occurred. What occurred was a famine harvest followed by a famine in all of the USSR. Yes, 5 million died, not usually of hunger but of disease epidemics due to weakened immunity, but it was not deliberate. The harvest simply collapsed that year. MacDonald says that Jews were less than The USSR was surely not “the most murderous regime in history” though I suppose you can play around with definitions of the word murder. How about Hitler’s Germany? The “most murderous regime in history” is often used by anti-Semites and pro-Nazis to defend their beloved Hitler. The argument? Stalin was worse than Hitler! MacDonald is surely an anti-Semite, and he also seems to have pro-Nazi sympathies (note his statements for the defense in the trial of Holocaust Denier David Irving). Further, there were no “15 million murdered peasants” in the 1930’s. A lot of people died, but those figures are excessive.

Executions:                800,000
Dekulakization in Ukraine: 390,000
Gulags:                   ~500,000
Totals:                   ~1.7 million

With the famine:

Famine:                    5.3 million
Executions:                800,000
Dekulakization in Ukraine: 390,000
Gulags:                   ~500,000
Totals:                   ~7 million

As this was occurring, life expectancy rose wildly and the death rate collapsed, compared to Czarist Russia. So the deaths and killings were occurring in tandem with the greatest humanitarian life-saving project that the world had ever seen. The comments that follow the article in the Occidental Observer of which MacDonald is an editor are the usual wildly anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi White nationalist nonsense.

National Bolshevik Video

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39IjFe4CS4c&feature=email]

I honestly don’t know where to begin with this crap.

This is some of the most fucked up and confused politics I’ve seen in a while.

Is socialism great, or is Socialism Death, as the video argues in one case?

The endless fascist imagery, the violent, morbid, punk, death and frankly occult imagery is very disturbing. This worship of violence, death and the occult is what fascism is all about.

The Communist leaders they love for the most part were some of the worst and most murderous Communists of all.

Stalin murdered 3.1 million people. Pol Pot caused the death of 1.7 million, 1/4 of the population. Mao did quite a bit of killing himself. Ceausescu was one of the worst, most backwards and most fascist-like leaders in the East Bloc. He had a ton of blood on his hands, and he’s nothing to envy. Ceausescu promoted natalism and made abortion illegal. This is progressive and pro-women’s rights? Stalin made abortion much harder to get in the 1930’s. Saddam Hussein was nothing but a murderer. The North Korean Kims have a horrific human rights record.

The video’s images of Nazis were very disturbing. Nazis are shit. They were shit then, they’re shit now, they’ll be shit forever. The video makes an extensive case that Stalinist Communism and Nazi National Socialism were basically one and the same thing. It’s not the case. They also play up the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a treaty that is very misunderstood. This Communism = Nazism, Nazism is socialism, Nazism is Leftism shit could have been written by an American hard rightwing anti-Communist.

Many of the Nazbol (the name itself is disturbing as it sounds like Nazis) marchers look like skinheads. The written introduction to the video defends not only nationalism (somewhat dubious) but also “racialism,” which is just a fancy word for racism. So Nazbols are apparently not only nationalists but also racists. Apparently Nazbols are also anti-Semites. Wonderful! Such a progressive movement, moving forwards and leaving barbarism behind! But that’s not so. Instead this movement embraces barbarism and looks backwards, not forwards. The opposite of progress, or progressivism.

Fuck this Nazbol shit. It’s interesting, but it seriously creeps me out. Even thinking about it makes my head spin.

Anti-Communist Bullshit About North Korea

Via the BBC.

It’s true that the regime lies all the time, and lies to its own people, and that there is a omnipresent propaganda system based to a large extent on lies. There is also rewriting of history.

However, there were some serious problems with this video. Frankly, this shit is just straight up anti-Communist propaganda from the capitalist BBC.

First of all, the hostess discusses the rewriting of history about the Korean War. According to the North, the Americans poured across the border and invaded North Korea. This did not occur.  But according to this BBC crap, it was the North Koreans who actually poured across the border. This lie is what almost all Americans believe about this war.

I would definitely say that the North Korea was the aggressor in the initial stage of the Korean War. However, speaking technically, the two sides had been attacking each other back and forth across the border for some time before the war started. The best analysis of the actual start of the war is that both sides simultaneously attacked each other. The Western media will never tell us this. Who’s rewriting history now?

The central lie of this video, as with all Western capitalist propaganda about North Korea, is the “Communism starves the people” lie. Actually, Communism does not starve the people. Other than brief famines during rapid collectivization, Communist regimes have generally done a much better job at insuring that everyone gets enough to eat than capitalist regimes.

There are shortages of certain foodstuffs, and there is a lack of variety, but definitely, everyone’s stomach gets fed. In China, the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam and the East Bloc, huge strides were made in in basic nutrition. To this day, the former nations of the USSR have very low rates of malnutrition. Communism is great for filling your belly.

If Communism per se is to blame for North Korea’s food crisis, how is that North Korea was able to feed its people just fine from 1945-1993, for 47 years. Did something change in 1993? The system is the same. If anything, there is much more capitalism in the system now than during 1945-1993, yet the food problem is much worse. How does this argument make sense?

Another argument of this video is that North Korea’s electrical power problems are caused by Communism. Yet there were no electrical power problems from 1945-1993. The system is the same now as then. What changed?

The problems of the system really have nothing to do with Communism, central planning or any of that. The truth is that the system collapsed in 1990. The USSR was selling North Korea oil at 10 cents on the dollar. The whole system, from heavily mechanized agriculture to oil dependent industry, relied on this cheap oil. In 1990, the subsidy collapsed and suddenly they had to pay the world price for oil. Overnite, the price of oil went up 10X. It would be as if here in the US we suddenly had to pay $30/gallon for gas. What would our economy look like? Come on.

The 10X increase in the price of oil collapsed the economy. There was no oil to run the heavily mechanized agriculture. There was no oil to run the oil dependent industries. Factories were shuttered. Agricultural production collapsed. Here it is, 17 years on, and things are not much better. They still can’t afford oil to run their farms or industry. That’s why you see bicycles in the video and cows working in the fields. Most of North Korea’s machinery broke down, and there was no money to replace it. The central problem is that the state is broke.

The North Korea haters are asked what exactly North Korea should do to remedy this crisis. They don’t seem to have any answers. I honestly think that the state is doing the best it can to provide people with electricity and food, just as it always has. It’s just that agricultural production has collapsed along with electricity production, and it’s going to be hard to get them going again with empty state coffers. I don’t buy that the state is deliberately starving people. That’s what capitalist countries do.

The Significance of the Refoundation of the Maoist Movement in Pakistan

This is an interesting document outlining the prospects for revolution in Pakistan.

If not for Islam, Pakistan would probably already be in a revolutionary situation right now.

Bangladesh, where objective conditions are just as bad as in India, if not worse, has seen little progress in an actual armed struggle by Maoist forces, mostly due to the presence of Islam. Islamic Bangladesh has recently seen a large movement towards Islamism, though the nation’s elites are still secular. The Islamic parties are very large and popular.

Your average poor, starving peasant, who ought to be on board with revolution, is instead wasting his time jerking off with Islamist reactinaries. The Islamist militias have attacked the Maoists many times, killing many cadres. The state is probably using them for this purpose. This is reminiscent of the situtation in Indonesia in 1965, when Islamist militias were used to kill 1 million Communists in less than a year, a massacre that the CIA was involved in from start to finish.

Every time revolution rears its head in the Islamic World, the Islamists immediately condemn them as “atheists” and slaughter them. I assume that your average religious Muslim supports this massacre of the apostates.

Since Islam is so embedded in the population, I am dubious at the prospects for revolution in Pakistan. The Islamists will quickly condemn the Maoists as “atheists” and will be free to slaughter them. Further, the state will use the Islamist militias, as it already does. For instance, the Pakistani state used the Islamist militias to kill Benazir Bhutto recently. Further, getting pegged as atheists will make it hard for the Maoists to get support.

The revolutionary situation in Hindu countries is much better for some reason. Maoism went over great in Nepal, and the Maoists are doing well in India. In Nepal, the Maoists simply asked, “What’s Hinduism done for you lately?” The answer in general was nothing. Hinduism was used via the caste system by local elites to repress the peasants in a feudal to semi-feudal manner. In India, most of the Hindu Maoists have not really given up Hinduism. I suspect that Hinduism is not as deeply embedded in your average peasant’s psyche as Islam is.

Nevertheless, I understand that the PMKP is already quite popular among peasants oppressed by semi-feudalism. They hold large rallies in favor of land rights and lots of peasants show up. I assume that they don’t directly attack Islam – that would be idiotic in Pakistan. I have a Pakistani friend who comes from a feudal landlord family, and even she supported the PMKP, saying they were good for the peasants.

At any rate, I don’t think a revolutionary situation exists in Pakistan right now, and it will be a while before one starts up. And that’s almost all due to Islam.

The Significance of the Refoundation of the Maoist Movement in Pakistan

August 12, 2010

A Statement to the Seventh National Congress of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party

From the General Secretary of Revolutionary Initiative

With our fists raised as high as our hopes for the future of the Pakistani revolution, Revolutionary Initiative, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist pre-party formation in Canada, offers a red salute to the comrades convening the August 2010 7th National Congress of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party (Pakistan Workers and Peasants Party).

We understand that the 7th Congress will mark a return of the PMKP to the Maoist origins of the party, as established by its founders Major Ishaq Mohammed, Afzal Bungish, Eric Sperian, and Ghulam Nabi Kaloo in the 1960s.

The new program of the PMKP will effect a decisive break with the pseudo-alternatives currently being presented to the people of Pakistan: the perpetuation of a backward semi-colonial, semi-feudal society maintained by the pro-imperialist military and civil bureaucracy, comprador bourgeoisie, and feudal ruling elite; versus the equally backward social program offered up by the Taliban of Pakistan. By breaking with the revisionist Left, which looks to U.S. imperialism for enlightenment through its brutal “War on Terror”, the PMKP is setting a course to truly rally the peasants, proletarians, and the progressive petty-bourgeois elements to the anti-imperialist cause.

Further, by exposing the program of the Taliban as fascism in a different form, the PMKP has truly placed itself at the vanguard of all the toiling masses in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s lackeys to the imperialists and the Taliban only appear to be irreconcilably opposing forces, but in practice they are two sides of the same coin. The world will never forget that it was U.S. imperialism, during the course of the Cold War, which helped create the Taliban with the unwavering support of the Pakistani state.

Due to the Pakistani ruling classes’ subservience to U.S. imperialism, the vast majority paid a steep price for the maintenance of the country’s incredible state of economic backwardness. Today, this relationship has brought only new sufferings, with U.S. imperialism raining down drone attacks upon the heads of Pakistani civilians.

With a population of 170 million people, 4

As the PMKP’s new draft program reads, it is the semi-colonial aspect of Pakistan’s countryside that remains the “main obstacle to the release of productive forces and the progress of our country”. This is what makes the heavily exploited and oppressed peasantry the “main force in the peoples democratic revolution carried out under the leadership of the proletariat.”

It is these conditions that make Pakistan ripe for People’s War. If the Maoists do not lead the struggle of the people, the Islamic forces will continue to prevail in their reactionary mobilization of the masses in their pseudo-opposition to U.S. imperialism.

The floods that are currently ravaging Pakistan, bringing great misery and dislocation to as much as 1

It is our hope that the floods do not derail the plans for the 7th Congress, but if they do, we know it will be because of the urgent need for the revolutionary vanguard to serve and guide the people in a time of great hardship. It is inevitable that the imperialists and the reactionaries in Pakistan will use the catastrophes to strengthen their legitimacy and order, just as the imperialists and reactionaries have done in Haiti with the great earthquake there in January 2010.

In addition to the great consequences that the rise of the Pakistani Maoist movement will have at the domestic level, the Pakistani revolution would also affect historic transformations at the regional and world levels.

Regionally, the revolution in Pakistan would carry the revolutionary tide sweeping South Asia deeper into the Muslim world, breaking the monopoly of the clerical fascists in the struggle against imperialism, which they do not fundamentally oppose and do so in appearance only for their own opportunistic and self-aggrandizing purposes.

At the world level, the rise of a revolutionary communist tide in Pakistan would deal a blow to the ideological basis of the imperialist ‘War on Terror’. In the Western imperialist countries, Muslims are being scapegoated to divert the rest of the masses from the true geopolitical and economic interests of the NATO bloc of imperialists: to plunder the world, exploit the toiling masses, and gain the upper hand in the inter-imperialist competition with the other imperialists and regional geopolitical rivals, especially Russia and China.

The masses in the West are blackmailed into supporting the imperialist war of aggression in Afghanistan through the specter of Taliban rule. But we know that the war against the Taliban, a war on domestic reactionaries and exploiting classes, can only be the class war of the toiling masses, not the imperialists. The world was reminded of this on May 1st, 2010 when the PMKP rallied and marched in North-West Frontier Province for the support of the revolution in Nepal.

We look forward, comrades, to the great feats that the people of Pakistan will achieve under the leadership of genuine communists guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and we will show the masses in our country that the people of Pakistan are our friends and comrades, and that they strive for genuine democracy, for socialism and for communism, just like ourselves.

If the PMKP, alongside our comrades of the Shola Jawid (Communist Party Maoist of Afghanistan) and Sarbederan (Communist Party of Iran-Maoist), successfully organize and arouse the masses for national democratic revolution by way of anti-imperialist People’s Wars in Central and South Asia, genuine communists all around the world will rally to your cause, learn important lessons from your struggle, and promote them amongst the proletarians of their home countries.

If the PMKP holds fast to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism after the convention of the 7th National Congress, deeply uprooting the revisionism of the past decades, and boldly applies MLM to the conditions of Pakistan, then a glorious future lays ahead for the people of Pakistan and South and Central Asia. The era of imperialism is the era of world proletarian revolution. In this phase imperialism’s strategic decline, the phase of the second great crisis of capitalist imperialism that has plagued the world since the early 1970s, the conditions for proletarian revolution are inexorably improving.

Finally, this message of solidarity would not be complete without our own organization clearly identifying Canadian imperialism as a leading enemy of the people of the world, including the people of your country. A leading player in the occupation of Afghanistan and NATO is Canadian imperialism, the basis of which is Canadian monopoly-finance capital. As the imperialist war in Afghanistan more and more spills over into your country, your connection to the Canadian proletariat’s revolutionary struggle deepens more and more.

The proletarian youth who are being sent to Afghanistan only to return to Canada in body bags are also the victims of imperialist war, but they must be driven from Afghanistan just the same. The ruinous war in Afghanistan sets the basis for revolutionary agitation amongst the soldiers, no less than the Korean War and the Vietnam War radicalized whole generations of youth and soldiers in the West.

Together, let us hasten the movement towards socialism and communism on a world scale before the imperialists drag us further into a hellish world of war, avertable disasters, ecological catastrophe, and the day-to-day grinding exploitation and oppression of capitalism.

Red salute to the PMKP for taking up the banner of Marxism-Leninism- Maoism!

Onwards with the People’s War in Pakistan!

From Canada to Pakistan, long live the international proletarian revolution.

Another Lie About Communism Bites the Dust

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxsrx9jBj_M&feature=fvw]

Even I believed this one for a long time. Everyone knows that the Communism failed because no one wants to wear Bulgarian shoes, right?

The lie, best stated, is that Communist products are all crap.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of truth to this – look at the East German car the Trabant. But in the case of this fair in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), apparently it’s not so. People are flocking here to sample products from the old GDR. Food, toys, clothing, furniture, it was all made better in East Germany than the mass produced, planned obsolescent, consumerist crap on sale in Germany today.

This complaint is commonly heard in former East, not just in this video. Other former East Germans also say that the stuff on sale now is more expensive, and it’s a poorer product. If anyone could make good products under Communism, it would have to be the Germans. They generally make good stuff.

Abiezer Coppe told me that he had a radio from the old USSR. I assumed it was a piece of garbage, but he said it was the best radio he ever had, lasted for many years and ran perfectly. Let’s get real here. Under capitalism, the profit motive often gets in the way of making a decent product. You make the product as cheaply as possible and as crappy as you can get away with, because that way you make more money.

We used to make some pretty good products here in the US, back in the 1970’s and before. Firms were often family-owned, and there was often a, “We take pride in the fact that our American firm makes a quality product.” Toaster ovens and microwaves from this period were excellent. Nowadays you have to spend some money to get a comparable one. The standard models are complete crap. I can’t get over how poor your average coffee maker is. In general, if you want a good toaster oven, microwave or coffee maker, buy one made in Europe. Everything else is garbage.

The “We take pride in the fact that our American firm makes a quality product” era is gone. America hardly makes anything anymore anyway, and firms have all merged and are all on Wall Street, with stockholders clamoring for an ever-increasing bottom line. The result is what you see today – I call it World O’ Crap.

Customer service is gone too, especially on the Internet. Everything’s been replaced by endless voicemail mazes where  you talk to idiot machines that don’t understand you. When you finally get a human, they’re at a call center in India or Philippines and they can’t even help you. Worse, you can’t even understand them. Even customer service is just another lousy product in World O’ Crap anymore.

The modern model of capitalism is really shit in so many ways.

From Trotskyites to Neoconservatives (Short Version)

A commenter asks if there is something about Trotskyism that turned them into neocons:

Do you think there is something fundamentally sinister about Trotskyism that makes such transformation inevitable?

Not really, but they are super-revolutionaries. They believe in worldwide revolution. Spontaneous worldwide revolution. They don’t believe in socialism in one country, remember? They want the whole world in revolt.

The Trots used to just be a bunch of Jews. They liked Trotsky because he was a Jew and supposedly Stalin sacked Trotsky due to anti-Semitism. Trotsky was running around telling everyone that Stalin was an anti-Semite. Also, Stalin was a conservative and a nationalist and he undid a lot of the radical changes that the Trot types had done before 1927. So anyway, if you were a Commie and a Jew in the West, you were supposed to be a Trot.

Then with Khrushchev’s secret speech, the full weight of Stalin’s atrocities, 3.2 people just murdered in peacetime, came out. Actually they were throwing around numbers like 20-110 million. Lot of Commies in the West, including most of the Trots, abandoned Communism and turned into Cold War liberals in the 1950’s associated with a CIA publication called Encounter. They were regularly trotted out to show how liberals hated Communism as much as conservatives. My Dad came out of this mold. Fierce liberal who hated Communism.

With the 6-day war in 1967, the group radicalized. They supported Israel, and they got behind the Vietnam War in a big way as a Cold War thing. Also they became these cultural conservative Jews who were sort of waging war on their fellow Jews. They saw the Counterculture as a bunch of traitorous Jews, and they were pissed. So they were pro-Vietnam War, pro-Israel, pro-Cold War and anti-counterculture.

In the 1970’s this movement grew around a few very obscure journals which have since gone under the names of which elude me. The group coalesced around Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s office in the Senate. He was known as the Senator From Boeing. Jackson represented Washington State. He was this “liberal” who was all tied in with the military industrial complex, a hawk on Vietnam in the 1970’s and a Cold Warrior. My father loved him.

He was a Gentile, but the neocons saw him as Israel’s best friend. All of these guys, Perle, Wolfowitz and the rest of them, come out of this environment. They still wanted to be Democrats though because they were still liberal Jews at heart.

When Reagan came in, they saw their opening and joined on board for the pro-Israel Cold War ride. They formed a BS committee called The Committee on the Present Danger. The whole reason for its existence was to say that the CIA was lying in its estimates on Soviet strength and that the Soviets were stronger than we were and about to conquer us.

This was all lies and apparently they knew this, but they pushed it anyway. They got the CIA to revise its estimates of Soviet strength to dramatically overestimate it. This was the Reagan defense spending ramp up thing. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Frank Gaffney, Perle and other scoundrels were all involved in this.

Most of them were turning into Republicans already when Bush Jr came in, and they made a rush to sign up. Most of his administration came out of the CPD and JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. The purpose of JINSA is, through corruption and propaganda, to sort of merge the Israeli military and its MIC with the US military and its MIC. It has sort of worked.

The rest is history.

Trace the trajectory of Norman Podhoretz of Commentary Magazine and Irving Kristol of Public Affairs Magazine (William Kristol’s father). Those were some of the original proto-neocons who are now full-on neocons.

Typical White American: Ronald Reagan

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irCp9kiLHuI]

Ronald Reagan, more than anything else, is not so much America as he is White America. And he’s not so much bourgeois America as he is White America.

Vast numbers of working class Whites voted for Reagan in 1980, so many that we had to invent a new word, Reagan Democrats. Almost no Blacks, even bourgeois Blacks, voted for Reagan. The number is only 1

Ronald Reagan represents White America, from the 1950’s to the present day, from working class to ruling class. He’s their boy; he’s our boy. In the 1950’s, he worked hand in hand with Joe McCarthy’s fascist goons. As governor of California, he threatened campus protestors and cheered on the idiot Vietnam War.

As President, he committed, said and did one evil act and statement after another. “Trees cause smog.” The fawning media gave him a pass the whole time, never calling him on anything.

In the name of fighting welfare leeches, he ranted about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, while his administration threw thousands of dying cancer patients off disability after condemning them as leeches who refused to work.

Through it all, Shithead White America, from poor to billionaires, could not stop cheering long enough to sit down. He funded death squads in Central America. He cheered on the mass murderers in Guatemala in 1982 while they slaughtered 20,000 people. He started up the Contras, who spent most of their time invading schools, medical clinics and collective farms and massacring all the “Communist” teachers, aides, doctors, nurses and farmers that they found there. Some freedom fighters.

The media, across the board, loved Reagan. Criticism in the press was nearly nonexistent. In White California, critics of Reagan were ostracized as losers and Commies.

The fanatical and irrational hatred of Communism and by extension socialism, the love of the rich and hatred of the poor and working classes, the racism, the contempt and raging hatred for the environment, the insipid and lunatic Christian fundamentalism, the fear of and and contempt for “European” and urban modernity in all its forms, the idiotic love of guns, the seething hatred of unions (even by working class Whites), Ronald Reagan was simply White America personified.

If you go anywhere in White California and say two words against Ronald Reagan, you’re risking a fistfight. He’s revered there as a God to this day. In a poll of Shitheads (Americans), Reagan recently got a 5

When he left office in 1988, the entire Democratic side of the isle stood up and cheered. Even the furthest left of all, Teddy Kennedy, gave a raving speech that sounded like an elegy to the Pope himself. When I read that, I had to pinch myself to remind me that Kennedy was really a Democrat.

I’m lately reading essays about America written in the 1970’s. Some about the general idiocy of the culture, others about the Christian Right types. What’s so depressing about these essays is that they could have been written today. The culture hasn’t changed one bit, (if anything it seems much, much worse) and the fundie fanatics screaming about textbooks in West Virginia in 1975 are simply the Tea Parties, or really, the Republican Party itself.

That we haven’t budged an inch in 35 years implies that America is terminal. We can’t seem to get rid of the essential shitheadedness that is sadly part of character for time immemorial.

I can’t help thinking that we are doomed.

New Movie on the Fake Holodomor

Some idiot Hollywood filmmakers, some of them Ukrainians, are behind Holodomor: The Movie, a new documentary about the fake Holodomor of 1932-33, the fake deliberate famine that never even happened.

Looking over the story line, there are problems already.

Worst genocide in the history of mankind. Not true. First of all, it wasn’t a genocide. Second, the figures are wrong.

7-10 million died, presumably all Ukrainians. Not true. There were probably about 5.4 million deaths, most actually due to disease and not starvation. People weakened by lack of food fell prey to disease epidemics, particularly cholera. Sanitation was still rudimentary in the USSR at this time, and the antibiotic era only began after WW2. Before the antibiotic era, those afflicted with epidemic diseases often just died.

The movie implies that only Ukrainians died. This is not true. There was a famine over the entire land. People died in Moscow and Siberia.

The movie implies that Ukrainians as a people were deliberately targeted for genocide. Not true. As noted, starvation occurred throughout the land. In particular, the Russian regions near the Ukraine had death rates as high as the Ukrainians. If the Ukrainians were specifically targeted for genocide, why was the death rate just as high among the Slavs of the Lower Volga?

The movie tells the usual lie – there was a bumper harvest in 1932-1933, but the USSR confiscated the crops in order to kill off the Ukrainians, many of whom were protesting collectivization. It’s not true. The famine occurred because there was a famine harvest. The harvest simply collapsed in those years. Some of it was due to weather, but mostly an epidemic of wheat rust spread throughout the land. The Ukrainians also were destroying many of their own crops, setting them on fire, or harvesting them and then leaving them in piles to rot in the rain.

Anti-government guerrillas were rampaging through the Ukraine, attacking collective farms, killing collective farmers, raping women. In early 1932, there were multiple armed attacks occurring every day. For several years prior, the Ukrainians had been killing their own farm animals. They had destroyed about 5

The government did not “confiscate the bountiful harvest.” It was a real problem with the Ukrainians destroying the food and farm animals, so it’s true that the state sent soldiers and agents down there to seize grain before it could be destroyed. The grain unfortunately was needed to feed the cities, in particular the army. Ukrainians died disproportionately because this was where the crop failure due to wheat rust was the worst.

It’s not true that the Ukrainians were locked in a prison to starve. It was a very difficult time. The crop had failed, with a famine harvest. People were desperately trying to flee the Ukraine to go to other parts of the USSR. In fact, people were on the move all of the USSR, mostly looking for food. It was a great big mess, because workers need to stay in one place for any work to get done.

If the Ukrainians all left the Ukraine, there would be another famine harvest the next year since there would be no workers in the fields to grow crops. So, yes, they did try to prevent people from moving around, but people kept moving around anyway.

Fortunately, the next year was a bumper crop.

There were no 7-10 million deliberate killings (genocide) in the Ukraine in 1932-33. It’s true that there were 390,000 state killings associated with dekulakization in the Ukraine in 1932-33. If the Ukrainians wish to play that up, they can be my guest. But they seem to have an intellectual hard-on for that juicy 10 million dead number.

How did the “7-10 million” figure pop up?

The figure kept going up, because the Ukrainians kept raising it. After WW2, it was decided that the Nazis had killed 6 million Jews. The Ukrainians were upset about this because it made their Holodomor seem lesser.

Plus, the Ukrainian nationalists who play up the Holodomor were deeply involved in Nazism and mass Jew-killing genocide in the Ukraine after the Germans invaded. The Ukrainian nationalists had Jewish blood of the Holocaust all over their hands, and now the Holocaust was beating their precious Holodomor in the numbers racket too. Something had to be done.

The 7 million figure was tossed out. Why? To outdo the 6 million of the Jewish Holocaust and beat the Jews at the numbers game. Also, to play up the “Stalin was worse than Hitler” card, since the Ukrainians were so deeply in bed with the Nazis, this was meant to minimize Nazism as a lesser evil.

To this day, Ukrainian nationalist groups are some of the nastiest anti-Semites out there, more or less unrepentant Nazis. The fake Holodomor thing is part and parcel of their Nazi anti-Semitic project, since supposedly a bunch of Soviet Jews are the ones who “genocided the Ukrainians.”

Over time, they kept adding onto this, and now we have this inflated 7-10 million figure.

One would think that the Ukrainian nationalists could come up with at least one document showing proof of this Holodomor of theirs. The Soviet archives have been opened, including the secret archives of the KGB. It’s all out there for anyone to look at.

With the Nazis, researchers have been able to go over their documentation scrupulously and find documents showing that the Nazi leadership was behind the Holocaust, as much as they tried to cover it up with euphemisms. That the Ukrainians can’t come up with one piece of paper to prove their case is telling.

What’s strange is that the collectivization project is probably what saved the world from Nazism. The USSR of the 1930’s was involved in breakneck industrialization, since Stalin knew that the Nazis and or the West were going to attack them. They had industrialize quickly or be destroyed. The buildup of the USSR during that period was one of the greatest and most extensive national developmental projects in history.

Collectivization was needed to feed the workers in the cities and to free up workers from the fields. Previously, Russian farmers farmed small, unproductive farms that barely grew enough food for one family. This wasn’t going to feed an industrial society, so collectivization was done. The result of this world-shattering developmental project was that the USSR was able to defeat the Nazis. 8

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The Failure of the Neoliberal Model For Developing Countries

On the 60th Anniversary of Chinese Liberation post, James Schipper says that I should compare China to Taiwan and South Korea instead and see who did better. I pointed out that a book on China by the reactionary Time-Life Corporation in 1962 at the height of the Cold War noted that Taiwanese miracle was not reproducible in China. They wished it was, but there was no way to do it. For one thing, one thing that helped create the Taiwanese miracle was a flood of US aid. In order to China to receive a concomitant amount of aid, China would have to have received an unheard-of figure that was simply not possible to achieve at that time, or even now. Further, there was the problem of feeding the people and rural poverty. Taiwan solved this, mostly by doing a land reform, but Taiwan is a little island, and feeding the island was not an insurmountable task. The book pointed out that the main problem facing China was feeding the population. Only 2 Everywhere on Earth, US imperialism has always fought the imposition of any kind of national health care, state involvement in the economy and especially land reform. Many nations have been overthrown by the CIA and other agents of US imperialism for attempting even those most meager reforms. Indeed, all Hugo Chavez seems to be doing is trying to create some sort of social democracy in Venezuela. Yet in Taiwan and South Korea, the US agreed to national health care, massive land reform, trade barriers, heavy state involvement in the economy, the whole works. This is because I believe that the US knew that all of these were necessary to develop an economy. Taiwan and South Korea were intended by imperialism to be “showcases against Communism”, to be sparkling examples of what “capitalism” could do better than say North Korea or China. It’s really amazing how cynical imperialism is, but if imperialism has to do a bit of a socialist dance to fight Communism, then that’s what it will do. The sad thing is that if the North Korean, Soviet and Chinese “threats of a good example” did not exist, there would be no reason for imperialism to create these “anti-Commie showcases” and the model for those countries may well have been the Philippines, Thailand or Indonesia instead. I would like to point out a few other things, mainly that we are comparing one socialist country to another, since I consider Taiwan at least to be a socialist country and South Korea to be a partly socialist country. As I’ve said on this site, I support all kinds of socialism. The main thing is that we are not comparing a socialist China to a neoliberal capitalist South Korea or Taiwan. Taiwan at least is a very socialist country. They did a land reform, and they have universal health care that even includes dental care! I don’t know much about South Korea, but I know that they did a land reform. It’s important to note how essential that land reform was developing those two nations. Neoliberal dumbasses never seem to figure that out. You have to deal with the problem of feeding your people and take care of the problem of rural poverty by doing a land reform, and then you can think about becoming a developed country. Until then, the best you can hope for is some backwards clusterfuck wreck like Brazil or Equatorial Guinea. Also, neither Taiwan nor South Korea are examples of neoliberal capitalism. Both were very heavily state-directed, state-guided and even state-involved economies. The state was pretty much setting economic policy and telling the corporations what to do. The state and the business sector were very much tied together. It was almost a “national socialism.” Also both countries protected their budding industries with huge trade barriers until they got big enough to compete with the big guys. All developing countries need to protect their budding industries from competition with huge economies – otherwise you are never going to develop. Of course all of this – land reform, national health care (including dental!), heavy state involvement in the economy, trade barriers to protect budding industries until they are big enough to compete – are anathema to the neoliberal agenda that holds sway over the entire world, mostly due to US imperialism. Neoliberalism never developed one undeveloped country ever, and probably never will.

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