Tag Archives: Russia

Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, and the Global Culture War, by Boyd Cathey

Posted on August 2, 2022 | Leave a comment

Not everyone wants to be “woke.” From Boyd Cathey at unz.com:

While in America we tear down monuments to Robert E. Lee, in Russia they tear down monuments to Lenin
The war in Ukraine is not really about Ukraine—it is not about Ukraine’s sacrosanct borders which have been supposedly violated by Russia. And it is most certainly not about the vaunted “defense of democracy,” as we constantly hear screamed in our ears by the media and by a broad panoply of American (and European) political and cultural leaders, from Nancy Pelosi to Lindsey Graham to Boris Johnson.

None of those rationales, none of those justifications for the fanatical involvement by the United States, its puppets in NATO, and the EU, explain why the conflict in that remote part of the world is so vitally important globally that it literally has the entirety of the “woke” American Left and the great majority of Republicans, in tow, literally standing on their chairs and desks to frantically applaud such charlatans as former X-rated comedian and authoritarian Volodymyr Zelensky (and his wife) as “champions of freedom and democracy.” The specter of Graham and Pelosi outdoing each other in the bellicosity of their rants against President Putin and Russia is only a little less sickening than their lascivious ideological embrace of each other.

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Posted in Culture, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Propaganda

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Europe has lost the energy war, by Thomas Fazi

Posted on August 2, 2022 | Leave a comment

Don’t tell the Eurocrats, but it’s going to be a cold, recessionary winter. From Thomas Fazi at unherd.com:

After a decade of financial austerity, is Europe now on the brink of a new age of energy austerity? The city of Hanover has recently introduced strict energy-saving rules that include cutting off the hot water in public buildings, swimming pools, sports halls and gyms, banning mobile air conditioners, fan heaters or radiators, switching off public fountains, and stopping illuminating major buildings such as the town hall at night.

Meanwhile, several countries across Europe are considering dimming or switching off public lights, and even adopting “energy curfews”, with early closures for businesses and public offices. And more drastic measures are under consideration — including gas rationing for energy-intensive industries such as steel and agriculture.

These measures are part of an EU-wide Gas Demand Reduction Plan, ominously titled Save Gas for a Safe Winter, to reduce gas use in Europe by 15% until next spring. Among the proposals is a provision that officials in Brussels impose fines for non-compliance if they decide the crisis is escalating dangerously.

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Going to Samarkand, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on July 30, 2022 | Leave a comment

A good part of the world seems more excited by the Russia-China axis than whatever it is the U.S. is offering. From Pepe Escobar at strategic-culture.org:

The SCO and other pan-Eurasian organizations play a completely different – respectful, consensual – ball game. And that’s why they are catching the full attention of most of the Global South.

The meeting of the SCO Ministerial Council  in Tashkent this past Friday involved some very serious business. That was the key preparatory reunion previous to the SCO summit in mid-September in fabled Samarkand, where the SCO will release a much-awaited “Declaration of Samarkand”.

What happened in Tashkent was predictably unreported across the collective West and still not digested across great swathes of the East.

So once again it’s up to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to cut to the chase. The world’s foremost diplomat – amidst the tragic drama of the American-concocted Era of Non-Diplomacy, Threats and Sanctions – has singled out the two overlapping main themes propelling the SCO as one of the key organizations on the path towards Eurasia integration.

  1. Interconnectivity and “the creation of efficient transport corridors”. The War of Economic Corridors is one of the key features of the 21st
  2. Drawing “the roadmap for the gradual increase in the share of national currencies in mutual settlements.”

Yet it was in the Q@A session that Lavrov for all practical purposes detailed all the major trends in the current, incandescent state of international relations. These are the key takeaways.

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SCOTT RITTER: Washington’s Russian Drone Fantasy

Posted on July 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

The U.S. and Europe have sold short Russian military capabilities every step of the way in the Ukraine war, so it should come as no surprise that they continue to do so concerning Russian drones. From Scott Ritter at consortiumnews.com:

The information warfare campaign by the U.S. and its allies on behalf of Ukraine appeared to engulf Putin’s visit to Iran last week. 

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, center, with NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana, left, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Oct. 7, 2021. (NATO)

According to the official U.S. government narrative, a “desperate” Russia — suffering significant battlefield reversals in Ukraine including the loss of “large numbers” of reconnaissance drones while its own military industrial capacity lacks the ability to provide adequate replacements due to Russia’s “economic isolation” — has turned to Iran for assistance.

“Our information,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared, “indicates that the Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with up to several hundred UAV’s [unmanned aerial vehicles], including weapons-capable UAVs on an expedited timeline.” Sullivan said. “It’s unclear whether Iran has delivered any of these UAVs to Russia already.”

Sullivan’s assessment was drawn from U.S. intelligence reports indicating that Russian officials had twice visited Iran — on June 8 and July 5 — for the purpose of observing at least two versions of Iranian UAVs in operation.

Both visits took place at Kashan Airbase, in central Iran. The Kashan facility has been publicly identified by Israel as the main training facility for Iran’s UAV program. According to Sullivan, these visits represent the first by Russian officials. “This suggests ongoing Russian interest in acquiring Iranian attack-capable UAVs,” Sullivan noted.

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PATRICK LAWRENCE: 21st Century Order

Posted on July 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

Whether the West likes it or not, some of the world’s most substantial countries are building a new world order without them. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

As a piece of the new world order that is under construction, Putin’s trip to Tehran last week was of singular importance. 

Railway station constructed in 2013 in Kazandzhik, Turkmenistan, an important crossroad of the Trans-Caspian Railway and North-South Transnational Railway. (Balkan Wiki, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

At last we were able to read, last week, a New York Times story that concerned the Russians but not the brutal Russians. However, if we are not reading about the brutal Russians and their brutal military and their brutal attacks on civilians in Ukraine, we are obliged to read about the lonesome Russians, the pariah Russians, the Russians the world has forsaken. We are never going to read about ordinary, just plain Russians in the Times or in the rest of the mainstream press as it apes the Times. This we must accept.

Vladimir Putin traveled to Tehran last Tuesday for a summit with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. This was an unusual occasion: The Russian president has not been much for foreign travel since the Covid–19 pandemic erupted; it was his second state visit outside the Russian Federation since Russia intervened in Ukraine last February.

And it is a big deal, deserving of our attention. It marks another step, a considerable one, in the construction of the diplomatic, political, and economic infrastructure that will — I don’t consider this a daring prediction — define the 21st century. We witness the new world order many of us anticipate as it is being built.

The new world order many of us anticipate, if you have not noticed, ranks high among the great unsayables in American discourse and among American media. No, we’re still stuck on our “rules-based international order,” which is clunky code for the hegemony America defends. It is hopelessly passé at this point but remains lethally destructive.

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Posted in Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics

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The power troika trumps Biden in West Asia, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on July 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

As the Eurasian axis takes shape, there’s one simple fact that will override American desires to stifle it. The Eurasian nations are playing on their own territory, the U.S. is not. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

The presidents of Russia, Iran, and Turkey convened to discuss critical issues pertaining to West Asia, with the illegal US occupation of Syria a key talking point.  Oil and gas, wheat and grains, missiles and drones – the hottest topics in global geopolitics today – were all on the agenda in Tehran this week.

The Tehran summit uniting Iran-Russia-Turkey was a fascinating affair in more ways than one. Ostensibly about the Astana peace process in Syria, launched in 2017, the summit joint statement duly noted that Iran, Russia and (recently rebranded) Turkiye will continue, “cooperating to eliminate terrorists” in Syria and “won’t accept new facts in Syria in the name of defeating terrorism.”

That’s a wholesale rejection of the “war on terror” exceptionalist unipolarity that once ruled West Asia.

Standing up to the global sheriff

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his own speech, was even more explicit. He stressed “specific steps to promote the intra-Syrian inclusive political dialogue” and most of called a spade a spade: “The western states led by the US are strongly encouraging separatist sentiment in some areas of the country and plundering its natural resources with a view to ultimately pulling the Syrian state apart.”

So there will be “extra steps in our trilateral format” aimed at “stabilizing the situation in those areas” and crucially, “returning control to the legitimate government of Syria.” For better or for worse, the days of imperial plunder will be over.

The bilateral meetings on the summit’s sidelines – Putin/Raisi and Putin/Erdogan – were even more intriguing. Context is key here: the Tehran gathering took place after Putin’s visit to Turkmenistan in late June for the 6th Caspian summit, where all the littoral nations, Iran included, were present, and after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s travels in Algeria, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, where he met all his Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) counterparts.

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Posted in Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments

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America’s Path To War With Russia, by Christopher Blattman

Posted on July 12, 2022 | Leave a comment

This is an interesting and incisive analysis of possible ways the U.S. could end up in a war with Russia. From Christopher Blattman at RealClearPolitics via zerohedge.com:

The Biden administration has worked hard to keep Russia from treating America as a co-combatant in Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean NATO isn’t deeply embroiled in the fight. The level of support is extraordinary and increasing, including sanctions, intelligence sharing, weapons transfers, and money. Add to that the ever-heightening political rhetoric: “The United States is in this to win it,” one US Congressman tweeted from Kyiv.

pic via africametro.com

But nothing in international law stops Russia from changing its mind and treating the United States as an active party to the conflict. Instead of providing bright red lines, the conventions are fuzzy and subjective. The fact that Vladimir Putin hasn’t deemed NATO a co-combatant comes from a mix of murky international norms, strategic calculation, and luck.

At some point, that could change. Perhaps a Ukrainian military unit uses a long-range system from NATO to attack Belgorod, just inside the Russian border, and Putin orders his military to retaliate against a Western country. Or, as the torrent of heavy weapons to Ukraine grows, perhaps Russia decides that supply depots in Poland are fair game. We can imagine these scenarios by the dozen.

In all likelihood, however, none of these will come to pass. Fighting is ruinous, and so, as a general rule, countries do their best to avoid open conflict—especially one that could go nuclear. The costs of war also mean that (when they do fight) nations have powerful incentives not to escalate and expand those wars—to keep the fighting contained. This is one of the most powerful insights from both history and game theory, and the subject of my recent book, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. War is a last resort, and the costlier that war, the harder both sides will work to avoid it.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Russia: On the Front Lines of the Great Anti-Liberal War, by Robert Bridge

Posted on July 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

One reason many people and politicians in the West hate Russia is because the Russians challenge so many  of their shibboleths. From Robert Bridge at strategic-culture.org:

Russia’s ’special operation’ in Ukraine could be considered the first of many battles to keep the crass ideology of the West far from Russian borders.

After taking major steps to align itself with the institutions of Western philosophy and thinking, Russia is now giving the West a serious rethink as it struggles to defend the homeland from on onslaught of cultural and social rot.

In 1698, Emperor Peter I of Russia instituted a variety of liberal changes designed to bring Russian society in line with Western European models based on the Enlightenment. Peter traveled often to modern European capitals and wished for his fellow Russians to imitate their ‘more civilized’ ways. This was all part of his ‘opening a window onto Europe’ through his eponymous capital of St. Petersburg.

One of the more controversial reforms introduced by the Russian tsar was an enforced beard tax. Despite heated protests by the devoted attendees of the Orthodox Church, who believed to a man that tthe prominent whiskers demonstrated Christian piety and sacrifice, Peter demanded that all Russian men submit to the blade, or suffer a tax for the privilege of wearing facial hair.

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, Politics

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Foreign Policy Fail: Biden’s Sanctions are a Windfall For Russia! By Ron Paul

Posted on July 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

As Obama said, never underestimate Biden’s ability to screw things up. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

It’s easy to see why, according to a new Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans said they do not want Joe Biden to run for re-election. As Americans face record gas prices and the highest inflation in 40 years, President Biden admits he could not care less. His Administration is committed to fight a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine and Americans just need to suck it up.

Last week a New York Times reporter asked Biden how long he expects Americans to pay record gasoline prices over his Administration’s Ukraine policy. “As long as it takes,” replied the president without hesitation.

“Russia cannot defeat Ukraine,” added Biden as justification for his Administration’s pro-pain policy toward Americans. The president has repeatedly tried to deflect blame for the growing economic crisis by claiming Russia is solely behind recent inflation. “The reason why gas prices are up is because of Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia,” he said in the same press conference.

But Biden has a big problem: Americans do not believe him. According to a Rasmussen poll earlier this month, only eleven percent of Americans believe Biden’s claim that Russian president Vladimir Putin is to blame for high prices.

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Posted in Collapse, Economy, Energy, Government, History, Politics, Propaganda

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You’re either with us or you’re a “systemic challenge”, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on July 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

Ultimately the world will not be defined by whether countries are with or against the U.S. or any other wanna-be empire. For the next few years, chaos and collapse will probably be the themes. What emerges from that? Who knows? Pepe Escobar, as he frequently does, tries his hand at predicting the future. From Escobar at thesaker.is:

After all we’re deep into the metaverse spectrum, where things are the opposite of what they seem.

Fast but not furious, the Global South is revving up. The key takeaway of the BRICS+ summit in Beijing,  held in sharp contrast with the G7 in the Bavarian Alps, is that both West Asia’s Iran and South America’s Argentina officially applied for BRICS membership.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry has highlighted how BRICS has “a very creative mechanism with broad aspects”. Tehran – a close partner of both Beijing and Moscow – already had “a series of consultations” about the application: the Iranians are sure that will “add value” to the expanded BRICS.

Talk about China, Russia and Iran being sooooo isolated. Well, after all we’re deep into the metaverse spectrum, where things are the opposite of what they seem.

Moscow’s obstinacy in not following Washington’s Plan A to start a pan-European war is rattling Atlanticist nerves to the core. So right after the G7 summit significantly held at a former Nazi sanatorium, enter NATO’s, in full warmongering regalia.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics

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