Tag Archives: Soviet Union

How the Last Superpower Was Unchained, by Tom Engelhardt

Posted on June 15, 2018 | Leave a comment

The fall of the USSR may have been the worst thing to ever happen to the US. From Tom Engelhardt at tomdispatch.com:

Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be humorous, if it weren’t so grim. If you look, you can find examples of this just about anywhere. Here, for instance, is a passage in the New York Times from a piece on the topsy-turvy Trumpian negotiations that preceded the Singapore summit. “The Americans and South Koreans,” wrote reporter Motoko Rich, “want to persuade the North that continuing to funnel most of the country’s resources into its military and nuclear programs shortchanges its citizens’ economic well-being. But the North does not see the two as mutually exclusive.”

Think about that for a moment. The U.S. has, of course, embarked on a trillion-dollar-plusupgrade of its already massive nuclear arsenal (and that’s before the cost overruns even begin). Its Congress and president have for years proven eager to sink at least a trillion dollars annually into the budget of the national security state (a figure that’s still rising and outpaces by far that of any other power on the planet), while its own infrastructure sags and crumbles. And yet it finds the impoverished North Koreans puzzling when they, too, follow such an extreme path.

Clueless is not a word Americans ordinarily apply to themselves as a country, a people, or a government. Yet how applicable it is.

And when it comes to cluelessness, there’s another, far stranger path the United States has been following since at least the George W. Bush moment that couldn’t be more consequential and yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don’t have a clue. In fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist’s couch, this might be the place to start.

To continue reading: How the Last Superpower Was Unchained

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Posted in Collapse, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, History, Imperialism

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The Russian V-Day Story (Or The History Of World War II Not Often Heard In The West), by Michael Jabara Carley

Posted on May 13, 2018 | 2 comments

The Soviet Union did the heavy lifting in World War II. From Michael Jabara Carley at strategic-culture.org:

Every May 9th the Russian Federation celebrates its most important national holiday, Victory Day, den’ pobedy. During the early hours of that day in 1945 Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, which had stormed Berlin, received the German unconditional surrender. The Great Patriotic War had gone on for 1418 days of unimaginable violence, brutality and destruction. From Stalingrad and the northern Caucasus and from the northwestern outskirts of Moscow to the western frontiers of the Soviet Union to Sevastopol in the south and Leningrad and the borders with Finland, in the north, the country had been laid waste. An estimated 17 million civilians, men, women and children, had perished, although no one will ever know the exact figure. Villages and towns were destroyed; families were wiped out without anyone to remember them or mourn their deaths.

Most Soviet citizens lost family members during the war. No one was left unaffected.

Most Soviet citizens lost family members during the war. No one was left unaffected.

Ten million or more Soviet soldiers died in the struggle to expel the monstrous Nazi invader and finally to occupy Berlin at the end of April 1945. Red Army dead were left unburied in a thousand places along the routes to the west or in unmarked mass graves, there having been no time for proper identification and burial. Most Soviet citizens lost family members during the war. No one was left unaffected.

The Great Patriotic War began at 3:30am on 22 June 1941, when the Nazi Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Seas with 3.2 million German soldiers, organised in 150 divisions, supported by 3,350 tanks, 7,184 artillery pieces, 600,000 trucks, 2,000 warplanes. Finnish, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Spanish, Slovakian forces, amongst others, eventually joined the attack. The German high command reckoned that Operation Barbarossa would take only 4 to 6 weeks to finish off the Soviet Union. In the west, US and British military intelligence agreed. Besides, what force had ever beaten the Wehrmacht? Nazi Germany was the invincible colossus. Poland had been crushed in a few days. The Anglo-French attempt to defend Norway was a fiasco. When the Wehrmacht attacked in the west, Belgium hurried to quit the fight. France collapsed in a few weeks. The British army was driven out of Dunkirk, naked, without guns or Lorries. In the spring of 1941, Yugoslavia and Greece disappeared in a matter of weeks at little cost to German invaders.

The Red Army’s losses were unimaginable, two million soldiers lost in the first three and a half months of the war.

The Red Army’s losses were unimaginable, two million soldiers lost in the first three and a half months of the war.

To continue reading: The Russian V-Day Story (Or The History Of World War II Not Often Heard In The West)

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, War

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The New York Times’ Latest Leninist Fetish: All the Fake Eco-News That’s Fit to Print, by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on August 10, 2017 | 1 comment

The New York Times has a special place in its heart for the old Soviet Union (although not for present day Russia). From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

As part of the New York Times’ recent celebration of the centennial of the communist takeover of Russia (“The Red Century”) the paper published an August 8 piece by one Fred Strebeigh, a Yale environmental studies and English lecturer, entitled “Lenin’s Eco-Warriors.”  The theme of the article is that, yes, the Russian communists tortured and mass murdered tens of millions of their own citizens, enslaved the rest in totalitarian hell, and completely ruined their economy; but  on the bright side they were precursors of and role models for the Sierra Club, Earth First!, Rachel Carson, and Al Gore.

The Soviet Union, which spanned eleven time zones, was “the world’s largest system of . . . protected nature preserves,” boasts Strebeigh.  No kidding.  How else would one define millions of acres in Siberia?

Lenin’s henchmen went on a murderous rampage to eliminate all suspected opponents, especially the clergy.  What churches that were allowed to remain were run by KGB agents disguised as priests, according to Yuri Maltsev, who once worked as an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev.  Yet Strebeigh writes that priests “sanctified the forests” of the Soviet Union and praises Lenin himself as “a longtime enthusiast for hiking and camping.”  He would have fit right in at the Yale faculty club and the New York Times lunch room, in other words.  Strebeigh sounds almost giddy in his description of a supposed “communist conservation movement” in the Soviet Union.

The New York Times has been lying to the American public about Soviet Russia for a very long time.  In the 1930s, when 25,000 Ukrainians a day were starving to death, the New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty misinformed his readers that “there is no famine . . . nor is there likely to be” (NYT, Nov. 15, 1931).  “Any report of a famine in Russia is . . . malignant propaganda,” wrote the Soviet stooge who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this “reporting” (NYT, Aug. 23, 1933).  Stalin himself publicly thanked Duranty for his work.  To its everlasting shame, the Pulitzer committee refused to rescind Duranty’s prize when in 2003 a campaign was waged to get it to do so.

To continue reading: The New York Times’ Latest Leninist Fetish: All the Fake Eco-News That’s Fit to Print

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The Deep History of US, Britain’s Never-Ending Cold War On Russia, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on May 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

Recently released files that both the US and British government tried to suppress indicate that they knew saw Hitler as a counterweight to Soviet communism, and covertly aided him in a number of ways. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

After decades of delaying, the United Nations finally released archives from the Second World War-era war crimes commission investigating the Nazi Holocaust. The source of those archives on Nazi war crimes were Western governments, including those in exile at the time of the war, such as the Belgian, Polish and Czechoslovakian. The time period covered is 1943-1949. Washington and London had long sought to halt the release. Why?

Notably, the landmark publication of the files last month was given scant Western media coverage. Surprisingly, perhaps, because the story that can be gleaned from the documents tells of a hidden history of the Second World War, namely the systematic collusion between the American and British governments and the Nazi Third Reich.

As a report in Deutsche Welle remarked on the released archives: «The files make clear that [Western] Allied forces knew more about the Nazi concentration camp system before the end of the war than has generally been thought».

This revelation points to more than just «knowledge» among the Western allies of Nazi-era crimes; it points more damningly to state collusion. This would also explain why Washington and London have been reluctant to make the UN war crimes files publicly available.

There has long been a controversial debate among Western nations about why the US and Britain in particular did not do more to bomb the Nazi infrastructure of death camps and railroads. Washington and London have often made the claim that they did know the full extent of the horror being perpetrated by the Nazis until the very end of the war when extermination centers such as at Auschwitz and Treblinka were liberated – by the Soviet Red Army, it should be noted too.

However, what the latest release of UN Holocaust files shows is that Washington and London were indeed well aware of the Nazi Final Solution in which millions of European Jews and Slavic people were being systematically worked to death or exterminated in gas chambers. So the question again is: why did the US and Britain not direct more of their aerial bombing campaign to destroy the Nazi infrastructure?

One possible answer is that these Western allies had a callous disregard for the Nazi victims. Washington and London establishments were themselves accused of harboring antisemitic prejudices, as can be seen from the scandals when both these governments spurned thousands of European Jewish refugees during the Second World War, in effect sending many of them to their deaths under the Nazi regime.

Not excluding the above factor of Western racist insouciance, there is a second more disturbing factor. That the Western governments, or at least powerful sections, were loath to hamper the Nazi war effort against the Soviet Union. Notwithstanding that the Soviet Union was a nominal «ally» of the West for the defeat of Nazi Germany.

To continue reading: The Deep History of US, Britain’s Never-Ending Cold War On Russia

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How The American Neoconservatives Destroyed Mankind’s Hopes For Peace, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on April 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

There was never a better time to ensure a generation of relative peace than when the Soviet Union fell. How US neoconservatives, especially Bill Clinton, strangled that idea, from Paul Craig Roberts, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

When Ronald Reagan turned his back on the neoconservatives, fired them, and had some of them prosecuted, his administration was free of their evil influence, and President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The military/security complex, the CIA, and the neocons were very much against ending the Cold War as their budgets, power, and ideology were threatened by the prospect of peace between the two nuclear superpowers.

I know about this, because I was part of it. I helped Reagan create the economic base for bringing the threat of a new arms race to a failing Soviet economy in order to pressure the Soviets into agreement to end the Cold War, and I was appointed to a secret presidential committee with subpeona power over the CIA. The secret committee was authorized by President Reagan to evaluate the CIA’s claim that the Soviets would prevail in an arms race. The secret committee concluded that this was the CIA’s way of perpetuting the Cold War and the CIA’s importance.

The George H. W. Bush administration and its Secretary of State James Baker kept Reagan’s promises to Gorbachev and achieved the reunification of Germany with promises that NATO would not move one inch to the East.

The corrupt Clintons, for whom the accumulation of riches seems to be their main purpose in life, violated the assurances given by the United States that had ended the Cold War. The two puppet presidents—George W. Bush and Obama—who followed the Clintons lost control of the US government to the neocons, who promptly restarted the Cold War, believing in their hubris and arrogance that History has chosen the US to exercise hegemony over the world.

Thus was mankind’s chance for peace lost along with America’s leadership of the world. Under neocon influence, the United States government threw away its soft power and its ability to lead the world into a harmonious existance over which American influence would have prevailed.

Instead the neocons threatened the world with coercion and violence, attacking eight countries and fomenting “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics.

To continue reading: How The American Neoconservatives Destroyed Mankind’s Hopes For Peace

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