Tag: history

The Russians Call Out NASA

For decades, Boomers who believe in the Moon landing narrative more firmly than they believe in God, Family, or Country have argued that the landings couldn’t have been faked or the Russians would have called out NASA. But now the former head of the Russian space agency is doing precisely that.

The former head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, has expressed doubt that the US Apollo 11 mission really landed on the Moon in 1969, saying he has yet to see conclusive proof.

In a post on his Telegram channel on Sunday, Rogozin said he began his personal quest for the truth “about ten years ago” when he was still working in the Russian government, and that he grew skeptical about whether the Americans had actually set foot on the Moon when he compared how exhausted Soviet cosmonauts looked upon returning from their flights, and how seemingly unaffected the Apollo 11 crew was by contrast.

Rogozin said he sent requests for evidence to Roscosmos at the time. All he received in response was a book featuring Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov’s account of how he talked to the American astronauts and how they told him they had been on the Moon.

The former official wrote that he continued with his efforts when he was appointed head of Roscosmos in 2018. However, according to Rogozin, no evidence was presented to him. Instead, several unnamed academics angrily criticized him for undermining the “sacred cooperation with NASA,” he claimed. The former Roscosmos chief also said he had “received an angry phone call from a top-ranking official” who supposedly accused him of complicating international relations.

Rogozin concluded by saying he still cannot believe that the US was able to pull off the feat, but is now unable to, despite the incredible progress in technology since the late 1960s. What he claims to have found out, however, was that Washington has “its people in [the Russian] establishment.”

Translation: NASA faked major elements of the space program and everyone in a place to know better kept quiet for fear of being targeted by Clown World. But now it is becoming increasingly obvious and the official Moon landing narrative is rapidly crumbling.

I very much doubt this will be the only historical hoax to be exposed by the Russians over the next decade.

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Now Wait a Minute

While we’re on the subject of stolen land and all:

Denver City Council member Candi CdeBaca, who is reportedly running for re-election, has suggested that white-owned businesses should be taxed at a higher rate than black-owned businesses, and that this revenue should then be given directly to black-owned businesses. Her apparent justification for this is that white people have built what they have on “stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen resources.”

I’m very curious to know how anyone can seriously broach the subject of reparations for historical crimes and decide that descendants of Africans from Africa, many of whom were never enslaved, should be compensated for land stolen – and yes, for the most part it was stolen, just read the treaties – in North America from the American Indians?

If there are any reparations to be paid to anyone – and I’m not saying there should be – shouldn’t they be paid to the descendants of those who actually owned and lived upon the land that was stolen?

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Past as Prelude

One of the great advantages of being conversant with history is the ability to recognize reoccurring patterns and apply one’s knowledge of the events of the past to observe current events in order to successfully anticipate the events of the future.

The great Soviet marshal Zhukov wrote the following in his autobiography concerning the turning point of WWII on the Eastern Front:

The Wehrmacht’s defeats in the summer and autumn of 1943 destroyed whatever was left of the confidence that the satellites of Nazi Germany had in the Hitler regime. The fascist bloc began falling apart. A still more favourable strategic situation developed for the Soviet Armed Forces. And the Supreme Command exploited it skilfully when preparing the 1944 operations.

No longer did Nazi Germany’s allies and the neutral countries believe that Hitler’s regime could escape total defeat. But the main thing was that the elements in Germany which had brought Hitler to power and had supported him in every way during the years that followed, also lost trust in the Nazi leadership. Most Germans began to see that they had been dangerously deluded by the easy victories of the first period of the war, and that Germany could not stand up to the Soviet Armed Forces and the anti-Hitler coalition.

Marshal of Victory, Georgy Zhukov, 1974

One can easily substitute NATO for “the Wehrmacht”, the USA for “Nazi Germany”, the neoliberal rules-based world order for “Hitler regime”, and the G7 for “the fascist bloc”. The failure of US proxy forces in Ukraine, combined with their failures in Syria and Afghanistan, have caused the majority of the world’s nations to lose trust in the leadership of Clown World.

As with the Germans 80 years ago, most people outside of Clown World now recognize that the seemingly inevitable triumph of the neoliberal world order was a delusion based on nothing more than an easy victory over an inept Iraqi army, neoclown influence in the media, and the false economic ideology of cheap credit, free trade, and mass immigration.

What is truly remarkable is the way that these decisive events of 80 years ago took place in precisely the same geographic region as they are taking place today.

The second blow was struck in the Ukraine to the right of the Dnieper. This was an intricate operation and, in fact, consisted of a series of major offensives which were carried out chiefly in February and March 1944 in the Korsun-Shevchenkovsky area and on the Southern Bug. The German troops were routed and flung across the Dniester, and finally all the Ukraine to the right of the Dnieper was liberated. The Soviet troops reached a favourable line for a subsequent advance into Europe’s south-eastern regions, for an offensive on the Balkans against Romania where the fascist Antonescu was still in the saddle, against Horthy Hungary, and other enemy forces. In April and May 1944, the Red Army delivered its third blow in the region of Odessa and in the Crimea. Odessa, Sebastopol, and the Crimean Peninsula were cleared of the enemy.

ibid.

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U-Stasi in Action

Every now and then, we’re offered a little glimpse of the surveillance society’s efforts to compromise and control various individuals of interest to them.

The CIA introduced King Hussein of Jordan to a Jewish B-list Hollywood actress in 1959 — touching off an affair that produced a dwarf love child who later killed her, reports say. Sensational new details of the king’s relationship with actress Susan Cabot were revealed in a recently declassified government memo, according to USA Today. The CIA was bucking to curry favor with the randy young Mideast leader when it agreed to procure women for him during his visit to Los Angeles in April 1959, the three-page document shows.

Hussein was 24 and had divorced his first wife about two years earlier.

The young king “was especially desirous of female companionship during his Los Angeles visit, and it was requested that appropriate arrangements be made through a controlled source of the [CIA’s] Office [of Security] in order to assure a satisfied visit,” according to the anonymously written memo.

Before she went to the gig, Cabot, 32, was told, “We want you to go to bed with him,’’ according to the memo. “The actress said that she rejected the proposal but finally went to [the] party. She became quite taken with [Hussein] and found him to be most charming,” according to the document.

A few days later, the king asked the CIA to arrange for him and his new girlfriend to get together while he was in New York City. The agency rented a house for them in Long Beach, LI, and also got her a room at the Hotel Barclay in Manhattan “under an assumed name,’’ the memo says.

Still, their relationship was not without a politically worrisome issue. Cabot, whose real name was Harriet Shapiro, was of Jewish heritage, a thorny issue given Hussein was Muslim, according to reports.

It’s apparent that very little of the shenanigans we are witnessing today, from Epstein and Maxwell to the Havana Syndrome, are new in any way, shape, or form. The only difference is that thanks to technological advances, the CIA’s surveillance program has expanded from particular persons of interest to pretty much everyone.

Which is why one should always assume that every email, every comment, every image uploaded, every Internet search, has been logged and catalogued in case it can be used against you. And why one should never place too much trust in women – or men, for that matter – who inexplicably find one to be irresistibly attractive.

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History for Europe

Residents of the European Union can now subscribe to Castalia History using the (EU) subscription. There is also the option for an annual (EU) subscription. You will see there is an additional charge to cover the higher cost of shipping to and within Europe, which is why the separate subscription is necessary, but even with the additional charge the price is favorable in comparison with Easton and Folio. European subscriptions will require one catchup payment to bring them up to date, as will regular History subscriptions begun in May.

While we won’t announce the books until the appropriate three-month period begins, the second, third, and fourth History books have been selected and two of them are already being scanned. We’re hoping our new production methods will help speed things up considerably while continuing to improve the overall quality.

On the general shipping front, please remain patient. We are actively working on providing a reliable alternative for our presently incapacitated partner and we will keep you posted accordingly. Once we get Europe established and the shipping situation resolved, we will turn our attention to Australia and Asia.

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The History of the US Color Revolution

Ron Unz writes a brief, but comprehensive history of the rise of the neocons from a minor anti-Soviet faction of the Democratic Party to the foreign policy establishment. And in doing so, he implicitly explains why 9/11 happened and who was responsible for it.

The complete ideological triumph of the Neocons after the 9/11 attacks was all the more shocking given the crushing recent political defeat they had suffered. During the 2000 presidential campaign, nearly all of the Neocons had aligned themselves with Sen. John McCain, whose battle with Bush for the Republican nomination had eventually turned quite bitter, and as a consequence, they had been almost entirely frozen out of any high-level appointments. Both Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were then widely regarded as Bush Republicans, lacking any significant Neocon ties, and the same was true for all the other top administration figures such as Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice, and Paul O’Neil. Indeed, the only Neoconservative offered a Cabinet spot was Linda Chavez, and not only was the Labor Department always regarded as something of a boobie prize in a GOP Administration, but she was ultimately forced to withdraw her nomination due to her “nanny problems.” The highest-ranking Neocon serving under Bush was Rumsfeld Deputy Paul Wolfowitz, whose seemingly inconsequential appointment had passed without any notice.

Most of the Neocons themselves certainly seemed to recognize the catastrophic loss they had suffered in the 2000 election. Back in those days, I was on very friendly terms with Bill Kristol, and when I stopped by his office at the Weekly Standard for a chat in the spring of 2001, he seemed in a remarkably depressed state of mind. I remember that at one point, he took his head in his hands and wondered aloud whether it was time for him to just abandon the political battle, resigning his editorship and taking up a quiet post at a DC thinktank. Yet just eight or ten months later, he and his close allies were on their way to gaining overwhelming influence in our government. In an eerie parallel to the story told in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin in Zurich, the totally fortuitous 9/11 attacks and the outbreak of war had suddenly allowed a small but determined ideological faction to seize control of a gigantic country.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks, the Neocons had solidified their control of nearly all existing conservative media outlets, prompting Pat Buchanan and a couple of partners to found The American Conservative in 2002. The following year, he used that platform for a blistering attack on Bush’s Iraq War foreign policy, which he denounced as a Neocon project. David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter and one of his targets, launched a near-simultaneous broadside in National Review against Buchanan and other critics, whom he condemned as “unpatriotic conservatives.” Taken together, the two lengthy pieces provide a good overview of the key figures on both sides of that bitter ideological battle.

Many moderates and liberals were equally appalled by the Iraq War as it unfolded, but unlike Buchanan they were often quite gun-shy in highlighting the obvious pro-Israel roots and motives of the leading Neocon backers…

Despite the unprecedented strategic disaster of the Iraq War, the Neocons fully retained their hold on the Republican Party’s foreign policy, while their Democratic counterparts achieved the same success across the political aisle. Thus, when the manifest failures of the Bush Administration led to the overwhelming victory of Barack Obama in 2008, Bush Neocons were merely replaced by Obama Neocons. Donald Trump’s unexpected triumph in 2016 brought to power the Trump Neocons such as Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, who were then succeeded in 2020 by Biden Neocons Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland.

As I recently explained:

One difficulty is that the very term “Neocon” used here has actually become much less meaningful than it once was. After having controlled American foreign policy for more than three decades, promoting their allies and protégés and purging their opponents, the adherents of that world view now constitute nearly the entire political establishment, including control of the leading thinktanks and publications. By now, I doubt there are many prominent figures in either party who follow a sharply different line. Furthermore, over the last two decades, the national security-focused Neocons have largely merged with the economically-focused neoliberals, forming a unified ideological block that represents the political worldview of the elites running both American parties.

Our nation’s two most recent Secretaries of State have been Mike Pompeo and Antony Blinken, and I’m not whether either of them even considers himself a Neocon, given that their foreign policy views are almost universal within their political circle. Do fish think that water is wet?

But consider the reality of today’s American foreign policy. In 1992 Neocon Paul Wolfowitz had drafted a Defense document advocating measures to ensure our permanent global military dominance but when it leaked the proposal was immediately repudiated by our Republican President and top military leaders, let alone the Democrats; however a decade later this “Wolfowitz Doctrine” had became our policy under Bush and today it enjoys complete bipartisan support.

Or consider the 28 standing ovations received by the Israeli prime minister when he spoke before a joint session of Congress in 2015, including the Stalinesque touch that some of our elected officials were denounced for applauding with insufficient enthusiasm. Given such a political environment, the strong pressure once exerted upon the Jewish State by such varied American Presidents as Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton would be unthinkable today.

From the moment the Ukraine war began, our entire media and political establishments have been in absolute lock-step, with scarcely a trace of doubt or dissent. There has been no willingness to recognize the role of NATO expansion in provoking the conflict nor to ask questions about a possible American role in the explosions that destroyed Europe’s Nord Stream energy pipelines.

The Neocons and Their Rise to Power, Ron Unz, 1 May 2023

Totally fortuitous indeed. There are a lot of “fortuitous” things that seem to happen around the world whenever the neoclowns are involved in some way, shape, or form. But as Robert Kagan’s last three books have chronicled, events are no longer trending in their favor because their fundamental axioms are false, thereby ensuring their ultimate failure even in areas – especially in areas – where they have been successful in the past.

It’s an excellent primer on neoconnery, although I reject the claim that the neoclowns are not Trotskyite world revolutionaries, which should be painfully obvious given the number of color revolutions they have attempted to launch around the world since the turn of the century. I highly recommend reading the whole thing because one cannot even begin to understand Clown World without knowing who the neoclowns are, from whence they came, and what their global imperialist objectives are.

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Not Alarmist, Avante Garde

An anon at AC’s site has begun to conclude that I might have known what I was talking about when I pointed out the satanic roots of the Enlightenment “freedoms”.

Freedom of speech is gone. Freedom of the press is gone. Freedom of religion is gone. I used to think Vox was an alarmist when he claimed those “freedoms” were actually anti-Christian tactics concocted by Satanic “Enlightenment” thinkers to destroy Christianity. Except it looks like he is right.

I wonder if 9/11 had multiple purposes. Maybe Iraq was a sideshow meant to distract us as they accomplished their true goals: the creation of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, increased domestic surrlveillance, the ruining of air travel, and so on.

Once they got that in place, they began banning speech, first as hate crime, then as “disinformation,” now as “Putin propaganda.” No matter what you call it, freedom of speech is on its way out. Freedom of the press is based on freedom of speech and now reporting the wrong thing gets you thrown off media and potentially arrested. How about freedom of assembly or freedom of religion? On their way out. COVID showed the sham of both. The Oregon decision to forbid a Christian woman from adopting or fostering children, on account of her religion, and the closing of churches, but not BLM rallies, during COVID are data points on the destruction of those so called freedom.

So if you realize all this, and you are a Christian, then what would keep you from instituting mandatory Christianity? After all, if there is no freedom of religion, then what would you prefer, child raping, child sacrificing Satanists ruling this area; or the child protecting Christians who built the European and North American civilization that is quickly being destroyed before your eyes?

Putin has figured this out. Wang Hunin and Xi Xinping have figured this out. The Elightenment concepts of “democracy”, “human rights”, and “freedoms” that have been used to establish and expand the liberal world order are not only lies, they are collectively one gigantic satanic trap for a nation. They are a means of transforming a society of men seeking honor, glory, and righteousness into a society of weak, pleasure-seeking lotus-eaters.

Increasingly commercial societies would be more liberal both at home and abroad. Their citizens would seek prosperity and comfort and abandon the atavistic passions, the struggles for honor and glory, and the tribal hatreds that had produced conflict throughout history. The ancient Greeks believed that embedded in human nature was something called thumos, a spiritedness and ferocity in defense of clan, tribe, city, or state. In the Enlightenment view, however, commerce would tame and perhaps even eliminate thumos in people and in nations.

The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan

Individual freedom is not the sine qua non of human existence or human society. And contrary to the Enlightenment propagandists, neither individual wealth nor national economic growth are the supreme metric that merit government prioritization. To the contrary, they are temptations meant to sap the spirit and morals of the nation.

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Peak America

We had no idea how good we had it as children, but we can hardly be blamed for that since we never knew anything else. But if you’re a member of Generation X, it is very important that you write your autobiography in order to leave behind some written record of what Peak America was actually like. Because what we regarded – what we still regard – as normal no longer exists. And its the micro accounts of daily life that are actually the most informative about a historical society, not the usual historian’s focus on politics, wars, and other macro-level events.

Save your elementary school class pictures. Describe what life was like in an ethnically homogenous European society. Give future generations a vision of what is possible for their children and grandchildren if they set their minds to it.

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Neoclowns in Retreat

The Ukraine War hasn’t even been officially lost yet and the neoclowns responsible for it are already in retreat again from their own imperialist ideology.

Shortly after September 11, 2001, I became known as a “neoconservative.” The term was a bit puzzling, because I wasn’t new to conservatism; I had been on the right ever since I could remember. But the “neocon” label came to be used after 9/11 to denote a particular strain of conservatism that placed human rights and democracy promotion at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. This was a very different mindset from the realpolitik approach of such Republicans as President Dwight Eisenhower, President Richard Nixon, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and it had a natural appeal to someone like me whose family had come to the United States in search of freedom. (We arrived from the Soviet Union in 1976, when I was six years old.) Having lived in a communist dictatorship, I supported the United States spreading freedom abroad. That, in turn, led me to become a strong supporter of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, Paper American thinks he should be setting US foreign policy because he lived in an imperialist dictatorship created by his own people for five years. Strangely enough, he supports the same imperialist foreign policy of the place from which he came.

Although I remain a supporter of democracy and human rights, after seeing how democracy promotion has worked out in practice, I no longer believe it belongs at the center of U.S. foreign policy. In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking. I am a neocon no more, at least as that term has been understood since 9/11.

So we’ve seen the neoclowns retreat from the inevitable “End of History” to the need to “Garden the Jungle”, and now we’re seeing them retreat again to “Garden the Garden”.

I still favor U.S. international leadership and support of allies, including a strong U.S. military presence in the three centers of global power—Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia—where their deployment is essential to maintain order and deter aggression.

But you know what? The Garden is going to fail too. The neoclowns are going to lose control because they are not only at war with reality, but with God, history, and human nature. And they know it, which is why they are rapidly attempting to change their tune in order to try to escape being held accountable for their monstrous failures for which so many lives, including Americans, were sacrificed.

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Et tu, Argentina?

Argentina abandons the dollar in favor of the yuan for trade with China:

Argentina will aim to pay for the bulk of its monthly imports from China in yuan rather than US dollars, Economy Minister Sergio Massa announced on Wednesday. Buenos Aires and Beijing signed a currency swap agreement last year, aimed at stemming the outflow of foreign currency from Argentina’s central bank.

China is currently Argentina’s second largest trade partner after Brazil, and the second biggest destination for Argentinian exports. Argentina’s total imports from China was around $13.5bn in 2021, according to the United Nations database on international trade.

Massa said that Buenos Aires will pay the equivalent of $1 billion in yuan for Chinese goods and services this month, with $790 million of monthly imports paid for in yuan each month thereafter. The currency swap agreement, expanded and finalized earlier this year, also allows Argentinian exporters to make settlements in yuan or dollars, to help balance the flows of foreign currencies in the central bank.

Even the neoclown Robert Kagan warned of the potential consequences for the neoliberal world order if the USA were to abuse its privileged position, which it generally avoided doing between 1945 and 2020.

The success of the order, however, also depended on the United States abiding by some basic rules. Chief among these was that it not exploit the system it dominated to gain lasting economic advantages at the expense of the other powers in the order. Put simply, it could not use its military dominance to win the economic competition against fellow members of the order, nor could it treat the economic competition as a zero-sum game and insist on always winning.

The Jungle Grows Back, Robert Kagan, 2019

The decision to weaponize the dollar in lieu of challenging Russia directly in a military context may prove to be one of the more catastrophic errors in the history of empires. Astute historians such as Victor Davis Hanson have for some time been wondering exactly when, and where, the Imperial USA’s Syracuse moment of imperial overstretch would take place; in The Father of Us All, published in 2010, VDH argued that the Iraq War was not likely to be a serious candidate for the Moment.

Athens’s disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens’s preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America’s dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India).

However, it increasingly appears that the attempt to control Russia using the leash of the dollar reserve system may have marked that long-anticipated Moment, as dropping its economic neutrality and putting pressure on the rest of the participants in the global economy in order to pressure Russia into withdrawing from Crimea and the Donbass, then doubling down on that mistake by financing the Kiev regime’s war appears to have been even more devastating to the neoliberal world order than an invasion of India.

UPDATE: The Global Times expresses China’s belief that de-dollarization is not merely desirable, but inevitable.

One of the most direct reasons behind the global de-dollarization trend is that the US has been increasingly weaponizing US dollar hegemony to impose economic sanctions as well as political repression. For instance, key Russia banks have been excluded from the SWIFT system, a service that facilitates global transactions among thousands of financial institutions.

What’s perhaps more surprising – and potentially worrying for Washington – is how expensive and scarce offshore US dollars are becoming. As the US Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes hit global financial systems, an increasing amount of foreign capital flowed back to the US, leading to a global US dollar shortage. The US’ interest rate hikes and the resulting shortage of US dollars serve as another important factor driving more countries to push for a quicker pace of de-dollarization.

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