Tag: war

The Soviet Union Didn’t Collapse

Everything you know about the end of the Cold War is wrong, as a U.S. ambassador who was witness to the events explains:

Octavian Report: To what extent were Reagan and Gorbachev as people essential to ending the Cold War?

Ambassador Jack Matlock: I think only Reagan and Gorbachev would have been able to do what they did. You had to have the two of them in office at the same time. Now, the first George Bush finished it off. But essentially, the Cold War was over ideologically when Reagan left office. It was just up to Bush to continue the policies Reagan had set with Gorbachev in order to finish it peacefully. It was finished by negotiation so that both sides came out as winners. That’s why today, when we talk about winning the Cold War as if Russia was the loser, we’re not only distorting history, we’re making it much more difficult to build a peaceful world.

OR: In what way do you think Russia won?

Matlock: First of all, Russia was part of the Soviet Union. We ended the Cold War with the Soviet Union, not with Russia. We’ve got to stop talking about Russia as if it was the same entity, whether a Communist empire or whether the current Russian Federation. There are a few characteristics that they share, but these are entirely different political entities.

That’s one thing you have to understand. The Soviet Union won the Cold War — as did everybody else. Ending it saved them from the collapse that was going on internally. The arms race was killing them. Their ideology was killing them. Their foreign policy was not in their interest. Gorbachev saw that and Reagan saw that. We set terms to end the Cold War which were in the interest of the Soviet Union if they wanted to follow a peaceful policy towards the West, which they did.

Losing the Cold War would have been if it went hot. Everybody would have lost. We ended it without anyone losing anything. The Soviet Union lost nothing in ending the Cold War other than its control of Eastern Europe, which was not an advantage for it but a disadvantage. The idea that somehow controlling other countries that don’t want you to control them is an asset is absolutely wrong. Look at the problems we have in the Middle East today. It is a liability. It is not an asset. In giving up those liabilities, Gorbachev made it possible to try to reform the system.

He was unable to do so but the system broke up from the inside after the Cold War was over. Ending the Cold War, ending the arms race which literally was killing their economy, ending their attempt to project their power abroad which was creating liabilities, ending all of that was to the advantage of the Soviet Union. It gave the country the possibility of reforming and coming into the late 20th century. They couldn’t do so under the conditions of the Cold War.

The seeds of future wars are often planted in the ends of the previous one. The neocons who used to control the Soviet Union now control only Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, the United States. That’s why they are now so eager for war with Russia, since the Russians managed to free themselves from neocon rule and the so-called neo-liberal world order with the collapse of the Yeltsin regime.

The events of the present make a lot more sense once one has a more accurate account of those of the past.

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Drums in the Not-Very Deep

The war drums are getting steadily louder as both NATO and Ukraine increasingly engage in “defensive” actions.

Vladimir Putin will opt for the ‘nightmare scenario’ of a full invasion of Ukraine as tensions rise towards tipping point, UK defence chiefs fear.

The region has been on a knife-edge since the end of last year when Moscow moved as many as 100,000 troops, as well as tanks and missiles, close to the border.

The White House warned yesterday the situation was ‘extremely dangerous’ and that Moscow could launch an attack ‘at any point’.

It had been thought Mr Putin would choose the ‘simple option’ of sending troops into the Donbass region in south-eastern Ukraine and then negotiate for it to become an independent state, providing a buffer between pro-western Ukraine and Russia.

As the region is already occupied by pro-Russian separatists, and has been in a state of war since 2014, it was believed it would offer little resistance.

But the latest intelligence now has Ministry of Defence chiefs worried about a much larger incursion, raising fears of warfare engulfing cities and high civilian death tolls.

They believe Mr Putin’s troops are being positioned in line with his new objective, with armoured divisions set to head into neighbouring Belarus on exercise but now stationed within striking distance of Kiev.

Last night a senior defence source said: ‘We strongly believe [Putin’s] preference is for a full invasion rather than a limited offensive. In a sense he might as well go for as much of Ukraine as he can get hold of because the penalties are just the same.

No one puts Vladi in a corner. Because it’s almost as stupid to do so as invading Russia in winter. Unfortunately, the neocons are both stupid and evil, being intoxicated by their success in taking over US foreign policy. And since we know the Official Story is always wrong, it would be interesting to know the real reason underlying these two developments. First, the suspension of flights to the USA.

Prominent airlines from Japan, India, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have suspended flights to airports across the United States after expressing concern over the deployment of 5G.

Emirates, Air India, Japan Airlines, and All Nippon Airways canceled flights to New York, New Jersey, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Seattle, among other US cities.

Air India announced on Tuesday that it would no longer operate flights the next day to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, and New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport “due to deployment of the 5G communications in USA.”

On the same day, Emirates canceled flights to at least nine US cities, again “due to operational concerns associated with the planned deployment of 5G mobile network services in the U.S,” while Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways canceled at least 13 flights.

Second, the real reason for the Hunga-Tonga eruption that created a tidal wave and was big enough to be seen from space.

On January 14, a very large eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, an uninhabited volcanic island of the Tongan archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean, began. Hunga Tonga is 65 km north of Tongatapu, the country’s main island. The eruption caused tsunamis in Tonga, Fiji, American Samoa and along the rim of the Pacific Ocean. Tsunami warnings and advisories were issued in Fiji, Samoa, Wallis and Futuna, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Russia, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Ecuador. Damaging tsunami waves were reported in New Zealand, the United States, Chile and Peru. Two people drowned in Peru when a 2 m wave struck the coast, and two fishermen in the United States suffered minor injuries. The event is likely the largest volcanic eruption of the 21st century to date.

Tsunamis are typically triggered by earthquakes, not volcanoes.

There are rumors that the “eruption” was actually the detonation of a massive Russian nuclear weapon. And the rumors are based on a modicum of actual evidence, or rather, the absence of evidence that should be available.

In yesterday’s report we noted that any nuclear weapon detonated in the Pacific Proving Grounds would throw into the atmosphere radiation signatures from the previous atomic tests conducted there still existing on the seafloor—and is critical to notice because in today’s transcript it notes that American radiation networks – updated in real time every minute – stopped updating on 16 January—and when checking the United States government RadNet system for real time atmospheric radiation levels, today it sees their hundreds of stations displaying the message: “RadNet Outage: EPA’s RadNet system is down for routine maintenance”.

Let’s see if the claim is credible. (checks RadNet). “RadNet Outage EPA’s RadNet system is down for routine maintenance.”

Okay. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence, though. When was the maintenance scheduled? “EPA’s RadNet system is down for routine maintenance from January 7-10, 2022.”

Isn’t it January 19, 2022?

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Don’t Fall For It Again

The reason Russia is ready to invade Ukraine is extremely straightforward. It will never permit NATO’s expansion into Ukraine. And NATO has already decided to expand into both Ukraine and Georgia.

NATO decided to admit Ukraine and Georgia, but did not set a deadline, Secretary General of the organization Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview in the Repubblika newspaper.

“Ukraine has already requested to join, and we have decided to work towards this by supporting its reforms, helping to modernize the armed forces to our standards. In 2008, we decided that Ukraine and Georgia would become [NATO] members, but we did not establish, when exactly,” Stoltenberg said.

That’s why the neocons are already attempting to lay the global media narrative for the customary US false flag, which, from the Spanish-American War to the Afghan War, has been used to whip up public support for US invasions of foreign countries around the world. These justifications for military action were all fake to varying degrees. Sometimes they were complete false flags, like the Maine and 9/11. At other times they were genuine attacks that were misrepresented to the public, such as the Lusitania and Pearl Harbor. But regardless of which form the next one takes, don’t let your friends and family fall for the next one.

The position that Russia has no right to a sphere of influence is as risible as it is hypocritical when it comes from the United States. It is the USA, not Russia, that is presently the Evil Empire. It is the USA, not China, that presently plays host to what Philip K. Dick described as “the empire that never ended.”

The United States has exercised a sphere of influence in its own hemisphere for almost 200 years, since President James Monroe, in his seventh annual message to Congress, declared that the United States “should consider any attempt” by foreign powers “to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

Listening to Mr. Blinken, you might think the United States long ago deposited this prerogative over the foreign policies of its southern neighbors in history’s dustbin. It has done no such thing. In 2018, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called the Monroe Doctrine “as relevant today as it was the day it was written.” The following year, his national security adviser, John Bolton, boasted that “the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”

To be sure, the United States doesn’t enforce the Monroe Doctrine in the same way it did in the first half of the 20th century, when it regularly deployed the Marines to Central America and the Caribbean, or during the Cold War, when the C.I.A. helped topple leftist governments. Washington’s methods have changed. It now prefers using economic coercion to punish governments that ally with adversaries and challenge its regional dominion.

Consider Washington’s decades-long embargo of Cuba. U.S. officials may claim the embargo’s goal is to promote democracy, but virtually every other government on earth — democracies included — views it as an act of political bullying. Last year, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the embargo by a vote of 184 to 2. Human Rights Watch has denounced it for imposing “indiscriminate hardship on the Cuban population.”

Biden officials do not celebrate the Monroe Doctrine as their Trump administration predecessors did. But they still muscle America’s neighbors. Mr. Biden hasn’t eased the embargo of Cuba. Nor has he ended Mr. Trump’s effort to cut off Venezuela, another autocratic government that flirts with America’s foes, from global trade. The United States, in the words of one European Union official, is still prepared to “starve Venezuelans until their leadership surrender or their people oust them.” These policies serve notice to other Latin American governments that defying Washington can bring grave costs.

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The Inevitable False Flag

The Fake Biden Administration has been kind enough to warn us about the war with Russia the neocons who run it are attempting to launch:

The US has intelligence that Russia is planning a ‘false-flag’ operation on its own forces in eastern Ukraine to create a pretext for invasion.

Officials on Friday also said they believed Russia was mounting a social media disinformation campaign to portray Ukraine as the aggressor.

The update, making the prospect of military conflict more immediate, came as Ukrainian government websites were taken offline in a ‘massive’ cyberattack, talks between Washington and Moscow collapsed and Russia held a combat readiness inspection of their troops.

Meanwhile, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia had ‘run out of patience’ with the West as Moscow demanded assurances that NATO would not expand closer to its territory.

The United States has evidence that operatives trained in urban warfare and sabotage will carry out these attacks on Russian proxy forces, officials told journalists on Friday, possibly weeks before an invasion.

‘We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine,’ said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

‘The operatives are trained in urban warfare and using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces.’

She said it mimicked the playbook used when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, and included social media disinformation to show Kyiv as the instigator of violence.

Translation: The USA will be staging an obvious false flag prior to starting a war again.

Remember the Maine!

Thank goodness that Scott Adams invented and explained the new concept of projection to us earlier today, so we understand that when Jen Psaki says that Russia is going to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine, she’s actually describing what the US government is in the process of doing.

We owe him a real debt of gratitude for teaching us to see through the persuasion.

DISCUSS ON SG

Color Revolution Fail

Vladimir Putin confirms that the unrest in Kazakhstan was another attempted color revolution by the Promethean neocons. Unlike Ukraine, this attempted coup failed thanks to the prompt action by the Russian Federation and the other CSTO states:

Violent and bloody clashes in Kazakhstan are a form of aggression leveled against the country, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said, claiming the same tactics used in Ukraine in 2014 were deployed to coordinate protests.

Speaking as part of a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) on Monday, Putin said that the mutual defense pact’s troops were working to secure the Central Asian nation after armed groups captured a number of key facilities and effectively took control of its largest city, Almaty. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev requested military support last week, insisting that the country was under attack from foreign terrorists.

“Well-organized and well-controlled groups of militants were used,” President Putin alleged, “including those who had apparently been trained in terrorist camps abroad.” At the same time, he went on, “Maidan technologies” were used to support the rioters and share information, akin to those that led to the ousting of the Ukrainian government.

This is a serious casus belli, and if the Fake Biden administration refuses to accede to Russia’s reasonable demands for security and non-interference in the states that border it in the current Geneva talks, don’t be surprised if the Iran-Russia-China alliance does not pass Go, does not collect $200, but proceeds directly to war.

DISCUSS ON SG

Color Revolution in Kazakhstan

It’s entirely obvious that the neocons are trying to open a second front against Russia by attempting to turn Kazakhstan into a second Ukraine:

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has explained how he believes the ongoing turmoil unfolded in his country, blaming the widespread street violence and looting on thousands of armed “gangsters and terrorists.”

Tokayev presented a timeline of the crisis, taking to Twitter with a large English-language thread late on Friday. Tokayev said he promptly addressed the initial demand of protesters, who were angered by a sharp hike in liquefied petroleum gas prices. He instructed the government “to regulate the price” on January 2 – effectively as soon as the protests took off.

“Regretfully, the protests in several regions of Kazakhstan and Almaty led to escalation of violence. Therefore, I decided to fire the government and imposed a nationwide curfew,” he added.

This move also failed to stop the unrest, as “the protests led to further escalation of violence all over the country,” Tokayev admitted. The president reiterated his earlier claims that the chaos was a result of “an armed act of aggression, well prepared and coordinated by perpetrators and terrorist groups trained outside the country.”

Tokayev claimed that as many as 20,000 “gangsters and terrorists” were involved in the violence, with the country’s largest city of Almaty enduring “at least six waves of attacks of terrorists.” The rioters were “very well trained, organized and commanded by the special center,” the president alleged, claiming that some of them were apparently foreigners “speaking non-Kazakh languages.”

However, it’s equally clear that Putin and the Russian generals have learned that it’s easier to intervene and put down the revolution than deal with another neocon puppet state on their borders. Because it looks like the neocons are going to get their war on the Eastern Front soon.

The United States and NATO on Friday roundly rejected Russian demands that the alliance not admit new members amid growing concerns that Russia may invade Ukraine, which aspires to join the alliance. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Russia would have no say over who should be allowed to join the bloc. And, they warned Russia of a “forceful” response to any further military intervention in Ukraine.

Their comments amounted to a complete dismissal of a key part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands for easing tensions with Ukraine.

However, don’t be surprised if they get a lot more of it than they are bargaining for. At this point, I would expect Russia, China, and Iran to harmonize their attack on their mutual enemy.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Final Warning

Russia clearly doesn’t anticipate the USA will heed its warnings about its intentions of taking military action if NATO does not stop attempting to expand right up to its borders.

Russia is doubtful that its demand to stop NATO’s eastward expansion will gain any traction, and it is highly likely the US-led bloc will simply ignore Moscow’s security concerns, the Russian Foreign Minister said on Monday.

Speaking to journalist Vladimir Solovyov, Sergey Lavrov revealed that Russia published proposals for security guarantees as a way to prevent Western nations from dismissing them, or leaking them selectively.

Experts in Moscow have noted that a contemporary American information tactic is to drop supposedly confidential negotiation points into the public sphere through “anonymous sources” feeding popular news outlets that are considered “on side.”

“We have made our initiative public, as explained by President Putin and the Foreign Ministry, because we are aware of the West’s ability to obfuscate any uncomfortable issues for them,” Lavrov explained. “We have serious doubts that the main thing in our proposals, namely the unconditional demand not to expand NATO to the east, will not be swept under the carpet.”

Lavrov’s comments come almost two weeks after Moscow publicly released two draft documents with a list of promises it wants to obtain from the US and NATO. As well as pledges that the bloc won’t expand eastwards, the proposed treaties also include the end of Western cooperation with post-Soviet countries, the removal of US nuclear weapons from Europe, and the withdrawal of NATO troops and missiles away from the Russian border.

It increasingly looks as if the neocons will finally get their revenge war with Russia. Given the confident way in which Russia and China are addressing these US-created crises, the outcome may not be anything resembling the one that the neocons expected.

DISCUSS ON SG

Why They Hide History

The reason the Prometheans always advocate maleducation and Zero History ignorance of the past is because it allows them to repeatedly make false predictions about the obvious consequences of their actions. What we’re seeing now, with sudden avalanche of false denials that the USA ever promised Russia that NATO would not expand to Eastern Europe, was not only anticipated, it was foreseen by the builders of the so-called neo-liberal rules-based world order.

In 1998 Thomas Friedman interviewed George Kennan, one of the architects of NATO, and was warned by Kennan that NATO expansion was certain to create a martial response by Russia:

”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. NATO expansion was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”

”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ”I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then the NATO expanders will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”

One only wonders what future historians will say. If we are lucky they will say that NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic simply didn’t matter, because the vacuum it was supposed to fill had already been filled, only the Clinton team couldn’t see it. They will say that the forces of globalization integrating Europe, coupled with the new arms control agreements, proved to be so powerful that Russia, despite NATO expansion, moved ahead with democratization and Westernization, and was gradually drawn into a loosely unified Europe. If we are unlucky they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to Russia’s border, triggering a new cold war, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe.

23 years later, it is clear that the forces of globalization were much weaker and less inevitable than its advocates preached, and that their lack of good fortune has triggered a new cold war that is already threatening to not only go hot, but go global, as the Promethean-occupied World Order finds itself being stared down by the new Nationalist Alliance of Russia, China, Iran, and India.

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Neocons Might Get Their War

Shades of Vietnam, as thousands of NATO “instructors” are reportedly being sent to Ukraine.

As many as 10,000 Western military instructors have been sent to Ukraine to train the Eastern European nation’s soldiers and support its fighting in the Donbass, Moscow has claimed, insisting that 4,000 are Americans. Speaking during a briefing on Friday, Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for Moscow’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, suggested that the presence of foreign military personnel is a sign that Kiev is preparing for a confrontational solution to the ongoing standoff with the two self-declared breakaway republics in the eastern Donbass region.

Meanwhile, if there was ever any doubt as to whether it is the neocons or the Russians who are lying, the Secretary General of NATO has helpfully provided definitive proof of the former.

NATO boss responds to Moscow on bloc’s expansion

NATO “has never promised not to expand,” the bloc’s Secretary General said on Thursday. The Norwegian insisted that the bloc’s founding treaty states that any European nation may join it.

Earlier on Thursday, Putin said during his annual year-end press conference that Moscow was “cheated” by NATO in a “vehement” and “blatant” way as it first swallowed former member states of the Eastern Bloc, which also used to be known as the Warsaw Pact, and then set its eyes on the former Soviet republics.

Stoltenberg denied such promises had ever been made and claimed that even the former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev – the man most commonly associated with the verbal agreement between NATO and Moscow – agreed NATO expansion had never been raised before the reunification of Germany. However, US government documents, declassified in 2017, appear to confirm that assurances were given.

Stoltenberg engaged in a nice little talmudics dance routine there, as the wording of the founding NATO treaty in 1949 says nothing whatsoever about the various assurances about its expansion that were given to the Russians in the 1990s and 2000s.

In early February 1990, U.S. leaders made the Soviets an offer. According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on Feb. 9, then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, U.S. could make “iron-clad guarantees” that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.

This is a dangerously stupid word game being played by global imperialists, given that the Russians can quite rightly observe that they never struck a formal deal not to invade Western Europe, and the Chinese can similarly point out that they have never struck a formal deal not to invade Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea.

DISCUSS ON SG

No Heat for You

One step closer to conflict in Europe.

Deliveries of Russian natural gas to Germany through the Yamal-Europe pipeline have been completely halted, data from the country’s transport operator, Gascade, revealed on Tuesday morning. The suspension of the flow comes after a weekend in which the volume being sent through the network dropped significantly, just as demand for energy in both Russia and the rest of Europe reached its winter peak. On Monday, it was reported that state-owned giant Gazprom, the system’s operator in Russia and Belarus, had booked no capacity at all for transiting natural gas on Tuesday.

The Yamal-Europe transnational gas pipeline runs from northwest Siberia to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in eastern Germany via Belarus and Poland. Last year, around one-fifth of all natural gas sent to Western Europe went via Belarus. Energy supplies through the system vary based on consumption, including within Russia, which Gazprom prioritizes over sending fuel abroad. Temperatures have plummeted in Moscow and other large Russian cities this week.

Flows through the pipeline dropped to 6% of capacity on Saturday and 5% on Sunday, before eventually falling to zero on Tuesday morning. Due to the winter cold and the restricted supply, European energy prices have soared.

Officials in the West have accused Moscow of playing politics with the supply of gas to the rest of Europe, allegedly with the aim of forcing the EU to approve the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is yet to be certified, but is ready to operate. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied these allegations, with Gazprom noting that it continues to fulfill its contracts.

The best case scenario is that this is just pressure to force the German authorities to sign off on Nord Stream 2.

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