Compare the measured words of the Chinese leader with Biden’s and NATO’s increasingly vituperative tone. Consider his emphasis on dialogue and negotiation and the need for ensuring the relative security of all parties, not just the absolute security of one.
Revolver News [h/t LRC] explains why, with the refusal of the media establishment to admit that it blatantly and concertedly lied about the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop and dismissed it as Russian propaganda, the “Russian disinformation” label has replaced “racism” or “sexism” as the state-of-the-art term in cancel culture…
Why? Revolver argues it is because national security is a reason that allows the harshest repressive measures.
Well, that has always been true.
Some twenty years ago, political dissidents or even just free-thinkers were labeled “domestic terrorists,” a label which also invoked national security. Then there was the War on Terror and dissidents got called “Jihadis” or “Islamofascists”.
So the “Russian disinfo” label is NOT some new line being crossed. It’s the same old tired ploy….and actually not nearly as effective as “public health hazard” which can get you into quarantine camp, have you forcibly injected with poisons, and hospitalized against your will. I’ll take jail over that.
Anyway, Revolver recommends the following:
[with my comments on each recommendation below]
1. Never believe the “disinformation” scam ever again, for any reason. The intelligence services have entirely forfeited any and all public trust on this topic. At this very moment, hundreds of Republican lawmakers, pundits, and D.C. creatures are being herded like cattle into supporting greater censorship of Russia, China, or anyone “supporting” them. This is a grievous blunder. Indeed, lower-level establishment flunkies and stooges will only have themselves to blame when these new powers are turned back against them. Of course, the ability to wield these tools like a weapon over a cowed populace is exactly the real purpose of expanding such powers in the first place.
[Lila: Now, hmmmm. Whom would that help? Never is too strong. Do you mean to say no other country or power will ever utilize disinformation against us? What if the WEF or the EU employs disinformation, may we say so? Baby, bathwater, etc.]
2. Take the news out of the press’ hands. In hindsight, it was clearly a mistake for Rudy Giuliani to try and carefully release the laptop’s contents through press outlets. The story trickled out too slowly, and it was too easy for the press and Big Tech to unite in simply shutting out the New York Post entirely. If the laptop’s entire contents had simply been uploaded online for anybody to read, a la Wikileaks, suppressing the story would have been much harder, verging on impossible.
[Lila: And if you do upload it online, who do you suppose allows visibility on the net? The material could lie there and not be read by anyone. Actually, a couple of videos of Hunter were uploaded online and that’s where I saw them. That doesn’t seem to have made a difference. The point is the general public still assesses the credibility of information based on who puts it out: how credentialed or well-regarded or prestigious, not on the merits. Wikileaks itself was initially promoted via a massive concerted effort of all the major media organs….just search Wikileaks on this blog.]
3. Defund the intelligence state. America’s intelligence agencies have essentially gone rogue. They spied on the Trump campaign in 2016 and sabotaged President Trump internally from 2017 onward. They constantly deliver preposterous lies in the guise of “expertise”, which is then used to justify mass censorship and the stripping of Americans’ rights. Oh, and they’re the same group behind warrantless espionage and the Iraq War and so much else. The intelligence agencies have become one of the chief impediments to American liberty, and they have declared American nationalists, populists, and conservatives a de facto enemy class. Breaking the power of these agencies should be the primary political goal of all decent Americans in the years to come. A good blueprint for a future Republican presidency? Declassify everything, so agencies can no longer conceal their blunders, lies, and outright crimes under the cloak of “national security.”
[Lila: Now, this I can fully endorse. Knowing the past is the best way to handle the future.]
Andrew Korybko, an American analyst in Moscow, describes the role of the West in destabilizing Ethiopia by uncritically supporting the Tigre Rebels [TPLF] – a former leader of which is the current WHO chief and Gates/Clinton Foundation front Tedros, who has promoted the Tigre rebels even while in office .
Selectively focusing on one humanitarian crisis in the area while ignoring others preceding it for strategic and political reasons is the same modus operandi the West has used in Ukraine.
Ethiopia has come under unprecedented pressure from the U.S. ever since it commenced a military operation in its northern Tigray Region last November. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered the armed forces to respond to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which used to be the most powerful faction of the former ruling party, after it attacked a military barracks. Addis Ababa now officially considers the TPLF to be a terrorist group. It fell out with PM Abiy after initially facilitating his rise to power as a result of disagreements over his fast-moving socio-political reforms……..
….The U.S. and its allies claim that Ethiopia is carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Tigray, which Addis Ababa, of course, denies. This set the basis upon which the U.S. began to sanction the country. The first sanctions were imposed in late May to target Ethiopian officials as well as some of their Eritrean allies who, the U.S. claimed, were supporting them in their military campaign. The Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) pulled out of Tigray a month later in June, claiming that this unilateral move would facilitate the international community’s relief efforts in the war-torn region that had attracted so much global attention.
The conflict did not end, however, but actually expanded. The TPLF felt emboldened to invade the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara, parts of which it continues to occupy. Addis Ababa suspected that the group was receiving various equipment and other forms of support under the cover of UN aid shipments. It also accused the TPLF of manipulating international perceptions about the region’s humanitarian crisis in order to generate more support and increase pressure on the Ethiopian government. PM Abiy published an open letter to U.S. President Joe Biden last month, urging him to reconsider his country’s policy towards the conflict…….
This American hybrid war on Ethiopia is waged in various ways that deserve further study. They closely resemble the American hybrid war on Syria in the sense that the U.S. is using humanitarian pretexts to justify meddling in the country’s internal affairs. Its motivations to backstab its regional ally are entirely self-interested and zero-sum. The U.S. is uncomfortable with PM Abiy’s geopolitical balancing between Washington and Beijing. Although the former TPLF-led government was also close to China, the U.S. likely expected PM Abiy to distance Ethiopia from it, considering the pressure that Washington exerts upon its partners to do so…….
This leads to the next motivation for the American Hybrid War on Ethiopia, which is to return the TPLF to power there, if not in a national capacity, then at least in its home region….
…..The U.S. “humanitarian imperialism”, as one can now call its policy against Ethiopia, is very pernicious. It focuses solely on the humanitarian crisis in the Tigray Region while ignoring the ones that the TPLF caused in the neighboring Afar and Amhara regions. This policy also manipulates perceptions about the situation in Tigray in order to delegitimize PM Abiy, the ENDF and the political cause of national unity that they are fighting for. The purpose is to encourage more members of the international community to pressure Ethiopia to the point where it finally feels compelled to politically capitulate. This policy, however, has proven to be counterproductive.”
“The Tigray conflict has motivated the West to exert pressure and thereby control Ethiopia that aspires and have been pursuing an independent foreign policy,” he said.
He said the US and Europe are concerned about the growing influence of China and that looks like the reason behind pressuring Ethiopia.
“Chinese direct investment (FDI) in Ethiopia had reached US$4 billion and bilateral trade had grown to $5.4 billion,” he added.
At the UNSC, Beijing vetoed the US and European resolution aimed at sanctioning and condemning Ethiopia over the Tigray crisis.
He said both countries (China and Ethiopia) were well aware of the motive and have been now upgrading their political relations by conducting a higher-level political meeting.
“The pressure is pushing Ethiopia to find trustworthy friends in the form of China, Russia, and other developing nations. Africa must embrace the new world order and resist humiliating western demands,” said Wuhibegzer.”
From Keghart.com h/t to Lew Rockwell,
In an Israeli attempt to fight the Christian presence on the Palestinian territories and deny Christians their rights and status in Jerusalem, the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority sought to implement a settlement project by expanding the Jerusalem Walls Park on church lands, located near the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.
The move was seen as an attempt to encroach on east Jerusalem by expanding Jewish residential and archaeological projects at the expense of Muslim and Christian sites and sanctities in the city. The plan was widely condemned by church heads who sought to garner international support to oppose Israeli plans, since they were seen as a deliberate attack on the Christians of Jerusalem.”
The Jewish ethnostate shows its true colors and its racist intolerance of any other religion or culture than its own.
Tafkaji pointed out that “the area that was declared as a park within Israel’s settlement plan is not Israeli. The park’s project is an implementation of the Henry Kendall zoning plan that was established before 1948 for the city of Jerusalem, which aims to make the western slopes of the Mount of Olives green areas that prevent Palestinian construction on them, whether these constructions are affiliated with Palestinian Muslims or Christians.”
He explained that “the targeted area includes large [Christian sites] such as the Church of All Nations, the Chapel of the Ascension, the Armenian Monastery and the Kidron Valley, which is considered one of the sacred valleys for Christians, as it separates the Mount of Olives and the city of Jerusalem. Christians believe Jesus crossed this valley more than once.”
Tafkaji indicated that “the city of Jerusalem is considered one of the most sacred areas for Christians who perform pilgrimage on the Way of the Cross, then head to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and finally to the Church of the Ascension. The Israeli plan is to end the Christian and Islamic presence in Jerusalem.”
In December 2020, the Church of All Nations, which is one of the oldest historical churches in east Jerusalem, was subjected to an arson attempt when an extremist settler set a fire inside the church. Some of the church’s seats and floor were damaged, but the fire was quickly controlled before it could destroy the church.”
Remember that the Muslim and Christian Palestinians who live there have lived there for thousands of years and some may actually descend from the Jews of Jesus’ time. On the other hand, the vast majority of Jews in Jerusalem are converts from Europe, America and elsewhere, who are essentially settlers and colonialists in the land. It would be as if a group of white American Hare Krishna converts from California traipsed into Haryana, cleared out the local Indian Hindus, grabbed the temples, and then declared a Hindu Rashtra, in which they were declared the direct descendants of the Pandavas and everyone else a late-comer with no claims to the soil.
NATO has activated its “chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defence elements” amid fears Russia could launch a biological strike in Ukraine.
Following an emergency summit of the military alliance on Thursday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels the decision comes as the allies move to equip Ukraine with its own biological defences.
“Our top military commander … has activated NATO’s chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defence elements,” he said.
“And allies are deploying additional chemical and biological and nuclear defences to reinforce our existing and new battlegroups, so we are taking measures both to support Ukraine and also to defend ourselves.”
Tass.com [a Russian state outlet] has just reported further charges by the Head of the Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces Igor Kirillov regarding the US-Ukrainian biological labs:
“The documents that were obtained confirm an attempt to subject them[Lila: Ukrainian military personnel] to tests of of previously untested medicines <…> that didn’t undergo an approval procedure in the US and Canada,” he continued. He said that such unacceptable approaches, with the tacit consent of the US administration, are usual business for large pharmaceutical companies.
“Thus, the Indonesian government in 2010 terminated the activities of the US Navy Medical Center in Jakarta due to numerous violations,” Kirillov said. “The work that the Americans carried out at this facility stepped outside of the agreed research program, as they carried out biological sampling and refused to inform the Indonesian government about the results that were achieved.”
He noted that the materials they received were used in the interests of the Pentagon-affiliated pharmaceutical company Gilead, which tests its drugs in countries that include Ukraine and Georgia.”
Lila: Gilead is the pharmaceutical company behind the expensive and ineffectual Covid drug, Remdesivir, that was promoted by WHO, Fauci, and the CDC, despite all the evidence showing its worthlessness and indeed counterproductive results.
Added: It turns out that Gilead was in an $800 million dispute with the Ukrainian government over monopoly rights for their antiviral drug sofosbuvir [marketed as Sovaldi] for chronic hepatitis C. There are 2 million people suffering from the illness in Ukraine and the drug, which costs $1000 a pill in the US and $60,000-80,000 for the whole treatment, was widely criticized for its expense. The dispute centered around the fact that Ukraine was not included in a deal that allowed lower income countries access to cheaper generics made by India.
Added: In 2017, Tass published findings by a Ukrainian hacker group, CyberBerkut, that US biological labs were running covert experiments in the country and were doing so under the direction of the Pentagon, via Maidan activist and US citizen, Ulyana Suprin, although formally under the Ukrainian health ministry. The hackers believed that outbreaks of rare diseases in recent years were not simply due to accidental leaks but were the results of active experimentation and testing of pathogens on the population. Outbreaks included AIDS/HIV, drug-resistant tuberculosis, swine-flu, leptospirosis, botulism, and hepatitis B and C. This would tie into Gilead’s anti-hepatitis drug sofosbuvir.
Added: Two companies involved in clinical trials of new drugs in Ukraine were Ascendis Pharma and Tricidia. It’s not clear to me yet if these were what the Russian MOD was referring to.
From Daniel Larison:
The recent act of “the West” — governments and central bankers in league and in unison — to expropriate what Biden called “Putin’s $630 billion war fund” is really off the charts by way of economic warfare, something that just wasn’t done in the 18th and 19th centuries, even in terrible extremities. Debts were paid, even to cretins. The reputation for trustworthiness was the banker’s most precious asset, and it became the creed of nations. Only by an authoritative legal process, governed by the law of nations, might someone else get their hands on your stash.
In the three centuries before 1914, beginning the age in which all restraints in war, military and economic, were obliterated, such a default was seen in “civilized Europe” as equivalent to the method of “the barbarian” — “we like, we take.” But not only by them. Vigorous shakings of the head in disapproval would also have come from the Princes of Africa, the Sultan of the Turks, the Kings of Persia and China, the Great Mogul of India, the Grand Duke of Moscovy, the Emperor of Ethiopia (Prester John), the rulers of Japan and Morocco, and the Khanate of Crimea………
…The commentariat treats this Vast and Unprecedented Expropriation, this Financial H-Bomb, alongside things like sanctioning Putin’s niece as just parts of a generic class of “sanctions,” as if they were two peas in a pod, when the Central Bank Expropriations are a revolutionary stake into the heart of the global economic system. They will one day be seen as hurtling us to a new monetary order, distinguished across the East-West divide by a rabid neomercantilism, wealth-destroying but inexorable.
In name the central bank actions are a freeze, but in actuality they constitute a debt repudiation, a default, on a far bigger scale than anything engineered by the Bolsheviks, who put the debts of the Tsar to the torch when they came to power.
The situation is made all the more incredible by two facts. First, the contemporary default occurred at the center of the financial order, not at its periphery. That makes it staggering and unlike any other. Second, it was cooked up in a couple of hours by U.S. government staffers. Previous discussions of sanctions had always treated Russia’s removal from SWIFT as the Absolute Weapon. The Great Freeze on Russian assets never made it into the press.
Our leaders in thought and action, the ones at the top of the political and financial and corporate media hierarchy, violated the first rule, the indispensable rule, the rule on which our grand financial edifice was built. Full faith and credit wasn’t just a phrase; it was a way of life. The idea of it, a new model of civilization, generated rules that most princes and peoples came to respect. No more………
Cassandra would like to say in reply: the Great Expropriation will come to be regarded as the financial equivalent of Operation Barbarossa, which sowed terror in all that lay in its path but which created through overextension and hubris the basis for its subsequent reversal. Our leaders, our “oligarchs,” have not necessarily shot themselves in the foot with these measures, but they have definitely shot their peoples in the foot, and they do not seem to care.
On Democracy Now, Professor Alfred McCoy explains why the Ukrainian war will give birth to a new world order. That is, a new New World Order.
Lila: Perhaps it is in this sense that the predictions since 2015 from various Rabbis that we are living in messianic times and that the moshiach has arrived/is arriving can best be understood. After all, if this new order, diminishes the United States and NATO, which it seems to be doing, then the fall of Edom/AntiChrist, associated in the minds of the Rabbis with Western Christianity/Europe/North America, must be accompanied by the rise of the Messiah, which in this geopolitical reading, is the new NWO, led by Russia and China, ostensibly, with Israel playing a mediating role.
In a historically informed and insightful piece on the background of the Ukraine war, David Stockman puts the failed kleptocracy of Ukraine and its tin-pot clown prince into proper historical perspective:
On April 26, 1954 The decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet transferring the Crimea Oblast from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. Taking into account the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic and cultural ties between the Crimea Province and the Ukrainian SSR….
So, yes, there is every reason for a Kiev government which finally sues for peace to return Crimea to Russia, which owned it all along; and in which Ukrainians accounts for less than 15% of the predominant Russian speaking population. For Washington to claim otherwise and encourage Zelensky to hold out is tantamount to a naked case of hegemonic arrogance.
After all, during the long decades of the Cold War, the West did nothing to liberate the “captive nation” of Ukraine – with or without the Crimean appendage bestowed upon it in 1954. Nor did it draw any red lines in the mid-1990s when a financially desperate Ukraine rented back Sevastopol and the strategic redoubts of Crimea to an equally pauperized Russia.
In short, in the era before we got our Pacific port in 1848 and even during the 170-year interval since then, America’s national security has depended not one whit on the status of Russian-speaking Crimea and the Donbas regions of eastern Ukraine. The fact that the local population of the former in March 2014 chose fealty to the Grand Thief in Moscow over the ruffians and rabble that have seized Kiev amounts to a giant, “So what?”
Still, it was this final aggressive drive of Washington and NATO into the internal affairs of Russia’s historical neighbor and vassal, Ukraine, that largely accounts for the current dangerous confrontation. Likewise, it is virtually the entire source of the false claim that Russia has aggressive, expansionist designs on the former Warsaw Pact states in the Baltics, Poland and beyond.
The latter is a nonsensical fabrication. In fact, it was the neocon meddlers from Washington who crushed Ukraine’s last semblance of democratic governance when they enabled ultra-nationalists and crypto-Nazis to gain government positions after the February 2014 coup, which threw-out Ukraine’s legitimately elected, Russia-leaning president.
In this context, moreover, the history of the 1930s and 1940s must never be forgotten. As indicated above, Stalin decimated upwards of 15% of the Ukrainian population during the Holodomer (starvations) and then moved huge numbers of Russian-speakers into the Donbas to safeguard its chemical, steel and armaments industries from the defiant locals who were sent to Siberia.
Thereafter, when Hitler’s Wehrmacht came charging through Ukraine on its way to the bloody battle of Stalingrad, it had no trouble recruiting hundreds of thousands of vengeance-seeking Ukrainian nationalists to its ranks to do its dirty work: That is, the brutal liquidation of Jews, Poles, Gypsies and other untermenschen.
In fact, during the fall of 1941 began the mass killings of Jews that continued through 1944. An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews perished, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east; at Baby Yar in Kyiv nearly 34,000 were killed in just the first two days of massacre – and all of these depredations were assisted and often executed by local Ukrainian nationalists.
Then, of course, the tide turned and the Red Army came marching back though the rubble of Ukraine on its way to Berlin. After their victory over the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, the Soviets launched an equally brutal scorched earth counteroffensive westward, searching high and low for traitors and collaborators among the Ukrainian population who had allegedly aided the Wehrmacht.
The Germans thus began their slow retreat from Ukraine in mid-1943, leaving wholesale destruction in their wake. In November the Soviets reentered Kyiv, where guerrilla activity intensified amid bloody revenge killings which claimed huge numbers of civilian victims. By the spring of 1944 the Red Army had penetrated into Galicia (western Ukraine), and by the end of October Ukraine was a bloody wasteland, once again under Red Army control.
So it may be fairly asked: What Washington lame brains did not understand that triggering “regime change” in Kiev in February 2014 would reopen this entire blood-soaked history of sectarian and political strife?
Moreover, once they had opened Pandora’s Box, why was it so hard to see that an outright partition of Ukraine with autonomy for the Donbas and Crimea, or even accession to the Russian state from which these communities had originated, would have been a perfectly reasonable resolution?
Certainly that would have been far preferable to dragging all of Europe into the lunacy of the current military showdown and further embroiling the Ukrainian factions in a suicidal civil war.
Needless to say, Zelensky gets none of this in the slightest – even though as a native and Russian speaking son of southeastern Ukraine, he actually grew up in a part of modern Ukraine that had been Russian for 370 years!
That’s right. He’s just the perennial short guy feasting on his 15 minutes of fame. But enough is enough already. In a rational world this double-talking creep should have been sent packing this morning by the US Congress, but these war-obsessed nincompoops can’t see the handwriting on the wall.
So once again, here it is. This is where the story ends – even as Washington wages Sanctions War on the entire global economy and thereby the American people as well.
How Ukraine Will Be Partitioned After Kiev Capitulates
In any event, a TV actor who has no script other than that handed to him by his Washington/NATO overseers is one thing. And at the end of the day, it small potatoes compared to the grotesque negligence and misdirection of Sleepy Joe’s own keepers.
That is to say, Secy Blinkey and Snake Sullivan should be bent over the above map in earnest conversation with their Russian counterparts as to the fine points of the partition, and the meaning of “neutrality,” “de-nazification” and “demilitarization” of the green area of the map, which is to become the future “Ukraine,” if there is to be anything left at all.
Needless to say, they are not even talking to the Russians. They are, in fact, so red in tooth and claw with the blood of economic warfare that they would drive the global economy to collapse rather than acknowledge that they – and they alone – brought this horrendous situation to the doorstep of the world.”
