Category Archives: Pols and Pundits

Donald Trump Failed To Break The Techno-Managerial Dictatorship

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Scott Gibbons at The Millenial City:

“As I wrote in my book, Trumped by History: The Resurrection of the Great American Middle Class, then suddenly, out of left field came the perennial celebrity Donald Trump. He did not come from within any institution or discipline, and his ideas and platform coalesced rapidly through interaction with various populist personalities, frustration and thought waves. Trump most famously recognized and sanctioned the downtrodden great American middle class and drew those people out of long-term seclusion into increased and open expression of opinion. He resuscitated them and suddenly by just wearing MAGA caps their long suppressed opinions were clear to everyone.

As I wrote in Trumped by History, in bypassing the mainstream institutions and processes, Donald Trump starkly defined the conflict between the middle class and the techno-managerial elite, drawing his supporters fully into the open for the first time since they had lost their social dominance in the 1960s. At the same time, he elicited a virulent opposition to himself personally from establishment conservatives whose ideology was thought in principle to be nearly the same as that of his supporters – revealing both left and right to be the true techno-managerial elite enemy of the great American middle class.”

Gibbons suggests that the Trump presidency failed to dislodge the techno-managerial ruling class and only enriched its own self, thereby leaving its followers even more vulnerable than before.

This is a pessimistic and widely-held analysis that I don’t share, because I never subscribed to the belief that Trump came from no where. I was quite clear-eyed from the beginning about who Trump was. I realized he was a liberal from the heart of the establishment – he was, after all, sent out to sell the financial bail-out to the public. There was his family’s decades-long coziness with mob figures, his ties to the Clintons, and his family ties to the media and to the Jewish establishment. He would never have become that popular without that.

However, to me he represented an opening, a disruption that had the potential to shake things up and move them in an unexpected direction. That potential did not exist with Hillary Clinton.

Trump blew up the place verbally.

And that created a space for the middle class to express itself. Whatever else did not get accomplished by his presidency, that did.

And it can not be undone.

 

 

Putin More Christian Than the Pope

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In President Putin’s well-considered and judicious remarks to the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres on April 26, I note two statements that shed an interesting light on his larger goals in pursuing the war in Ukraine and more generally on the position Russia has taken up as the head of the resistance to the universal hegemony of the West:

We are also surprised to hear statements by our colleagues that imply that some in the world have exceptional status or can claim exclusive rights because the Charter of the United Nations reads that all participants in international communication are equal regardless of their strength, size or geographical location. I think this is similar to what the Bible reads about all people being equal. I am sure we will find the same idea in both the Quran and the Torah. All people are equal before God. So, the idea that someone can claim a kind of exceptional status is very strange to us.

Since every word from Putin’s mouth is considered, I take the manner in which he has articulated his concerns about certain UN members to be highly significant.

First, it should be noted that he is attacking exceptionalism of any kind, which would imply both American exceptionalism and any other exceptionalism.

Now, exceptionalism is much the same thing as supremacism.

President Putin of course has positioned himself  very publicly  against Nazism, specifically the Nazism exhibited by some parts of the Ukrainian government. That is well known. However, he has for some time been hinting at something more.

And here he is clarifying what that is. It is the more general category to which Nazism belongs, supremacism.

The political point Putin is making to the Secretary-General is that actions of member-states that are similar should be treated similarly by the UN. If Kosovo could declare itself independent and this was recognized by the International Court, then the independence of the Donbass should be treated equally. Equality before the law cannot co-exist with an exceptionalist treatment of one country, permitting it a leeway  in action none other has. American exceptionalism is clearly the target here.

Then, significantly, President Putin, derives the equality of member- states in the UN from  the notion of equality among human beings given to us in religious scripture. And here he does something very illuminating.  He lists the religious texts that support the notion of equality: the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah.

Notice that he omits the Talmud and he omits any Hindu scripture, such as the Vedas or Upanishads, but since Hinduism is not represented in Russia in any substantial way, so that is not a surprise. What is a surprise is his omission of the Talmud, which is the scripture that most regulates Jewish practice, since Judaism, especially Chabad, is well-represented in Russia.  In fact, Chabad is the most powerful Jewish community in the country. Now, there is no question that there is in Chabad a supremacist vein, found in such texts as Ha Tanya, as well as, more generally, in the Talmud. Thus, when President Putin omits any reference to the Talmud and instead directly mentions the Torah, it is significant, since the Torah is most important among true Torah following Jews, who are anti-Zionist and constitute a very small group, and among the equally small group of Karaite Jews.

Besides that omission, the order of the list is also significant. President Putin mentions the Bible first, giving pride of place to Christianity among the traditional Russian faiths. He then mentions the Koran, giving Islam the second place, and with the Torah, gives Judaism its due. This particular ordering might be linked to the size of the demographic each religion represents in the Russian federation, with the state aligning itself first with the Orthodox faith and presenting itself as the defender of that faith.

From the political context, it is clear that President Putin is opposing his defense of equality to the supremacism practiced by two exceptionalist groups, the one in Ukraine which has a pagan and occult basis, and the one embodied in NATO and the West, that also draws on the pagan and the occult. I will leave it open whether one should extrapolate from Mr. Putin’s words an implicit indictment of Talmudic supremacism or not.

Now, contrast this with the words of the head of the Catholic church, Pope Francis, in a speech to Congress on September 24, 2015, in which he called for inclusion and fraternity. The Pope managed to mention both Moses and Mohammed but omitted the name of Jesus Christ. Clearly, in that at least President Putin is a more forthright defender of the Christian faith in the public sphere.

Fascist Biowar Experts Hired By CIA Operation Paperclip

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Finian Cunningham at Strategic-Culture.org:

Medical scientists Shiro Ishii and Kurt Blome were respectively the commanders of the biological and chemical warfare research efforts by Japan and Germany during the war. Ishii commanded the notorious Unit 731 which was based in Manchuria in Japanese-occupied China. Blome was the lead scientist in testing biological weapons and poisonous gases on inmates at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.

Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany collaborated intensively in the sharing of experimental data on new bioweapons, including the spreading of anthrax, typhoid, cholera, smallpox, bubonic plague, and botulism.

Ishii’s Unit 731 is estimated to have caused up to 500,000 deaths during the war from the use of biological warfare by dropping pathogens from airplanes on Chinese cities in Hunan and Zhejiang provinces. The unit also carried out diabolic forced experiments on Chinese and Russian prisoners of war to study the epidemiology of diseases and vaccines. Inmates were infected with pathogens and subjected to horrible agonizing deaths.

Shiro Ishii and his criminal network were never brought to trial following the war despite earnest Soviet requests. Instead, the Americans who occupied mainland Japan granted him and his team of doctors immunity from prosecution in exchange for exclusive access to the biological and chemical warfare experiments. The Pentagon assigned its experts from Fort Detrick, Maryland, to tap the Japanese trove of data.

General Douglas MacArthur, the Allied Supreme Commander, personally intervened to ensure that Washington did not allow prosecution of Ishii or any other Japanese wartime specialist in those fields. Ishii died in 1959 in Tokyo at the age of 67 never having faced justice for the mass deaths he had supervised.

Meanwhile, Kurt Blome, the Wehrmacht chief of biological and chemical warfare, was brought to trial at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trials but he was acquitted in 1947 primarily because of American intervention to let him walk free.

Blome was just one of over 1,000 Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited by the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip. They would go on to be vital contributors to developing American missile technology and the NASA space program.

Again Fort Detrick, the Pentagon’s biological warfare center, tapped Blome’s expertise in weaponizing anthrax and other pathogens. His knowledge of nerve agents such as Tabun and Sarin was also harnessed by the CIA and its MK-Ultra program for assassinating political opponents. Blome worked closely with Sydney Gottlieb who headed up the CIA’s biological and chemical warfare unit. Gottlieb was known as the agency’s “poisoner-in-chief” and was personally involved in repeated efforts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Ironically, the CIA man who was the son of Jewish Hungarian immigrants ended up working with a Nazi scientist who had experimented at Auschwitz.

Read the rest at Strategic-Culture.org

Vladimir Putin: Monster, Madman, or Mastermind?

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Moscow-based analyst Andrew Korybko debunks the false portrait of Putin promoted in the Western media:

Everyone is trying to figure out who exactly President Putin is and what he’s trying to achieve. Many of his opponents and even quite a lot of his foreign supporters alike have regularly misportrayed him as a strongman who’s obsessed with fighting against the West, each propagating this narrative in pursuit of their diametrically different ideological agenda. This storyline, for as compelling as it may be, is grossly inaccurate and deserves clarification.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is the most talked-about man this century thus far after commencing his country’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine in late February. That dramatic move was intended to uphold the integrity of Russia’s national security red lines in Ukraine in particular and in the region more broadly. It followed the US-led West refusing to respect his security guarantee requests from December, which in turn prompted President Putin to kinetically defend Russia’s existential interests. The unprecedented and preplanned response by the US-led West accelerated preexisting multipolar trends connected to the ongoing global systemic transition and led to what many nowadays consider to be the worst crisis since World War II.
Amidst all of this, everyone is trying to figure out who exactly President Putin is and what he’s trying to achieve. Many of his opponents and even quite a lot of his foreign supporters alike have regularly misportrayed him as a strongman who’s obsessed with fighting against the West, each propagating this narrative in pursuit of their diametrically different ideological agenda.
According to this common interpretation of his motives, he simply can’t get over how the USSR’s dissolution in 1991 led to the erasure of Russia’s former superpower status. In their minds, he’s plotted for decades to make the move that he fatefully did in February, though each side differs over their assessment of how successful it’s been since. This storyline, for as compelling as it may be, is grossly inaccurate and deserves clarification.
Beginning with the viewpoint of his opponents, President Putin is either a monster or a madman. The first implies that he’s a bloodthirsty dictator who couldn’t give a damn for any notion of democracy and human rights, whether the objective understanding thereof or subjective interpretations of them that vary based on society. All that he wants, they claim, is to kill as many people as possible. This leads to the second viewpoint of him possibly being a madman, as in, someone who’s literally gone crazy and surrendered to whatever pathology it may be that supposedly controls everything that he does. Those who ascribe to this interpretation insist that he isn’t a rational actor and therefore mustn’t be negotiated with. Whether a monster or madman, his opponents claim that this man must be contained.
The polar opposite camp employed a proto-QAnon model to explain everything that he does by introducing the idea that he’s a mastermind who plays “5D chess”, “is always winning”, and that everyone who sympathizes with even a single element of his policies should just “trust the plan” exactly as former US President Donald Trump’s most passionate supporters suggested about that American leader.
According to them, President Putin deeply despises everything associated with the West, especially its close partners like Israel and Turkey. Anytime he pragmatically interacts with them and is caught on camera smiling alongside their leaders, they claim, he’s just “playing chess” and “tricking his enemies” in order to supposedly “gather intel” to help defeat them at a later undisclosed time.
Suffice to say, all three interpretations are flat-out ridiculous and have no resemblance to reality. President Putin isn’t a monster, madman, or a mastermind, he’s simply a man who history placed in a very unique position that ultimately compelled him to muscularly defend his Great Power’s existential national security red lines in the most dramatic way possible.

West Provoking Putin For The Sake Of Ukrainians Oligarchs

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An article in Forbes in 2014 presciently advises the US to stop humiliating and provoking Putin:

. Despite what you read in the Western press, he [Putin] didn’t protest about NATO expansion, he gave up on a number of important Russian military bases, and acted aggressively only when he felt that Russia’s back yard was threatened. Annexation of Crimea, while responding to very strong popular demands both in Russia and Crimea, was a limited operation that enabled Putin to save his face after “losing” Ukraine. Since then he has given plenty of indications that he is ready to call it a day. His limited goals are acknowledged in the writings and interviews of such people as former ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock, or former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. But what needs to be stressed is that the next Russian leader might not be that accommodating, especially in light of continuous and needless bullying on the part of the US. Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s NATO representative and a serious political figure on the right, has already declared that next time he’ll fly into Ukraine and Moldova on military bomber after these countries didn’t allow his plane to use their airspace. What gave rise to Hitler was Germany’s continuous humiliation after World War I. The policy of public humiliation of Putin, the talk of “punishing” him or Russia for bad behavior, is insulting to the Russian leader and his countrymen. In contrast to Germany in 1939, Russia still has plenty of nuclear arms. Had Russia intended to enslave the US or its allies with its threat of nuclear bombs, I would be more than happy to repeat after New Hampshire: “Live Free or Die.” But is it worth it to taunt and threaten an already angry and frustrated nuclear power for the sake of handing Ukraine to the likes of Mr. Kolomoisky and his motley crew of oligarchs, nationalists, and subservient politicians? Those Western politicians and journalists, who confuse the issue of defending freedom with the power games that the current Ukrainian elite is playing, should be aware that they are not serving, but rather betraying, cherished American principles.

Putin Jails Top Spy Chief, Possibly For Leaks

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AFR.com

From the The Telegraph UK

Vladimir Putin has thrown a top spy chief in prison amid concern over apparent leaks to the US about Russia’s plans in Ukraine, according to reports.

A report on Monday suggested that Colonel General Sergei Beseda, head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence unit, has been taken to Moscow’s high-security Lefortovo prison, typically used for those suspected of treason.

Russia Says Pakistan PM Khan Being Punished For Trip To Moscow

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From The Print

The senior Russian diplomat [Lila: Maria Zakharova] said that the sequence of events left no doubt that Washington had “decided to punish a disobedient Imran Khan,” which also explained why a number of members from Khan’s ruling coalition decided to switch sides and shift their allegiances ahead of the April 3 no-trust vote.

Khan, 69, stunned the Opposition on Sunday by recommending snap elections within three months, minutes after a no-confidence motion against him was dismissed by the deputy speaker of the National Assembly.

Khan then got Pakistan President Arif Alvi to dissolve the 342-member National Assembly.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Monday adjourned the hearing on the deputy speaker’s decision to reject the no-confidence motion against the premier, who had lost majority in the lower house of Parliament.

Khan had named senior US diplomat Donald Lu as the person who was allegedly involved in the “foreign conspiracy” to oust his government through a no-confidence vote tabled by the Opposition.

Pakistan’s Opposition leaders have ridiculed Khan’s allegation, and the US has dismissed these claims.

Bucha Genocide Likely False-Flag By Ukrainian Nazis

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Update: Pentagon unable to confirm or deny Bucha and Biden unwilling to call it a genocide.

Update:

Just saw this on twitter:

Anton Troianovski
@antontroian
NYT analysis of satellite imagery shows at least 11 of the bodies seen on a street in Bucha in an April 2 video had been on the street since March 11 — when Russian forces occupied the town

 

Veterans Today:

Denying the spurious and unsubstantiated allegations of purported war crimes and genocide by Russian troops, Russia’s chief investigator Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Russian Investigative Committee, ordered a probe be opened on the basis that Ukraine had insidiously spread “deliberately false information” in order to malign Russia’s month-long military campaign in Ukraine.

In addition, Russia has requested a United Nations Security Council meeting on April 4 over purported war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine’s Bucha, Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyanskiy said on Sunday.

“In light of the Ukrainian radicals’ provocation in Bucha, Russia has requested a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Monday, April 4,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. “We will unmask Ukrainian provocateurs and their Western patrons.”

The Russian defense ministry said earlier on Sunday that all Russian troops had left the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region as far back as March 30, while the “evidence of crimes” surfaced four days later, when Ukrainian security forces and allied ultra-nationalist militias arrived in the city.

As Larry Johnson points out, there were white arm-bands on the dead bodies, indicating that the corpses were Ukrainians not antagonistic to the Russian army. Now why would the Russians kill them? It stands to reason that people who might do that would be the Nazi ultra-nationalists, the Azov and the rest.

Biden says, “butcher, butcher,” “war criminal, war criminal,” like a tom-tom…it’s been in the headlines for days, getting people geared up.

Next thing you know, there are open graves, bodies with nooses. Nooses would evoke the racial hangings and lynchings of the past, which would be something people in the US would react to.

The town is called Bucha…a word evocative on so many levels, as I mentioned in the previous post. Butcher, Buchenwald, Bucha.

It didn’t happen coincidentally. It’s been concocted that way.

Think. Why would Russia do something like this now? And why wouldn’t Ukraine?

Also read Indian Punchline.com.

 

Indo-Russian Ties Complicate Indian Balancing Act Between America, China

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Andrew Korybko, an American political analyst in Moscow and author of several books on US color revolutions, or hybrid wars, analyzes the delicate balance between the super-powers driving both India and Russia:

An American Official Accidentally Got It Right About Russia and India:

Exactly as Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics Daleep Singh said, the potentially disproportionate dependence that Russia might eventually come to have on China could have real implications for India and obviously be unfavorable. It’s with these credible strategic concerns in mind that India is seeking to preemptively thwart that scenario from ever materializing by functioning as an alternative Western pressure valve for Russia so that it doesn’t have to disproportionately depend on China to that end.

The US’ understanding of Russian-Indian relations is outdated as evidenced by US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland’s inaccurate assessment of their ties just the other day. This is partly because such figures remain ignorant of the emotional element in their relationship, but one American official just accidentally got it right. Deputy National Security Advisor (NSA) for International Economics Daleep Singh was just in New Delhi where he responded to a question from the Hindustan Times regarding US President Joe Biden’s scandalous claim that India’s position in the Quad is “somewhat shaky” with respect to Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine.
The relevant part of his answer is as follows:
“China is a strategic threat to a free, open and secure Indo-Pacific. If you set that against the reality that China and Russia have now declared a no limits partnership, and that Russia has said that China is its most important strategic partner, by extension, that has real implications for India. No one should kid themselves – Russia is going to be the junior partner in this relationship with China. And the more leverage that China gains over Russia, the less favourable that is for India. I don’t think anyone would believe that if China once again breached the Line of [Actual] Control, that Russia would come running to India’s defence.”
The rest of the analysis will explain what he got right and why, as well as the part that he still got wrong.
Singh wasn’t correct in his threat assessment of China but that was to be expected since he represents the greatest geopolitical opponent of the People’s Republic after all. Be that as it may, it’s his right to describe whoever he wants however he wants, but his claim about Russia not coming to India’s defense was factually false. Reports from the time of those two Asian Great Powers’ clash along the Galwan River Valley in summer 2020 suggested that Russia made early deliveries of ammunition and weapons to India worth $1 billion during that time. Defense Minister Rajnath Singh (no relation) also traveled to Moscow shortly after to attend Russia’s Victory Day parade and negotiate even more military deals.
It’s what Deputy NSA Singh got right, however, that’s worthwhile focusing on. Like the author explained in the first hyperlinked analysis in the present piece connected to Nuland’s inaccurate assessment of Russian-Indian relations, New Delhi is indeed driven by the fear that Moscow could become Beijing’s junior partner to remain steadfastly loyal to its half-century-long special and privileged strategic partner through its policy of principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Conflict. Exactly as Singh said, the potentially disproportionate dependence that Russia might eventually come to have on China could have real implications for India and obviously be unfavorable.