Tag Archives: exceptionalism

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.

Col. Douglas McGregor: Donors, NeoCons Want To Prolong War To Topple Putin

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CLARIFICATION:  I doubt that a senior Pentagon official is going to be perfectly candid about US military capabilities in public at any time, let alone now.  The same goes for a Russian official.

ORIGINAL POST

Colonel Douglas McGregor, former advisor to the Secretary of Defense and once one of NATO’s top strategists, talks with the Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on the Ukraine war.

McGregor says the Russians have done what they intended to do, which is destroy the Ukrainian military [for the most part], without too many civilian casualties. The war is over as far as that goes. He says Putin has tried to minimize civilian casualties, the diametric opposite of what the Western media reports. He adds that both the Ukrainians and international volunteers are now simply cannon-fodder used by NATO to prolong the war in any way to destablize Russia, but that isn’t working, because polls show 70% popular support for Putin.

McGregor thinks about 2000 Russian soldiers dead is a plausible figure, although there is no confirmation, but the Ukie numbers for their own dead are propaganda. A large quantity of foreign military equipment has been captured. Whatever foreign equipment is shipped in is useless  anyway as the Ukrainians cannot use it.

Russia’s demands are minimal: Ukraine must renounce their claim on Crimea [which is historically Russian anyway], recognize the Donbas as Russian, stay out of NATO and refrain developing nukes.

The Russians have tried to avoid the central portion of Ukraine, which is the agricultural region where the spring planting is about to begin. The Russians don’t want to destroy the wheat and barley. In Mariupol, however, the Ukrainians are not allowing 3000 civilians to leave through humanitarian corridors, so a disaster is in the making. McGregor argues that any Western interference in Ukraine, including the imposition of no fly zones,  will lead to horizontal and vertical escalation of the war and the use of nuclear weapons, whose fall-out will spread by wind as far as Japan and Korea. He says the strike on a NATO base near the Polish border was a message by Putin to Poland to stay out of the conflict or become a target themselves.

McGregor says the Russians are behind the USA in detection capabilities so they tend to be paranoid and might make a mistake and believe a launch was imminent, when it  was not, especially as it is not possible for them to know if US B52’s are carrying nuclear or non-nuclear devices.  The unraveling of arms control treaties has also fueled distrust of the US.

Nonetheless, McGregor points out that the president has made good decisions in saying no to a no-fly zone or to boots-on-the-ground and most of the top brass also do not want war, as they know the US military is not up to the task. But the donors run the uniparty, and they, as well as the neocons and the “bombs-away club,” the American exceptionalists, do want war. McGregor doesn’t see why the winning side, Russia would want a false flag, but Ukraine or NATO might well engineer one as a last-ditch effort to widen the war.

Unlike the British empire which practiced “economy of enemies” and tried to see whom they could work with, American elitist Marxists believe in their supreme virtue and demonize and bully anyone who doesn’t fall in line, such as China. They are Wilsonians to the extreme.