Tag: Russia Russia Russia

Brace for Impact

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

“It’s not enough to say it’s nuts, you have to explain why it’s so nuts.” – Terrance McKenna

“Joe Biden’s” victory dance in South Carolina — down on the ol’ Democratic Party Plantation, where they grows votes — didn’t last long. By Sunday, a rogue satellite named Tucker Carlson was spotted orbiting over Russia, Russia, Russia, a country you have to say three times so that people get how serious it is. Carlson threatens to actually sit down in the same room with Putin, Putin, Putin — the antithesis of “Joe Biden,” since Putin actually operates as head-of-state — and convey Mr. P’s thoughts and opinions to the citizens of America via the rascally social media platform called “X.”

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‘Largest Ever’ NATO Exercise To Rehearse Russian Attack On Europe

Via ZeroHedge

A massive NATO military exercises slated to run all the way through the end of May has kicked off. Exercise Steadfast Defender 24 is being hailed as the largest NATO exercises since the Cold War. Some 90,000 troops from all 31 members states will take part.

Also, Sweden – which is on the cusp of formally entering the alliance after Turkish parliament belatedly signed off – is expected to sent troops and equipment. “The Alliance will demonstrate its ability to reinforce the Euro-Atlantic area via trans-Atlantic movement of forces from North America,” a NATO statement said.

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GASLIGHTING ON A CIVILIZATIONAL SCALE

Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer

Guest Post by Gaius Baltar

THE ROLE OF HUMAN CAPITAL AND WESTERN EDUCATION

WHY IS THE WEST SO WEAK (AND RUSSIA SO STRONG)?

It is becoming increasingly clear to more and more people in the West that something has gone terribly wrong with the Ukraine project. Predictions and projections didn’t pan out and the West doesn’t seem to know what to do. The Russian economy wasn’t a house of cards as predicted, Russian weapons weren’t inferior as predicted, Russian soldiers and commanders weren’t incompetent as predicted, and Russian technology wasn’t inferior as predicted.

In some respects the Russians even seem to be superior to the West. Their weapons are effective and in many cases outright technologically superior, as clearly demonstrated by their hypersonic missiles, SAM systems and electronic warfare systems. Their economy appears to be surprisingly advanced and diversified and based on real wealth creation rather than financialization and debt like the West’s. Their strategic and tactical thinking also seems to work, while the West‘s clearly doesn‘t.

The whole mess is often explained as a result of a miscalculation by the western elites – they underestimated Russia and overestimated the West. The situation, however, is far worse than that. Every day that passes reveals the impotence of the West more and more and the situation is becoming outright humiliating. At this point the rest of the world either shakes their heads or simply laughs at the West and its politicians and diplomats – not to mention its crazed populations.

The dysfunction of the West is far deeper than just the situation around the Ukraine project. It’s absolutely everywhere. The West can’t do diplomacy in general, it can’t run its cities or countries except into the ground, its high-tech projects fail almost as a rule, its infrastructure is crumbling, its economies are crumbling, and all public policies seem to have a civilizational suicide as a final goal. The West’s control mechanisms over the rest of the world are also crumbling, including the dollar, sanctions, color revolutions, military interventions and threats. Nothing seems to work and everything the West does seems to make things worse.

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Russia is still complicit in the Great Reset

Submitted by Mary Christine

Guest Post by Riley Waggaman

Twelve months ago (plus a few days) we participated in a roundtable discussion moderated by Whitney Webb and Kit Knightly, “Russia & the Great Reset – Resistance or Complicity?”

A short summary of our position (“Yes, Russia is complicit in the Great Reset”; April 3, 2022) quickly became the second most-read article on this blog.

In July we revisited this hot-button issue (Resetting Without Schwab: Russia & the Fourth Industrial Revolution), using Klaus Schwab’s Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2018) to guide us through Moscow’s technocratic hijinks.

Anyway. We thought it would be appropriate and educational to use the one-year anniversary of the Zoom Debate to update our prognosis.

What follows is an addendum to the July article using the same Great Reset categories: digital currencies, safe (and smart) cities, genetic “vaccines”, and sustainable development.

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Is the Kremlin Out to Lunch?

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Dear Readers, you might be tired of “doom and gloom,” but the life of the planet is threatened by the continuing conflict in Ukraine, and no one else is addressing the dangerous situation.

The Russian Foreign Ministry tells us that Moscow is alarmed by the mounting tensions in Kosovo.  https://www.rt.com/russia/568116-kosovo-serbia-west-agreements/

Don’t tell me the Kremlin didn’t expect this and did nothing, such as assassinate the Albanian troublemakers, to prevent it.

I am beginning to think that the Kremlin is even more insouciant than the American public.  How can the Kremlin be unaware that Washington is operating against Russia on all fronts?  How could the Kremlin not expect Washington to brew trouble in Kosovo? And between the EU and Serbia?  And trouble in the former Central Asian Soviet Republics?  And in former Soviet Georgia?  And in the Baltics?

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‘Russia Started the War’ and Other Fallacies

Guest Post by Mike Whitney

On Monday, Putin delivered the annual “Victory Day” speech celebrating Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. The Russian president made none of the hyperbolic pronouncements the media had predicted but, instead, gave a brief recap of the events leading up to the war in Ukraine. There was none of the bravado you’d expect from a leader trying to gin up support for the ongoing war. Putin simply reminded the crowd that he had done everything he could to avoid the bloody conflict in which Russia is currently embroiled. Here’s part of what he said:

“Last December we proposed signing a treaty on security guarantees. Russia urged the West to hold an honest dialogue in search for meaningful and compromising solutions, and to take account of each other’s interests. All in vain. NATO countries did not want to heed us, which means they had totally different plans. And we saw it.”

This is an accurate account of what took place in the months preceding the war. Putin tried to avoid a confrontation by repeatedly asking the US to address Russia’s reasonable security concerns. Unfortunately, the Biden administration brushed off Putin’s demands without even providing a response. The US and NATO insist that Ukraine has every right to choose whatever security arrangement it wants. But that’s clearly not the case. The United States and every nation in NATO have signed treaties (Istanbul in 1999, and Astana in 2010) that stipulate they cannot improve their own security at the expense of others.

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The Total War to Cancel Russia

Guest Post by Pepe Escobar

Vast swathes of NATOstan have been corralled into behaving like a Russophobic lynch mob. No dissent is tolerated.

By now it’s abundantly clear that the neo-Orwellian “Two Minute Hate” Russophobic campaign launched by the Empire of Lies after the start of Operation Z is actually “24/7 Hate”.

Vast swathes of NATOstan have been corralled into behaving like a Russophobic lynch mob. No dissent is tolerated. The full psyops has de facto upgraded the Empire of Lies to the status of Empire of Hate in a Total War – hybrid and otherwise – to cancel Russia.

Hate, after all, packs way more punch than mere lies, which are now veering into abject ridiculousness, as in U.S. “intelligence” resorting to – what else – lies to fight the info war against Russia.

If the propaganda overdrive has been lethally effective amidst the zombified Western masses – call it a “win” in the P.R. war – in the front where it really matters, inside Russia, it’s a major fail.

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Questions Abound About Bucha Massacre

Guest Post by Joe Lauria

The West has made a snap judgment about who is responsible for the massacre at the Ukrainian town of Bucha with calls for more stringent sanctions on Russia, but the question of guilt is far from decided.

Within hours of news Sunday that there had been a massacre at Bucha, a town 63 kms north of the Ukrainian capital, the verdict was in:  Russian troops had senselessly slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians as they withdrew from the town, leaving their bodies littering the streets.

Unlike their judicial systems, when it comes to war, Western nations dispense with the need for investigations and evidence and pronounce guilt based on political motives: Russia is guilty. Case closed.

Except the case hasn’t even been opened yet and the sentence is already being proposed. French President Emmanuel Macron, for instance, has called for Russian coal and oil to be banned from Europe. “There are very clear indications of war crimes,” he said on France Inter radio Monday. “What happened in Bucha demands a new round of sanctions and very clear measures, so we will co-ordinate with our European partners, especially with Germany.”

Other voices are now perilously calling for the U.S. to go to war with Russia over the incident.

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False Flags Suddenly No Longer A Crazy Conspiracy Theory

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone,

In a drastic pivot from typical denunciations of false flag operations as conspiratorial nonsense that don’t exist outside the demented imagination of Alex Jones, the US political/media class is proclaiming with one voice that Russia is currently orchestrating just such an operation to justify an invasion of Ukraine.

“As part of its plans, Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday.

“We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine.”

“Without getting into too much detail, we do have information that indicates that Russia is already working actively to create a pretext for a potential invasion, for a move on Ukraine,” Pentagon Spokesperson John Kirby told the press on Friday.

“In fact, we have information that they’ve pre-positioned a group of operatives, to conduct what we call a false flag operation, an operation designed to look like an attack on them or their people, or Russian speaking people in Ukraine, as an excuse to go in.”

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Keep Throwing Spaghetti at That Wall

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

We’re reminded this morning by The New York Times, America’s official psychotic fantasy generator, that the Russians are coming (again!) as an ad hoc arm of the committee to re-elect Mr. Trump. You have to ask yourself: Does Mr. Trump actually need their help? His opponents have been self-meddling so diligently that their party now looks like a Frankenstein creature assembled from the spare parts of Herbert Marcuse, Tupac Shakur, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and Jame Gumb. Imagine that monster running a government.

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The New Cold War Flops

Guest Post by Justin Raimondo

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Has there ever been a country so vilified as Russia, a leader so demonized as Vladimir Putin?

It makes me dizzy just to think of all the crimes that have been laid at that particular doorstep. I could spend the rest of this column simply listing them, from the deaths of numerous Russian journalists to the extinction of Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions – that and so much more! The omnipotent Russian President has apparently poisoned so many Russian expatriates in Britain that the streets are awash in polonium, novichok, and god knows what else. Why, it only took a few thousand bucks spent on some Facebook ads that practically no one saw to steal the presidential election from the rightful winner. Vlad the Bad is the all-powerful villain at the center of so many sinister conspiracies that it’s hard to keep track of them.

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Fever Pitch

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Those in the USA who have not been driven plumb insane by President Donald Trump are probably scratching their heads down to the subdural cavity this week with his imposition of more severe sanctions on Russia only a month after he went to Helsinki to repair tattered relations with Russia’s president, Mr. Putin. The official reason: payback for the poisoning in Wiltshire, UK, of Sergei Skripal, retired UK/Russia double agent, and his daughter Yulia.

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