By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Repeating lies over and over makes old-fashioned Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda. Repeating lies, then contradicting them; moving them from one government-paid think-tank to another; footnoting a new lie to an older version; quoting policemen and gangsters saying fatuities; adding slang and the words of pop songs—this is still Goebbels-type but  stretched out and product-diversified  to make its author more money. This is Mark Galeotti’s method.

His new book on the business of Russian crime isn’t about business at all. There’s not a single item from a balance-sheet, cashflow analysis, asset trace, or financial indictment in Galeotti’s effort to exaggerate  Russian criminals to mean Russian people, all of them. 

The Russians are also the unique criminals of our world, he thinks  – no other nation on earth matches them for their criminality. So for the protection of the rest of the innocent world, and to protect the uncriminalized from being Russianized, the Russian state, that’s the “super-mafia” of Galeotti’s targeting, should be destroyed by warfare. And since Galeotti repeats the slang of the Russian streets himself to rub in his conclusion that “mainstream society” – that’s everybody –“ reflect[s] a fundamental process of criminalisation of politics and daily life”, he means that Russians deserve  more than their mouths washed out.  Galeotti is a mercenary; his book a weapon — a stun-gun for the naive,   an improvised explosive device for the unguarded, a neutron bomb for the sceptical.   Means, motive, opportunity for a hate crime in the service of a war crime. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, September 8th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Mother Nature has arranged short life spans for rabbits, like journalists.

Rabbits have the advantage — an extra digestive cycle for foodstuffs which don’t properly give up their nutrients on the first pass-through. In the autumn, when grass and other tender plant stems give way to dry straw and bark, this comes in handy, rabbit-wise.  They cycle the stuff through their cecum – a pouch between their intestines — excrete it in lumps, and eat it for re-digestion.  The lumps are called cecotropes. You don’t need to be a veterinarian or aborigine to tell the difference between cecotropes and shit. You can tell by looking at them. Cecotropes are soft and lumpy; shit is hard and pellet-sized.

In the internet media, cecotropes are called tweets. Retweeting is the human equivalent of eating shit. But in the human anatomy, there’s no cecum, just an appendix which is quite useless unless it gets inflamed. If you lack a cecum, eating shit can cause appendicitis,  and that can lead to brain death. Most journalists eat shit without realizing the terminal damage they’ve done; being dead,  their brains are as useless as their appendixes. Readers of brain-dead journalism can tell by looking at it – is it soft and lumpy, or hard and pellet-sized?

Regular exercises are required for telling the difference between the two. Welcome back.

by Editor - Sunday, September 8th, 2019
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On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot live when my fatherland is dying and everything that has been the meaning of my life is crumbling. Age and the life that I have lived give me the right to step out of this life. I struggled until the end.”

by Editor - Friday, August 23rd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Aestivation in August is something to be shared with the African lungfish, alfalfa weevils and salamanders. For them, in the hottest season of the year it’s obligatory to conserve energy and retain water in the body for unluckily long periods. If they don’t wish to die, they must be taught to lower their metabolic rates. This is why August is a holiday month in civilized Europe, including Russia.

The organ most resistant to slowing down is the one which must keep up practicing what it does best; otherwise it loses its capacity to function altogether. The fingers of pianists, for example, must never stop practicing the piano, however hot August gets. The fingers of writers are the same. Even the lady bug and the cane toad usually handle the mortal risk of August aestivation better than people can. In August beasts worry about plain death.  People worry about living death; that’s when the brain slows down to the point of realizing that the fingers and other things work with embarrassing clumsiness, or not at all. (This isn’t about erectile dysfunction; the children in the audience may stay on the page and read on.) (more…)

by Editor - Friday, August 2nd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This month’s escalation of US and British threats to Iran’s oil export shipping and maritime defences in the Persian Gulf is to be matched with Russian assistance to the Iran Navy and to shore batteries of air defence missiles, as well as the 300-kilometre range Russian Kalibr missile, a US Navy ship-killer.

The Kalibr, according to US assessments, “skims just above the sea, making it difficult to detect at a distance, before leaping up to three times the speed of sound on the terminal approach—offering a challenging target for missile-defense systems. The Kalibr can be fired not only from underwater by submarines, but also by relatively small and cheap corvettes.”

Iran, according to its experts, has its own anti-shipping missiles and drones deployed along the Iranian coastline, on the sea surface and on board submarines, concentrating at the Strait of Hormuz.   What the Iranian arms may lack in speed, range and electronic capabilities, the introduction of Russian electronic counter-measures, which Russians sources say has begun, will assist by jamming or spoofing US tracking equipment.

The result has already been signalled by the British, German and French governments in their response to Trump Administration requests for a multinational naval convoy operation in the Persian Gulf, and also in response to Iranian warnings. At sea, Iranian naval commanders have already deterred the British with the warning: “don’t put your life in danger.” The response of the Europeans is the one from Germany’s Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister,  Olaf Scholz: “We must prevent an escalation that could end in a much bigger conflict. So I think that this [naval operation] is not the best idea.”

The British naval response has been to add a warship in the Gulf, the destroyer HMS Duncan.  But this has failed to add confidence to shippers. On July 30 British Petroleum’s (BP) chief financial officer Brian Gilvary rejected the efficacy of naval convoys to safeguard BP’s vessels. The company, he declared, “has no current plans to take any of its own vessels through the strait, adding that BP is shipping oil out of the region using chartered tankers.”   According to Gilvary, “we will continue to make shipments through there but you won’t see any BP-flagged tankers going through in the short term.”  In other words, it’s up to others to run their own risks of seizure or destruction. But for them the market has already decided by raising the cost of premiums that independent charterers should be deterred.  For the foreseeable future marine underwriters are requiring them to negotiate terms according to the specifics of the voyages proposed.  (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, August 1st, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Under cover of its Russian S-400 air defence batteries, and ignoring US and European sanctions, Turkey is going on the offensive at sea, surrounding Cyprus, and by land, launching a weapon against the European Union against which there is no defence: a Turkish cannon firing 150,000 people at Europe’s borders each month. They are the refugees from the wars the US and NATO launched in Iraq, Syria and Libya. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, July 28th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It appears that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his officials may have lied twice – the first time in February to deny they had discussed mediation in the Kashmir conflict with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; and the second time this week to deny that Modi discussed US mediation with President Donald Trump a fortnight ago.

Indian officials insist they never ask other states or leaders for mediation, and don’t lie about it. What they mean by ask and what they mean by mediation are not quite so clear. (more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The new Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of the Ukraine, elected on Sunday, will have an overwhelming national mandate to negotiate peace terms to end the five-year civil war.

Sluha Narodu (“Servant of the People”), the party of President Volodymyr Zelensky, having won more than 43% of the votes countrywide, will now command majorities of both the party-list and the single-constituency seats in the new parliament; 253 seats altogether out of 422, or a “mono-coalition” as the party is calling the result, or as the hostile Ukrainian media term it, “a landslide [which] has never occurred in the contemporary history of Ukraine and it is more typical for post-Soviet Asian dictatorships.”  

This beats earlier pollster predictions that Zelensky would be forced into a coalition with Holos (“The Voice”), a US-invented spoiler organization of Lvov region (Galicia) led by pop singer, Svyatoslav Vakarchuk.  He ended up  with less than 6% of the national votes, fewer than forecast. Holos has proved to be neither the voice of youth, nor an organization without oligarch support (it was backed by Victor Pinchuk), nor a political party at all.

Polling better than predicted was the Donbass (Donetsk, Lugansk regions) party, Opposition Platform led by Victor Medvedchuk, which ended up with 13% nationally; 48% in Lugansk; 42% in Donetsk; 24% in Odessa; and 19% in Nikolaev. If the additional votes of the eastern Opposition Bloc of Boris Kolesnikov and Vadim Novinsky are counted with Medvedchuk’s aggregate, together they have drawn majorities of 53% to 54%, putting Zelensky’s party in the east in a minority.

This is the first time democracy has defeated a US Government-installed putsch and junta in Europe since the election of Andreas Papandreou’s Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in 1982. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, July 22nd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials;  suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes;  and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time.

The sources of the breakthrough are Malaysian — Prime Minister of Malaysia Mohamad Mahathir; Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the officer in charge of the MH17 investigation for the Prime Minister’s Department and Malaysia’s National Security Council following the crash on July 17, 2014; and a forensic analysis by Malaysia’s OG IT Forensic Services of Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) telephone tapes which Dutch prosecutors have announced as genuine.

The 298 casualties of MH17 included 192 Dutch; 44 Malaysians; 27 Australians; 15 Indonesians.  The nationality counts vary because the airline manifest does not identify dual nationals of Australia, the UK, and the US. 

The new film throws the full weight of the Malaysian Government, one of the five members of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), against the published findings and the recent indictment of Russian suspects reported by the Dutch officials in charge of the JIT; in addition to Malaysia and The Netherlands, the members of the JIT are Australia, Ukraine and Belgium. Malaysia’s exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium’s inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained. 

The film reveals the Malaysian Government’s evidence for judging the JIT’s witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court.

For the first time also, the Malaysian Government reveals how it got in the way of attempts the US was organizing during the first week after the crash to launch a NATO military attack on eastern Ukraine. The cover story for that was to rescue the plane, passenger bodies, and evidence of what had caused the crash. In fact, the operation was aimed at defeating the separatist  movements in the Donbass, and to move against Russian-held Crimea.

The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them.  The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government’s opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27.   (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, July 21st, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

What can Foreign Affairs, bimonthly tribune of the Council of Foreign Affairs in New York, be referring to when it reported on the government for which “in worldview and practice, it was a conspiracy that perceived conspiracy everywhere and in everything, constantly gaslighting itself. In administration, it constituted a crusade for planning and control that ended up generating a proliferation of improvised illegalities, a perverse drive for order, and a system in which propaganda and myths about ‘the system’ were the most systematized part.”

Need a clue? On the head of government’s left foot two of his toes were webbed. Still stumped? (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, July 18th, 2019
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