by Evan Jones, Sydney, introduced by John Helmer @bears_with
Fascism is the combination of force, fraud, and propaganda which replaces constitutional rule by parliament and the rule of law.
Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, Germany under Hitler, Italy under Mussolini, and Greece under the Colonels, are 20th century examples in Europe. There are more recent and current ones — Ukraine since the putsch of February 21, 2014, is the obvious example. Another is French President Emmanuel Macron’s rule by decree, without the National Assembly, which began in 2020 with the emergency powers of the pandemic, and accelerated last week with the imposition of “pension reform” by decree, instead of parliamentary vote.
Outside Europe, there are the Australians who have been testing, training and practising fascist rule since the beginning of the pandemic. So successful were they at that, they managed to keep several hundred thousand of their own citizens out of the country on a deception, unvoted by parliament, untested in the courts, but approved by the mass media. They are now preparing the population to go to war against China.
One of the chapters of the Australian story has just been reviewed by Evan Jones in Independent Australia, an internet site published in Brisbane. Here’s the site; read on for the review.
Igor Zyuzin (lead image), owner of the Mechel steel and coal group, and one of the few Russian metals oligarchs not presently sanctioned by the US, is a running sore on the Kremlin’s policy of halting, and also continuing, industrial pollution.
From his base in Chelyabinsk, and at factories, mines, and ports from Moscow through the Urals to the Pacific coast, Zyuzin has defied decades of protests by residents, city and region investigations, court rulings, and promises by federal officials to stop the water, ground, and air pollution which his businesses have been producing.
Zyuzin is now telling the Kremlin he wants permission for more – more pollution, that is, at lower cost to the profit line on his balance-sheet.
The emergency economic measures being adopted for the war in the Ukraine, Zyuzin is claiming, should now relieve him and his company executives of criminal liability for intentional pollution, and Article 251 of the Criminal Code should be cancelled. This provision in the Russian law allows regulators, prosecutors and courts to force the dismissal of culpable managers or to send them to prison for up to one year.
Zyuzin has appealed through the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE), the oligarch lobby, for President Vladimir Putin to do this by implementing the promise announced in his Federal Assembly address last month. “I will repeat,” Putin said on February 21, “against the backdrop of external attempts to contain Russia, private businesses have proven their ability to quickly adapt to the changing environment and ensure economic growth in difficult conditions. So, every business initiative aimed at benefiting the country should receive support. I believe it is necessary to return, in this context, to the revision of a number of norms of criminal law as regards the economic elements of crime. Of course, the state must control what is happening in this area. We should not allow an anything-goes attitude here, but we should not go too far either. It is necessary to move faster towards the decriminalisation I mentioned.”
“Everything we do is solidly rooted in market principles…We have avoided having to apply excessive regulation or distorting the economy by giving the state a more prominent role,” Putin added.
The head of the RUIE lobby, Alexander Shokin, has been a Zyuzin retainer for many years. Over this time he and Zyuzin have persuaded Putin to accept the principle that Mechel should be allowed to violate the anti-pollution laws on condition it pays small cash penalties for its poison.
If China’s journalists, foreign intelligence analysts, and People’s Navy staff have needed an opportunity to demonstrate, if not to the Middle Kingdom audience, then to the US exceptionalist public how peripheral and how mediocre American legends have become, Seymour Hersh has provided it in an interview Hersh (lead image, right) recorded with China’s state broadcaster CGTN on Saturday.
For the first time since Hersh’s earlier interviews with American, British, German, and Russian reporters, Hersh faced skepticism and cross-examination of the account he published on February 8 of what he claimed then, and insists still, was a joint US and Norwegian operation to destroy the Nord Stream gas pipelines on September 26, 2022.
According to Hersh, the operation was directed by the White House and ordered by President Joseph Biden, with the reluctant support of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In his 28-minute interview with Liu Xin (left), Hersh repeats his original claims; makes fresh mistakes of fact; discloses new source information.
Hersh also reveals he is so confident of the seniority and veracity of his US intelligence ageny source – make that the CIA – he is not reading nor understanding the fresh evidence which has been published in the German mainstream media, the international internet, the US alt-media, and the New York Times. Dismissing it all, while revealing he has analyzed none of it, Hersh told Beijing television: “they are trying to divert attention from the story I wrote.”
Hersh also reveals that for verification of his story, he employed fact-checkers from the New Yorker, the most virulently anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian magazine in New York.
In the original story of The Riddle of the Sands, two Englishmen sailing a yacht in the Frisian islands of the North Sea discover evidence of German military preparations to go to war and invade England. That was the plot of Erskine Childers’s novel of 1903, based on his yachting logs of several years before. It was the first of the spy novel genre – a best-seller, and a political warning at a time when few in the UK took German intentions and war plans seriously.
In this week’s broadcast, the newest German plot is discussed for war against Russia, culminating in the involvement of German officials and Green Party politicians in the operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines last September. The new machination is 400 kilometres to the east of the old Childers plot.
Did a yacht sailing from Rostock around the Darss peninsula rendezvous with a team of British-trained Ukrainian divers, their diving equipment, and a cargo of explosive which had been flown from Poland into an old Luftwaffe airfield? Was the yacht a decoy while the operational vessel was concealed or camouflaged by others moving above the pipelines in coordination?
What is revealed about the plot from the recovery of the detonation residues on the seabed and the bomb which reportedly failed to go off remains in the secret keeping of investigators from Germany, Denmark and Sweden. But how to tell the fact – motive, weapon, modus operandi, perpetrators — from the fiction appearing in the German and US press? These questions are asked and answered in the new broadcast.
Also breaking news is the Kinzhal raid of Thursday night – a salvo of six hypersonic Kh-47 missiles – which reportedly hit secret underground bunkers in Kiev and Lvov and dozens of Ukrainian and NATO officers directing the war in the east.
The broadcast winds up with an explanation of why Georgia cannot afford the latest US and European Union-inspired protests against Russia – and also why the Georgian government’s beggarly state budget can’t afford not to do what it is being told.
James Bamford is forty years late in discovering that Israel not only spies against the US, but does so constantly and comprehensively, effectively escaping prosecution at the highest levels of government in Washington, and almost always lower down.
Now almost 77 years of age, Bamford is not old enough to understand the reason for this is that the Israelis have managed a state capture in Washington that is longer lasting and more successful than the Ukrainians have pulled off for the Canadian government in Ottawa; or the Gupta brothers who took over the South African government in Pretoria. The last of these state captures was stopped in 2016 after just seven years.
Still, Bamford has convinced the French publisher Hachette to print a news update of the Israeli takeover of the US government.
The two of them reveal how exceptional they think this is by concealing the story over 215 pages (pp79-294) in the middle of Bamford’s 482-page book. Together, they have hidden any mention of Israel and its Zionist allies in the US from the dustjacket, flaps, and blurb on the outside of the book, and from the table of contents, chapter titles, and running page headers inside. As disguise goes in spycraft, this is not so deep. It’s more a case of loss of nerve compounded by ignorance of the eighty-year history of Zionist operations which began in the White House of President Franklin Roosevelt.
In Bamford’s subtitle – “Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence” — he presents an alibi and an excuse. No one is to blame except a handful of high-ranking officers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA) whom Bamford recommends retiring or discharging dishonourably. The excuse, according to Bamford’s tale, is that outwitted although the US security services may have been by the Israelis, the Americans have had one success – that’s the one against the Russians.
If the Israeli plots are facts with which Bamford excites readers as stranger than fiction, the Russian ones are fictions dressed up by his FBI, CIA and NSA sources to be stranger than facts. Most of them unidentified sources, natch.
In the history of the wars of the world, it almost never happens that the military strategy of a fighting state directs and revolutionizes the political strategy, and not the other way round — as aspiring politicians, military officers and policemen are taught by the venerable Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz to believe.
But it is happening in Europe now, on the Ukrainian battlefield, and in the war of the US and NATO alliance against Russia.
So long, Sun; so long, Carl; so long, Pardner!
For Russia it would never have turned out this way if President Boris Yeltsin had decided to run for a third term, ruling as medically incapable as President Joseph Biden, but deferring the succession until after Mikhail Khodorkovsky had sold the Yukos oil company to the US, and the other Russian oligarchs created by Yeltsin had followed suit. Heart, brain, and liver disease stopped the Yeltsin part of that. The Vladimir Putin succession plan then failed to deliver what had been intended.
What has remained of the plan of the destruction of Russia from those days is what there is today.
The oligarchs survive but, according to the terms of the US and NATO sanctions war, they cannot have their assets and freedom of movement back unless they overthrow Putin, change the regime in the Kremlin, and destroy the capability of the Russian military to defend the country.
The defensive strategy in response is obvious. Not only must the capacity of Ukrainian forces and their NATO weapons be destroyed at the front, and their remainder driven to a territorial line west of the Dnieper River, between Kiev and Lvov, out of range of Russian Crimea, Zaphorozhye, Kherson, Donetsk and Lugansk. Also, each of the NATO weapons must be defeated and destroyed which the US sends to the battlefield, and the airborne and ground systems for directing them at their Russian targets neutralized. .
If this Russian strategy succeeds, the implication for Europe – and the rest of the world (Taiwan) – will be plain. The US cannot defend NATO and NATO cannot defend its member states with a military capability that has been defeated. Article Five of the NATO treaty will become a dead letter. If and when that happens, the all-for-one-one-for-all principle of security in Europe which Article 5 promises will be replaced, first by the principle of every one for himself, and then by the principle of reciprocal security and non-aggression; that was the proposal of the Russian treaties of December 17, 2021.
The political strategy of the US and NATO for Russia, having failed with Yeltsin’s replacement of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, and then with Putin’s replacement of Yeltsin in 2000, now depends on the survival of the oligarch system inside Russia. This too is under attack — not from the Kremlin, but from the US and European sanctions war which has paralyzed the oligarchs and their networks in the west, and suspended their capital export schemes.
For the Russian oligarchs to hope to resume their business as usual in the post-war period, as they say they want, the war on the Ukrainian battlefield should be short and the terms of armistice and settlement suspensive, equivocal, inconsequential – like the Minsk accords of 2014-15. Ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel and ex-French President Francois Hollande have acknowledged why that is impossible for the Russian president, the General Staff, and the Russian people to accept.
The alternative Russian political strategy is the redirection of trade, capital, transport, and financial logistics to the east and south – principally China and India, but also Iran, Turkey, the Arab world, and in time, the African one. For this political strategy to succeed, the success of the military strategy in Europe is a parallel requirement, a pre-condition almost. And so, in the practical logic of politics, for Russian military strategy to succeed on its terms, the Russian oligarchy must be transformed. This is happening.
As the Russian military strategy succeeds on the battlefield, the political will of the European people must also be transformed. This too is happening. Not every battle on every front can be explained at once, though.
Listen to the discussion of Russian tactics in the Donbass, the General Staff strategy for the Ukraine, and the political divisions widening inside the NATO states.
Two Englishmen, Timothy Garton Ash (lead image, left) and Mark Leonard (right), and Ivan Krastev (centre), a Bulgarian, claim to have discovered from opinion polls they conducted in nine European Union (EU) countries during January that “since Russia’s war on Ukraine began, the US and its European allies have regained their unity and sense of purpose…Russia’s aggression in Ukraine marks both the consolidation of the West and the emergence of the long-heralded post-Western international order.”
“The growing hostility of Europeans towards Russia is reflected in their preference not to buy Russian fossil fuels even if it results in energy supply problems. This is the prevailing view in every one of the nine EU countries polled, with an average of 55 per cent of these EU citizens supporting it.It is now clear that, contrary to the Kremlin’s expectations, the war has consolidated the West, rather than weakened it.”
“Average” is a telltale admission from Ash, Leonard, and Krastev.
They have been employed to undertake the polling and write a summary of its reults by a European government think tank called the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Their report was published on February 22. Click to read it here.
This “average” result has been fabricated by counting the response percentages in each of the EU country polls and dividing by their sum, nine. This “average” distorts and conceals the large differences in the poll percentages between the most anti-Russian countries – Estonia and Poland – and the more pro-Russian and antiwar states, such as Italy, Spain, and Germany.
“Unity”, “consolidation”, and “hostility towards Russia” are the “prevailing view in every one of the nine EU countries” – that’s the headline conclusion from the think tank. It appears to mean the majority of people in Estonia think the same towards Russia and the war as the majority of Italians; the majority of Poles the same as the majority of Spaniards or Germans.
But the evidence from Ash, Leonard and Krastev is a slip of their tongue between “prevailing”, which is a political term that doesn’t mean numerical majority; and “average” which is an arithmetical operation which doesn’t measure difference – it erases the variation around the numerical mean.
Politically speaking about the Europe peoples, this is faking. “I found the degree to which the national EU findings were subsumed in the overall figures, so that Germany could be diluted by Poland, for instance, fairly blatant,” commented a British expert on the war.
Asked to clarify the methodology for his published conclusion, Krastev refused, saying “I am putting in cc my colleagues from ECFR as they can answer your question.”
Speaking for Krastev, Ash and Leonard, Andreas Bock, a Berlin-based spokesman for the ECFR, acknowledged the individual country tabulations for each of the poll questions asked in each of the European countries were available to the report authors. But when asked for a public or press copy of these data, Bock refused to disclose them. He claimed “we can’t provide the intra-European data as we are preparing another piece using this [sic] data”.
Ash has been travelling outside England, his secretary said, but he had received the request for evidence to substantiate what he had written, and he would be replying. He has not, however. “Misrepresenting research data, withholding research data tables, faking research results, refusing to substantiate factual claims, and representing propaganda as professional work are grave violations of duty, standard and conduct for the holder of a university professorship”, Ash was asked. “How do you respond?” He has not answered.
Ash, Leonard, and Krastev were asked by telephone and email to explain the stonewalling. “Is there a reason in evidence or interpretation why you believe this statement [of fabrication] does not apply to you?” There has been no response.
Football is the most popular sport Russians like to play and like to watch. Ice hockey comes second.
The connexion between football and ice hockey, apples and tomatoes is that Gennady Timchenko (lead image left) is the sanctioned oligarch who is now moving into domestic production of apples to substitute for imports; he has been a player, sponsor, financier and director of ice hockey clubs, associations, and stadiums in Russia and Finland. Yevgeny Giner (right) has been the long established owner of the Moscow football club CSKA, a financial director at the Russian Football Union, and stadium builder; he is now taking a position in tomatoes.
Why apples, why tomatoes, why now in Russia?
The reason is the war – and the way in which the US and NATO campaign to destroy the Russian economy is rebuilding it in directions and in sectors which the pre-war oligarchs had no wish, no incentive to consider.
By curtailing their freedom to export cash, capital, and assets outside Russia, the sanctions have forced the oligarchs to look for the right combination of investment factors in the domestic Russian market. Apples and tomatoes qualify for them because of the large and growing size of consumer demand; the relatively low level of domestic competition for market entry; and the determining role of the state in raising protection from imports, allocating low-cost land for production; and handing out budget cash to pay for borrowing, seed, fertilizer, and other purchases, machine leasing, tax relief, subsidized storage and transport to the point of sale – and price fixing. Traditional oligarch methods for consolidating assets, raiding and bankrupting small producers, and court corruption can flourish under the war emergency regulations administered by state planning committee apparatchiki. They have taken over where the state anti-monopoly and environment regulators left off.
And so, by striking at Putin’s cronies, as the US Treasury and the Office for Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) call them, with their long-arm prohibitions, freezes, and threats of confiscation, the warfighters are revolutionizing the domestic economy.
Think of this revolution as an apple a day to keep the oligarchs in play.
The brainwashing of the peoples of the NATO alliance is working much better with the British than the Americans. For the time being, Russia-hating is a peculiarly English phenomenon.
Almost half the Americans polled a month ago said they did not believe Russia was an adversary with whom the US is in conflict. The poll results were reported by a government-sponsored and financed think tank called the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), and the results published on February 22. Asked to say which prompt statement “best reflects your view on what Russia is to your country”, 55% of Americans took the war-fighting option. However, 14% replied that Russia was “an ally that shares our interests and values” or “a necessary partner with which we must strategically cooperate”; another 16% of Americans described Russia as “a rival with which we need to compete”; and 16% were non-committal, saying they “don’t know”.
Altogether, 46% of the national US sample refused to agree to the mainstream media line on Russia and the policy of the US Government and Congress.
By contrast, the proportion of British respondents polled who agreed Russia is the enemy in the present war was about two-thirds – 65% — while the dissenters numbered only 35%. Northern Ireland was not included in the survey, and the Scots were under-represented.
The European country results have been manipulated by the ECFR think tank, casting doubt on the first conclusion it reported that “Europeans are united in believing that Russia is an ‘adversary’ or a ‘rival’”, and the second conclusion of “the growing hostility of Europeans towards Russians”. This rigging was managed by withholding the separate poll results for France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and over-weighting the influence of Estonia, Poland, Denmark, and Romania in the consolidated European Union (EU9) result reported.
Interpretation of the results by a group of academics at St Antony’s College, Oxford, was paid for by US and German foundations which have published their anti-Russian views, like these: “Stiftung Mercator views the war against Ukraine also as an attack by Putin on European values, an attack directed against democracy, pluralism, freedom of opinion and freedom of the press throughout Europe.”
Despite the message of the money, one-third of the EU9 respondents resisted, saying they believe Russia is either an ally or partner, and 20% refused to give the pollsters an answer – the largest non-committal response in the entire survey worldwide.
Even more hostile to the sponsors of the survey were Indians, Chinese, and Turks. In India, where the surveys pressured respondents in face-to-face interviews, 80% insisted Russia is an ally or partner, and only 3% an enemy. In China, the opinion was almost identical — 79% and 5%, respectively. In Turkey 69% favoured alliance or partnership with Russia; 8% said Russia was an enemy; 5% said they didn’t know.
TNT Radio’s War of the Worlds programme broadcasts to provide the breaking news and analyses which the Don’t Knows of Europe and North America need to hear, before making up their minds. This is also information unpaid by the war-fighting governments of the NATO alliance, and by the German foundations committed to continuing the Wehrmacht aims of 1939. The broadcast is also an opportunity for the Irish and Scots to pull their ears out of Westminster’s hands.
This week the breaking news on microphone reveals the evidence of how and why the Kremlin gave US President Joseph Biden s safe-conduct pass to Kiev, with the caution that the Russians could give no “security guarantees” against an attack on Biden from Ukrainian fanatics afraid of a sell-out by Washington.
Listen also as the terms for an armistice and partition of the Ukraine are revealed in the Chinese Government’s twelve-point proposals for a political settlement of the war, released on Friday morning.
