Home » Posts tagged 'soviet union' (Page 5)

Tag Archives: soviet union

Above, you can see the full recording of a 2012 lecture given in Moscow by Dennis Meadows; one of the authors of “The Limits to Growth” report of 1972. It is long, more than an hour, but – if you don’t have the time to watch all of it – I suggest that you go to minute 21 and watch Dennis Meadows showing this book.

It is titled “Soviet Union and Russia in the global system.” According to Meadows, in the 1980s, Viktor Gelovani, first author of the book, adapted to the Soviet Union the world model used for “The Limits to Growth” and he ran it; finding that the Soviet Union was going to collapse. Then, Meadows says “he went to the leadership of the country and he said, ‘my forecast shows that you don’t have any possibility. You have to change your policies.’ And the leader said, ‘no, we have another possibility: you can change your forecast'”

Meadows’ anecdote is basically confirmed by Rindzevičiūtė, who wrote an excellent article that tells the whole story. It turns out that it is not true that “The Limits to Growth” was ignored in the Soviet Union, as it could be the impression from the documents available in the West. The “Limits” study was translated into Russian, although it was distributed only to very limited circles (generating, by the way, a brisk black market, as Rindzeviciute describes at p. 6). Several Soviet scientists knew very well the study, they had contacts with its authors and a number of them made a considerable effort to warn the Union’s leadership that the system was going to collapse. They didn’t have much success, as Meadows says in his talk.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Paul Craig Roberts’ Address to the International Conference on the European/Russian Crisis Created by Washington

June 20, 2015

Paul Craig Roberts’ Address to the International Conference on the European/Russian Crisis Created by Washington

Paul Craig Roberts’ address to the Conference on the European/Russian Crisis, Delphi, Greece, June 20-21, 2015

 Paul Craig Roberts, formerly Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy, Associate Editor, Wall Street Journal, Senior Research Fellow, Stanford University, William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

The United States has pursued empire since early in its history, but it was the Soviet collapse in 1991 that enabled Washington to see the entire world as its oyster.

The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in the rise of the neoconservatives to power and influence in the US government. The neoconservatives have interpreted the Soviet collapse as History’s choice of “American democratic capitalism” as the New World Order.

Chosen by History as the exceptional and indispensable country, Washington claims the right and the responsibility to impose its hegemony on the world. Neoconservatives regard their agenda to be too important to be constrained by domestic and international law or by the interests of other countries. Indeed, as the Unipower, Washington is required by the neoconservative doctrine to prevent the rise of other countries that could constrain American power.

Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neoconservative, penned the Wolfowitz Doctrine shortly after the Soviet collapse. This doctrine is the basis of US foreign and military policy.

The doctrine states:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Even More Admitted False Flag Terror Incidents Come to Light

May 20, 2015

Even More Admitted False Flag Terror Incidents Come to Light

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror

Every time we look, we find new admissions of false flag terror attacks.

In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:

(1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this.

(2) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland.

(3) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goeringadmitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(4) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

No, you can’t go back to the USSR!

May 19, 2015

No, you can’t go back to the USSR!

One of the fake stories kept alive by certain American politicians, with the help of western media, is that Vladimir Putin (who, they vacuously claim, is a dictator and a tyrant) wants to reconstitute the USSR, with the annexation of Crimea as the first step.

Instead of listening to their gossip, let’s lay out the facts.

The USSR was officially dissolved on December 26, 1991 by declaration №142-H of the Supreme Soviet. It acknowledged the independence of the 15 Soviet republics, and in the place of the USSR created a Commonwealth of Independent States, which hasn’t amounted to much.

In the west, there was much rejoicing, and everyone assumed that in the east everyone was rejoicing as well. Well, that’s a funny thing, actually, because a union-wide referendum held on March 17, 1991, produced a stunning result: with over 80% turnout, of the 185,647,355 people who voted 113,512,812 voted to preserve the USSR. That’s 77.85%—not exactly a slim majority. Their wishes were disregarded.

Was this public sentiment temporary, borne of fear in the face of uncertainty? And if it were to persist, it would surely be a purely Russian thing, because the populations of all these other Independent States, having tasted freedom, would never consider rejoining Russia. Well, that’s another funny thing: in September of 2011, fully two decades after the referendum, Ukrainian sociologists found out that 30% of the people there wished for a return to a Soviet-style planned economy (stunningly, 17% of these were young people with no experience of life in the USSR) and only 22% wished for some sort of European-style democracy. The wish for a return to Soviet-style central planning is telling: it shows just how miserable a failure the Ukraine’s experiment with instituting a western-style market economy had become. But, again, their wishes were disregarded.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Do You Want Total War?

May 13, 2015

Do You Want Total War?

70 Years Since the End of WW2

Last week Russia celebrated the 70^th anniversary of “V Day” over Nazi Germany with a traditional huge military parade in Moscow.

resized_99265-russia-victory-parade_will_61-19595_t630 Military parade in Moscow on May 9, celebrating the victory over Nazi Germany

Photo credit: RT

However, this year the celebrations were marred by the fact that many Western political leaders decided to stay away from Moscow in protest over the Ukraine situation. As Eric Margolis remarks, this snub seems quite churlish, especially if one considers that Russia made the biggest sacrifices by far in WW2 (Margolis’ article has all the grisly details, the most striking of which is the fact roughly 27 million Russians lost their lives between 1941 and 1945. Russia accounted for nearly 80% of all allied war casualties). Moreover, without Russia’s participation in the war, Hitler may well have ended up winning it. Eventually the political and economic system the Nazis had erected would have crashed and burned anyway, but without the expansion of the war to a second front, it would have been very difficult and costly to dislodge the Germans from the territories they had conquered.

To be sure, Hitler and Stalin – the dictators leading two of the most bloodthirsty and murderous governments in the history of the world – were allies before Hitler decided to unilaterally call the alliance off by invading Russia. When Hitler’s Wehrmacht began to attack Russia, Stalin at first simply couldn’t believe it. He allegedlyliterally denied that the reports of Hitler’s invasion were true. Hitler’s armies were already closing in on Moscow, when the other members of the Soviet Politburo arrived at Stalin’s dacha one day, in which he had hidden himself away for two weeks, refusing to communicate with anyone.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Grisly Truth About How World War II Was Won

May 9, 2015

The Grisly Truth About How World War II Was Won

It was churlish for western leaders to boycott this week’s Victory Parade in Moscow that commemorated the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany 70 years ago.

Historic events are facts that should not be manipulated according to the latest political fashions. Being angry at Moscow for mucking about in Ukraine does not in any way lessen the glory, admiration and thanks owed to the Russian people for their heroism during World War II.

Americans and Canadians like to believe they won the war in Europe and give insufficient recognition to the decisive Soviet role. Most Europeans would rather not think about the matter. By contrast, Russians know that it was their soldiers who really won the war. They remain angry that their military achievements are ignored by American triumphalists and myth -makers.

Not only did Stalin’s Soviet Union play the key role in crushing Nazi Germany, its huge sacrifices saved the lives of countless American, British and Canadian soldiers. Were it not for the USSR’s victory, Nazi Germany might be alive and well today.

Let’s do the numbers. The Soviet armed forces destroyed 507 German division and 100 allied Axis divisions (according to Soviet figures). These latter included the pan-European Waffen SS whose largest numbers came from Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland and a division from Spain.

Soviet military historians claim their forces destroyed 77,000 enemy planes, 48,000 enemy tanks and armored vehicles. The Red Army accounted for 75-80% of Axis casualties in World war II.

In the process, 1,710 Russian cities, 70,000 towns and villages, 31,850 factories or and 1,974 collective farms were destroyed. Add 84,000 schools, 43,000 libraries and 65,000 km of railway.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Great Oil Game: Resource Crisis in Russia?

May 6, 2015

The Great Oil Game: Resource Crisis in Russia?

Weekly pageviews of “Resource Crisis.” My blog seems to be having a remarkable success in Russia, but do the Russians understand the problem of resource depletion?

Complex structures, such as states and empires, are always prone to collapse and they usually give little or no previous warnings. The collapse of the Soviet Union, indeed, had not been predicted by anyone and it came completely unexpected. In the present crisis, instead, Western analysts seem to have fallen in the opposite mistake, predicting the rapid demise of the Russian Federation. But that didn’t happen. On the contrary, the Russian economic system showed a remarkable resilience and it strongly rebounded after a bad moment, last year. (image below from Bloomberg).

So, predicting collapses is always very difficult in a world’s situation that looks more and more like a Russian Roulette (an appropriate name in this context), but played with nuclear weapons. It might well be that some states which at present look very solid could be the ones to experience a sudden and unexpected Soviet-style implosion (let me not say which ones these states could be).

Let’s go more in depth in this matter. The collapse of Russia was expected in the West mainly as the result of the recent crash of the world’s oil market. That repeated the situation of the late 1980s, when the old USSR was bankrupted by a similar effect: a rapid fall of oil prices which strongly reduced the revenues from oil exports.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Choice Before Europe

May 6, 2015

The Choice Before Europe

Washington continues to drive Europe toward one or the other of the two most likely outcomes of the orchestrated conflict with Russia. Either Europe or some European Union member government will break from Washington over the issue of Russian sanctions, thereby forcing the EU off of the path of conflict with Russia, or Europe will be pushed into military conflict with Russia.

In June the Russian sanctions expire unless each member government of the EU votes to continue the sanctions. Several governments have spoken against a continuation. For example, the governments of the Czech Republic and Greece have expressed dissatisfaction with the sanctions.

US Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged growing opposition to the sanctions among some European governments. Employing the three tools of US foreign policy–threats, bribery, and coercion–he warned Europe to renew the sanctions or there would be retribution. We will see in June if Washington’s threat has quelled the rebellion.

Europe has to consider the strength of Washington’s threat of retribution against the cost of a continuing and worsening conflict with Russia. This conflict is not in Europe’s economic or political interest, and the conflict has the risk of breaking out into war that would destroy Europe.

Since the end of World War II Europeans have been accustomed to following Washington’s lead. For awhile France went her own way, and there were some political parties in Germany and Italy that considered Washington to be as much of a threat to European independence as the Soviet Union. Over time, using money and false flag operations, such as Operation Gladio, Washington marginalized politicians and political parties that did not follow Washington’s lead.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NATO Increasingly Surrounds the ‘Russian Threat’

April 20, 2015

NATO Increasingly Surrounds the ‘Russian Threat’

On Saturday, April 18th, the Commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, Ben Hodges, told Britain’sTelegraph that “There is a Russian threat,” and that “The best insurance we have against a showdown is that NATO stands together.”

Ever since the Soviet Union’s military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, dissolved in 1991, NATO has expanded eastward to Russia’s borders, and now it is preparing to admit yet another nation on Russia’s border: Ukraine. This eastward expansion broke (and breaks, since it’s continuing) a verbal agreement which had produced the termination of the Warsaw Pact (the Soviet Union’s equivalent of America’s NATO alliance).

In February 1990, U.S. President George H.W. Bush sent his Secretary of State, James Baker, to Moscow to negotiate with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev an end to the Cold War. According to Jack Matlock, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union then, Baker offered Gorbachev the following deal: “Assuming there is no expansion of NATO jurisdiction to the East, not one inch, what would you prefer, a Germany embedded in NATO, or one that can go independently in any direction it chooses.”

Baker knew that Russia, after Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941 (“Operation Barbarossa”), feared, more than anything, the possibility that an independent Germany would build a nuclear-weapons force and use it against Russia. According to Ray McGovern’s account of the meeting, Gorbachev “wasted little time agreeing to the deal.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The “Deep State” Is Now in Charge

March 30, 2015

The “Deep State” Is Now in Charge

The Most Important Change

But when he is disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

– Plato on tyrants, The Republic

This is the last in our series on how America’s money, economy and government have changed since the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement and the end of gold-backed money.

Today, we keep the focus on government… and what it has become. The period is hardly coincidental: On August 15, 1971, President Nixon hammered the last nail in the coffin of honest money.

It was not the only reason for the profound changes that followed. There was also the opening up of Communist China to capitalism, the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Internet, to name just a few. But the new credit-based money system was the least obvious change… and probably the most important.

Caution: “Deep State” at Work

The credit-based dollar brought about a new economy. It changed the way people thought and the way their government operated. Now, deep pools of money determine which candidates are presented to voters.

And there is a new branch of government: the “Deep State.” It is not mentioned in the Constitution. And it operates above and beyond the visible process of democratic government.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Obama’s Double-Standard on Russia

March 19, 2015

Obama’s Double-Standard on Russia

He Attacks Russia, then Condemn’s Putin for Defending Russia from His Attack

Ukraine is considered by geostrategists (both Republican and Democratic) to be militarily the most important adjoining nation to Russia, serving as the chief buffer to attacks against Russia from the west. Since 1783, Russia has had its key Black Sea naval base located in Crimea, which used to be part of Russia 1783-1954; the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev blithely donated Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, though the residents in Crimea didn’t want that — and no referendum was taken on it. After the Soviet Union broke up in 1992, this naval base continued but instead on a long-term lease from Ukraine.

For Ukraine to become anti-Russian would be like for Mexico to become anti-American: even worse than when Cuba became anti-American in 1959. Mexico, of course, isn’t anti-American, but, during Barack Obama’s second term, Ukraine did, indeed, become anti-Russian. It happened not via any democratic revolution (such as American propaganda pretended), but via a bloody coup. Here is how it transpired:

After Mr. Obama (who had been raised surrounded by CIA operatives) finally became elected to a second term, he switched his key official controlling Ukrainian policy from the benign internationalist Philip Gordon, who considered America’s chief enemy to be global jihadism, to the hard-right America-supremacist Victoria Nuland, who considers America’s chief enemy to be instead the nation of Russia.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The EU’s Stalinesque “4 Year Plan”

March 14, 2015

The EU’s Stalinesque “4 Year Plan”

They Didn’t Want to Call it the “5 Year Plan”

We have already commented on previous occasions on the EU’s “investment plan” (see: “EU Planning to Spend Money it Doesn’t Have” for details), which is bound to result in the production of countless white elephants across Europe (such as Poland’s “ghost airports”). These investments are apt to “boost GDP” in a number of countries, but will very likely leave nothing but proverbial bridges to nowhere behind. It is going to be yet another giant waste of scarce resources.

Apparently the EU has now given its placet to a “Four Year Plan” with the aim of investinf €315 billion, with various EU governments vying for the best place at the trough. It seems they didn’t want to make it a “Five Year Plan” – that would have been too reminiscent of the Soviet GOSPLAN agency, so a four year plan was adopted. However, what they may not have been aware of is that Stalin actually gave orders that the Soviet Union’s five year plans had to be fulfilled in four years:

5 year plan in four years An old Soviet GOSPLAN poster: “Let’s fulfill the five year plan in four years!”

As Reuters reports on this latest giant boondoggle thought up by the administrative apparatus of the European socialist superstate project:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Stupid Do They Think We Are?

February 14, 2015

How Stupid Do They Think We Are?

Newsweek magazine headlined on February 5th, “‘Biggest NATO Reinforcement Since Cold War’ Sets Frontlines Against Russia,” and reported that, “According to general Charles Wald, former-deputy commander of U.S. European Command, … ‘The question for Europe is: is Putin creeping further and further west?’” Wald is quoted as saying that the case of Ukraine especially worries him. This article continues: “‘Is this a precursor to Russia moving into Moldova? Nagorno Karabakh has been bubbling up, and the Georgia issue is still unresolved. NATO has essentially set these [new military] bases in its frontline states,’ Wald says, referring to the countries’ proximity to Russian territory.”

So: Russia is moving too close to NATO countries, according to the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department.

But it’s a blatant lie. Actually, since 1999, 11 former members of the Warsaw Pact, countries, which had been allied with Russia during the communist Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, have switched to the U.S. military alliance against their former ally Russia, NATO: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Albania.

So: Russia hasn’t been moving at all, not an inch; but the U.S. certainly has — by surrounding Russia with its NATO missiles.

This Newsweek story is ‘news’ that’s published in a mainstream U.S. ‘news’ source, which people pay bad money for — it’s worse than a waste, it’s their being charged for U.S.-Government propaganda.

Here is authentic news, from an authentic news source — news which had been posted just four days earlier than that Newsweek lie, on February 1st — news that was posted at the Fort Russ blog, which not only is free, but it’s the most thorough and reliably truthful news site of all on the Ukrainian conflict:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A New Sino-Russian Alliance?

January 12, 2015

A New Sino-Russian Alliance?

CAMBRIDGE – Some analysts believe that 2014 ushered in a new era of Cold War-style geopolitics. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea was met with heavy economic sanctions from Europe and the United States, weakening Russia’s ties with the West and leaving the Kremlin eager to strengthen ties with China. The question is whether Russia will manage to build a real alliance with the People’s Republic.

At first glance, it seems plausible. Indeed, traditional balance-of-power theory suggests that US primacy in power resources should be offset by a Sino-Russian partnership.

Perhaps more convincing, there seems to be historical precedent for such a partnership. In the 1950s, China and the Soviet Union were allied against the US. After US President Richard Nixon’s opening to China in l972, the balance shifted, with the US and China cooperating to limit what they viewed as a dangerous rise in the Soviet Union’s power.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that de facto US-China alliance ended, and a China-Russia rapprochement began. In 1992, the two countries declared that they were pursuing a “constructive partnership”; in 1996, they progressed toward a “strategic partnership”; and in 2001, they signed a treaty of “friendship and cooperation.”

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russia-china-alliance-by-joseph-s–nye-2015-01#WoUPW2M50rsJT1Aq.99

According To Russell Napier Which World Has No Volume, No Volatility And Rising Prices? The USSR | Zero Hedge

October 29, 2014

According To Russell Napier Which World Has No Volume, No Volatility And Rising Prices? The USSR | Zero Hedge.

Great Expectations, Pregnant Pandas and Last Wednesday’s Treasury Market

“I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”

– Estella, Great Expectations

What sort of financial world is a world with no volumes, no volatility and steadily rising prices? The only historical example is perhaps the Soviet Union. When the marginal buyer of any product is the state, or its handmaiden the central bank, then simply nothing happens until the state comes out to play.

Across the world the owners of private sector assets sleep under palm trees in Bangkok, relax over mahjong in Beijing, play sudoku in Berlin, read The Sun newspaper in London or take turns to appear on CNBC in New York – all awaiting the arrival of the state. No two private parties will enter a bargain in the absence of the state, for what if the state does not like their price? Then the price will be moved by state fiat and one, or perhaps both, of those parties will look very foolish indeed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: soviet union

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

The Most Important Change

Caution: “Deep State” at Work

They Didn’t Want to Call it the “5 Year Plan”

Post navigation

Latest Posts