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The fallout from the Salisbury nerve agent attack reminds us of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which was the most immediate catalyst – of many parallel narrative and sequences of events – that ultimately resulted in World War I. We are not alone in this reasoning, as one high-level retired Russian general warns the Salisbury poisoning could lead to the “last war in the history of mankind.”

Ret. Lieutenant-General Evgeny Buzhinsky — who served in the Russian Armed Forces for more than forty years — said relations between Russia and Washington could become “worse” than the climax of the Cold War and “end up in a very, very bad outcome” following the nerve gas attack in the United Kingdom.

More than 150 Russian diplomats have been expelled from 25 countries — including 23 from the United Kingdom since western nations accused Russia of being the sole actor responsible for using deadly chemical weapons on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in their Salisbury home.

Buzhinsky, who is now the senior vice president of the Russian Center for Policy Studies (PIR Center), told BBC Radio Today program:

“Please, when you say the world, you mean EU and United States and some other countries … you see it’s a cold war, it’s worse than the Cold War because if the situation will develop in the way this (is) now, I’m afraid that it will end up in a very, very bad outcome.”

Nicholas Robinson, a British presenter on the BBC’s Today program pressed Buzhinsky on what he meant by “worse than a cold war,” to which the Ret. Russian Lieutenant-General responded with this bombshell: today’s current situation is spiraling out of control and could develop into a “real war.”

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

Mass Deception and the Prelude to World War

April 4, 2018

Mass Deception and the Prelude to World War

In Libya, NATO bombed a path to Tripoli to help its proxy forces on the ground oust Gaddafi. Tens of thousands lost their lives and that country’s social fabric and infrastructure now lies in ruins. Gaddafi was murdered and his plans to assert African independence and undermine Western (not least French) hegemony on that continent have been rendered obsolete.

In Syria, the US, Turkey, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been helping to arm militants. The Daily Telegraph’s March 2013 article “US and Europe in ‘major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb’” reported that 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia had been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels. The New York Times March 2013 article “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With CIA Aid” stated that Arab governments and Turkey had sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters. This aid included more than 160 military cargo flights.

Sold under the notion of a spontaneous democratic uprising against a tyrannical political leader, Syria is little more than an illegal war for capital, empire and energy. The West and its allies have been instrumental in organising the war as elaborated by Tim Anderson in his book ‘The Dirty War on Syria’.

Over the last 15 years or so, politicians and the media have been manipulating popular sentiment to get an increasingly war-fatigued Western public to support ongoing wars under the notion of protecting civilians or a bogus ‘war on terror’. They spin a yarn about securing women’s rights or a war on terror in Afghanistan, removing despots from power in Iraq, Libya or Syria or protecting human life, while then going on to attack or help destabilise countries, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.

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U.S. and Russia Making Preparations for World War III

April 2, 2018

U.S. and Russia Making Preparations for World War III

The anti-neoconservative Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who had been the chief aide to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and had opposed America’s invading Iraq, spoke on March 2nd explaining how the U.S. and Russia are drifting ever-more-rapidly into World War III. He said it’s essentially the same way that England and Germany drifted into WW I: being sucked in by their entangling web of foreign alliances. However, as he sees it, the role that Sarajevo played to spark world-war in 1914, is being performed this time by Israel. Instead of the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip igniting the war by assassinating in Sarajevo the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, Benjamin Netanyahu is igniting this war throughout the Middle East, by escalating his campaign to conquer Shiites in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon — overthrowing and replacing the governments there (which would then become controlled by allies of the anti-Shiite Sunni regime in U.S.-Israel-allied Saudi Arabia), and also aiming ultimately to expand Israel itself, to take over Jordan so as to confirm biblical prophesy.

And, as Wilkerson sees it, Netanyahu is also fronting for the Saud family: the Israel lobby is fronting not only for Israel’s aristocracy, but for Saudi Arabia’s. (Whereas Israel works both inside and outside the U.S. Government to control the U.S. Government, the Sauds, which are the world’s richest family, work only inside the U.S. Government, by outright buying it; so, unlike the Jewish billionaires who control Israel, they don’t need acceptance by the American people; and each time the Sauds try, they fail at it.) However, since Wilkerson’s speech was being sponsored by organizations that oppose Israel’s lobbyists, most of it dealt with Israel’s side of the Israel-Saud alliance that controls U.S. foreign policies (especially in the Middle East). (The U.S. aristocracy’s hostility toward Russia is, however, its own; it is primary for America’s billionaires, but not for Israel’s aristocracy, and also not for the Sauds — both of which aristocracies are instead focused mainly against Iran and Shiites.)

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

“Uncontroversial” Mass Destruction

April 2, 2018

“Uncontroversial” Mass Destruction

“There are two sets of scenarios in which a US president might order a nuclear strike. The first is relatively straightforward and uncontroversial: launching a retaliatory attack after or during an enemy nuclear attack.”

Richard Betts and Matthew Waxman, who wrote this sentence in Foreign Policy magazine, ignore military, scientific and humanitarian exposés, reports and confessions that have unified most of the world against any and all use of nuclear weapons. After decades of well-documented analysis of their effects, the bland assertion that war with nuclear weapons would be “uncontroversial” betrays ignorance of the literature or the deliberate use of disinformation, or both.

International stigmatization of the Bomb (outside nuclear weapons states) reached an extraordinary milestone last July 7 when the UN adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—the first legally binding international agreement to prohibit nuclear weapons, with the goal of leading to their total elimination. With painstakingly research, the International Committee of the Red Cross was instrumental in informing the Ban Treaty negotiators that no state or international body could ever adequately address the inevitable, irreversible and catastrophic health effects of even a limited nuclear attack.

Betts and Waxman today sound much like presidential advisor and Cold War hawk Paul Nitze, whose 1956 article “Atoms, Strategy & Policy” in the same magazine considered “massive retaliation” versus “graduated deterrence.” Dr. Nitze wrote then: “The main point at issue between the two concepts is the reliance which should be placed upon the capacity to bomb centers of population and industry with nuclear weapons.”

Dr. Nitze, a life-long proponent of nuclear weapons, stunningly reversed himself in 1999 by completely rejecting US nuclear war policy. In a New York Times op/ed titled “A Threat Mostly to Ourselves” Nitze wrote, “I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them … adds nothing to our security. I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us.”

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

Getting Ready for Nuclear War

March 30, 2018

Getting Ready for Nuclear War

Photo by Steve Snodgrass | CC BY 2.0

John Bolton is to assume the appointment as President Trump’s National Security Adviser on April 9. On February 28 he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “it is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first,” which would undoubtedly lead to explosion of at least one nuclear device by whoever might remain alive in the Pyongyang regime after the US attack. In a macabre echo of the alleged link between Iraq and Al Qaeda before the US invasion, Bolton said on March 23 that “Little is known, at least publicly, about longstanding Iranian-North Korean cooperation on nuclear and ballistic-missile technology. It is foolish to play down Tehran’s threat because of Pyongyang’s provocations.”

Link and bomb, and get ready for yet more war.

On August 9, 2017 President Trump tweeted “My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before.”

This declaration of US achievement and nuclear policy was apparently intended to intimidate the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, who tested a nuclear-capable ballistic missile three months later, following which the US president issued an insulting tweet that referred to him as “Little Rocket Man.” The level of international dialogue and diplomacy sank to yet a new low which was enthusiastically reciprocated by Kim, but Trump gave a rare exhibition of common sense on November 11, 2017 by asking “When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. There [meaning they’re] always playing politics — bad for our country . . .”

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

3 Recent Events That Could Send the US Hurtling Toward World War III

March 29, 2018

3 Recent Events That Could Send the US Hurtling Toward World War III

Recently, the news has been all abuzz with teen activists who want to take away our guns but refuse to use clear backpacks, the Facebook privacy scandal, and how someone bit Beyonce in the face. But there are three recent events that aren’t getting much press which tell us it is entirely possible that we could be headed toward World War III at worst and toward an economic collapse at best.

During the election, it really seemed as though Hillary Clinton as president would be a much more likely path to World War III. She even gloated of the actions she planned to take that would have led directly and immediately to war. Donald Trump as president seemed less likely to get us into a war with Russia, but it appears the tides may have turned back in that direction.

#1) The Trade Tariffs

We’re already at financial war with China due to punitive trade tariffs that our governments are instituting on one another. President Trump wants to rebalance global trade in America’s favor, and China isn’t going to go down without a fight. Here’s more information on the list of tariffs the US wants to charge for Chinese merchandise and the retaliatory list from China.

The last time we were involved in a major trade war, the Great Depression happened, according to an economics expert for CNN.

America’s last trade war exacerbated the Great Depression in the 1930s, when unemployment rose to 25%. Claiming it was protecting American jobs, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930. The original bill was meant to protect farmers. But to build political support, many lawmakers asked for tariffs — or taxes — on all sorts of goods in exchange for their vote.

Several nations, such as Canada, slapped steep tariffs — or taxes — on US goods shipped and sold abroad. For example, US exports of eggs to Canada fell to 7,900 in 1932 from 919,000 in 1929, according to Doug Irwin, a Dartmouth professor and former trade adviser to President Reagan.

The result: US imports fell 40% in the two years after Smoot-Hawley. Banks shuttered. Unemployment shot up. Surely, there were a litany of factors at play. But economists widely agree Smoot-Hawley made the Great Depression much worse than otherwise. (source)

And what happened at the end of the Great Depression? World War II happened, and this ended the unemployment and resulted in a spending frenzy that pumped up the economy. There’s always an increase in the GDP during wartime due to defense spending. But that is one hell of a bad way to fix the economy, don’t you think?

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

Tensions Rise Between China And The U.S. Inching World Closer To WW3

March 28, 2018

Tensions Rise Between China And The U.S. Inching World Closer To WW3

While half the media is distracted and obsessed about an extramarital affair that U.S. President Donald Trump allegedly had a decade ago with Stormy Daniels, U.S. geopolitical policy has been shifting towards China, putting us all in danger of conflict with the Communist superpower which has recently become a dictatorship with moves against human rights and presidential rights shifting back to a dynasty style of government.

Over the past few weeks, several events have elevated the U.S. geopolitical tension with China which since the Obama administration has been in turmoil after failed diplomatic discussions. It all started in 2012 when China and the Philippines engaged in a lengthy maritime feud which resulted in rejections of the verdict by China in 2016, increasing the chances of potential conflict in the region.

In 2016, an arbitration court ruled that China had(s) no historic title over the waters of the South China Sea and that it in doing so breached the Philippines’ sovereign rights with its actions.

China reacted by boycotting the proceedings, rejecting them and stating that the ruling was “ill-founded.”

Last November, China announced the creation of two Chinese-controlled international maritime courts that would be used to provide China’s interpretation of maritime law, Epoch Times reported.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte responded by stating the man-made islands aren’t pointed at us.

“It’s not intended for us. The contending ideological powers of the world or the geopolitics has greatly changed. It’s really intended against those who the Chinese think would destroy them and that is America,” Duterte noted. “We did nothing.”

The Philippines also just announced possible discussions for joint South China Sea projects only last week, which may be an attempt to ease the tension, Japan Times reported.

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

A World War Might Sound Crazy, but It Could Be America’s Last Act of Desperation

March 21, 2018

A World War Might Sound Crazy, but It Could Be America’s Last Act of Desperation

(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed)— Though some have been warning about the catastrophic potential for a third global conflict for years, it wasn’t until recently that these warnings became more mainstream. The calamitous nature of the violence in Syria — which has one nuclear power defending a government that has been the target of a regime change operation led by the world’s superpower — combined with 2017’s threats of “fire and fury” against another state intently pursuing a nuclear weapons supply of its own, has pushed the issue of a third world war directly into the public discourse.

While certain hotspots throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe (i.e. Ukraine) have seen some notable escalations in the last few years, a direct conflict between Russia and the United States is still yet to emerge. That’s because the idea of a third world war in today’s world is completely insane. If the two countries that currently possess the world’s greatest supplies of nuclear weapons go to war, there may not be a world left for the victors to inhabit after the war is done, thereby making it an unthinkable proposal.

Then again, the U.S. did just recently bomb a significant number of Russian-linked forces in Syria, reportedly killing scores of them. The targets of these air strikes were also predominantly Iranian-backed militias (just in case there weren’t enough state actors already involved in this ongoing conflict).

Speaking of Iran, Donald Trump recently fired Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and immediately appointed CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace him. Pompeo is a notable anti-Iran hawk who will almost certainly go further than Tillerson was ever prepared to go with regard to the Iranian nuclear accord, a deal Pompeo believes is “disastrous.”

There are also reports now emerging that Donald Trump is planning to oust his national security advisor, General H.R. McMaster. McMaster originally replaced anti-Iran war hawk Michael Flynn, but apparently, McMaster’s non-stop allegations against Iran were not enough to please Trump. McMaster was not on board with Trump’s attempt to completely derail the Iranian nuclear deal.

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

Can Nuclear War Be Avoided?

March 19, 2018

Can Nuclear War Be Avoided?

Two factors are driving the world to nuclear war. One is the constant stream of insults, false accusations and broken agreements that the West has been dumping on Russia year after year. The other is Russia’s response, or, perhaps more correctly, the lack thereof.

Articles documenting Washington’s betrayals and provocations of Russia are available online and on my website. There is no point in repeating them here.

I have pointed out that the Russian government’s factual, diplomatic, and legal responses actually produce more provocations and insults. See, for example, https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/03/17/war-is-on-the-horizon/ Stephen Lendman agrees (http://stephenlendman.org/2018/03/russia-expelling-23-uk-diplomats-way-inadequate/ ) and so does Peter Koenig ( https://thesaker.is/russias-reaction-to-the-insults-of-the-west-is-political-suicide/ ).

Russia has two alternatives to the self-defeating response the government has chosen. One, recommended by Peter Koenig and myself, is to turn her back on the West, cleanse herself of all Western embassies, businesses, media, and NGOs, and cease relying on Western communication systems and bank clearing mechanisms. The West has nothing Russia needs. The West is exhausted and corrupt. The future lies in the East of which Russia is a part. Russia should focus on the partnership with China and relationships in the East and simply stop responding to blatantly false accusations and provocative insults.

Russia can be part of the West only if Russia surrenders to Washington’s hegemony. One would have thought that by now the Russian government would have figured out that Washington is determined to marginalize and isolate Russia, discredit Russia’s government, dislodge Putin and install a puppet like May, Macron, and Merkel, and failing these efforts to push Russia to the point that her only alternatives are to surrender or go to war.

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

Drums Along the Potomac

March 16, 2018

Drums Along the Potomac

The amateur psychologist in me suspects that the more the USA heaps Russia with censorious opprobrium and punishments, the closer this floundering polity actually is to completely losing its shit. Friday morning’s front-page headline in The New York Times appears to have been written by Pee Wee Herman:

I can just hear Vlad Putin blowing a raspberry out of the Kremlin: “Nyah, nyah, nyah… I know you are, but what am I…?” We’re also informed today by that august journal that U.S. Accuses Russia in Cyberattacks on Power Plants. (Oh, wait a second, they changed the headline at 8:02 to Russia Wormed Its Way Into Access at Power Plants, U.S. Says.) Hmmmm… well, the amateur detective in me suspects that A) this is exactly the kind of bullshit that US intel excels at making up; plus B) the public was actually told last year that our intel has the ability to place any kind of cyber-footprint and time-stamp it wants on digital information, so that C) this assertion can be neither proved nor disproved.

The amateur international relations analyst in me sees in these shenanigans a desperate search for a casus belli, an excuse to go to war. But that only brings me back to amateur psychology: the US apparently wants to commit suicide. Wouldn’t war be a great idea a week after Russia announced it had new hypersonic missiles that the US can’t defend itself against? Hmmmm. Maybe the Russians made that shit up. And maybe they didn’t. Perhaps we’d like to test that, say, by bombing a bunch of Russian military personnel in Syria, just to see what happens.

There is also the matter of the poisoning in Salisbury, UK, of the Russian Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a suspected nerve toxin, Novichok, first developed by the old Soviet military. The two remain in critical condition. A nasty bit of business. Skripal was a Russian-to-British double agent who was exchanged some years back in one of the infrequent swaps of captured intel “assets” by the so-called great powers. British Prime Minister Theresa May had a whack attack over the Skripal hit, reeling out new sanctions and booting a boat-load of Russian diplomats off-island.

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

World War 3 Is Approaching

March 13, 2018

World War 3 Is Approaching

“In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity.” — Fidel Castro

The Russians, in their anxiety to show the West how friendly they are, left Washington with a toe hold in Syria, which Washington is using to reopen the war. The Russians’ failure to finish the job has left Washington’s foreign mercenaries, misrepresented in the American presstitute media as “freedom fighters,” in a Syrian enclave. To get the war going again, Washington has to find a way to come to the aid of its mercenaries.

The Trump regime has found, or so it thinks, its excuse in the revival of the Obama regime’s fake charge of Syrian use of chemical weapons. This made-up lie by the Obama regime was put to rest by Russian intervention that made sure there were no Syrian chemical weapons. Indeed, if memory serves, Russia delivered the chemical weapons to the US for destruction. Little doubt Washington still has them and will use some of them with their Syrian markings for what appears to be a coming false flag attack that can be blamed on Assad. In other words, Washington will create a “situation,” blame Assad and Putin, and with or without congressional authorization introduce US intervention in behalf of Washington’s mercenaries. https://www.globalresearch.ca/russia-warns-us-against-attacking-syrian-forces/5631930

If we can believe James Mattis, the retired US Marine General who is US Secretary of Defense, Syria, a country without chemical weapons and in need of none in its mopping up operations against Washington’s mercenaries, is using chlorine gas “against its own people,” exactly the same phrase as the Obama regime used when Obama tried to orchestrate an excuse to attack Syria. Mattis said that he is receiving reports of chlorine gas use by Assad while simultaneously saying he has no evidence of gas use, much less by the Syrian Army.

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

Army document: US strategy to ‘dethrone’ Putin for oil pipelines might provoke WW3

March 8, 2018

French soldiers unload tanks from a train in northern Poland for a NATO military exercise (Source: LA Times)

Published by INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfundedinvestigative journalism platform for people and planet. Support us to report where others fear to tread.

A US Army document concedes the real interests driving US military strategy toward Russia: dominating oil pipeline routes, accessing the vast natural resources of Central Asia, and enforcing the expansion of American capitalism worldwide.

The Russians are coming. They hacked our elections. They are lurking behind numerous alternative political movements and news outlets. Such is the overwhelming chorus from traditional reporting on Russia, which sees the United States as being under threat from fanatical Russian expansionism — expansionism which has gone so far as to interfere dramatically in the 2016 Presidential elections.

Russia is certainly an authoritarian regime with its own regional imperial ambitions. President Vladimir Putin and his cronies are responsible for massive deaths and human rights violations against populations at home and abroad (the latter in war theaters like Syria and elsewhere). Putin has strengthened a system of oligarchical state-dominated predatory capitalism which has widened extreme inequality and concentrated elite wealth. And we will no doubt learn more about what shenanigans Russia did, or did not, get up to in relation to US elections.

For the most part, these are not especially dangerous things to report on from the comfort of the West. Somewhat lacking from conventional reporting, on the other hand, is serious reflection on whether US policies toward Russia have contributed directly to the deterioration of US-Russia relations.

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

Light It Up

March 5, 2018

Light It Up

It must be hard on The New York Times editors to set their hair on fire day after day in their effort to start World War Three. Today’s lead story, Russian Threat on Two Fronts Meets Strategic Void in the U.S., aims to keep ramping up twin hysterias over a new missile gap and fear of Russian “meddling” in the 2018 midterm elections.

The Times’s world-view begins to look like the script of a Batman sequel with Vlad Putin cast in The Joker role of the cackling psychopath who must be stopped at all costs! America’s generals have switched on the Batman signal beacon, but Donald Trump in the role of the Caped Crusader, merely dithers and broods in the splendid isolation of his 1600 Penn Avenue Bat Cave, suffering yet another of his endless bipolar identity crises. For God’s sake, The Times, shrieks, do something! The Russians are coming! (Gotham City’s Chief of Police Hillary said exactly that last week in a Tweet!)

I think they misunderstood Mr. Putin’s recent message when he announced a new hypersonic missile technology that would, supposedly, cut through any imaginable US missile defense. The actual message, for the non mental defectives left in this drooling idiocracy of a republic, was as follows: Nuclear war remains unthinkable, so kindly stop thinking about it.

Mr. Putin’s other strategic position is also misrepresented — actually, not even acknowledged — in Monday’s NYT propaganda blast, namely, to discourage the USA’s decades-long policy of regime change here, there, and everywhere on the planet, creating a debris trail of one failed state after another. As a true-blue American, I must say these are two admirable propositions. Is it fatuous to add that atomic war is unlikely to benefit anyone? Or that the world has had enough of US military “meddling” in foreign lands?

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

Globally Top-Respected Experts on Middle East Warn Syrian War May Produce WW III

February 25, 2018

Globally Top-Respected Experts on Middle East Warn Syrian War May Produce WW III

Abdel Bari Atwan, the retired editor-in-chief (1989-2013) of the pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi and author of widely respected books on the Middle East, headlined on February 18th, “A superpower confrontation could be triggered by accident in Syria” and he opened:

Qatar’s plans to build a gas pipeline to the Mediterranean were a major cause of the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. Seven years on, Syria’s oil and gas reserves east of the Euphrates, and especially around Deir az-Zour, have the potential to trigger World War III.

Four military aircraft were downed over Syria in the course of one week: an Israel F-16 shot down by a Russian-made Syrian missile; a Russian jet hit by an American-made shoulder-fired MANPADS; an Iranian pilotless drone intercepted by Israeli missiles; and a Turkish helicopter brought down in the countryside of Afrin by US-backed Kurdish fighters.

Warplanes from at least six countries crowd Syria’s airspace, including those of the American and Russian superpowers, while numerous proxy wars rage on the ground below involving Arab, regional and international parties.

Atwan goes on to note the reason why the war has ratcheted up after Donald Trump became America’s President:

The US has made clear that it has no intention of withdrawing its 2,000 military personnel from Syria even after the expiry of the original pretext for deploying them, namely to fight the Islamic State (IS) group. Administration officials have repeatedly affirmed that these forces will remain indefinitely in order to counter Iranian influence in the country.

Trump has abandoned former U.S. President Barack Obama’s excuse for invading Syria, and replaced it by what is now clearly an American hot war against Iran, which indisputably has become the U.S. President’s target — no longer (even if only as an excuse) ISIS or “radical Islamic terrorism.”

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

Can the Impending Collapse of Russiagate Halt the Slide Toward a Nuclear 1914?

February 3, 2018

Can the Impending Collapse of Russiagate Halt the Slide Toward a Nuclear 1914?

In the period preceding the World War I how many Europeans suspected that their lives would soon be forever changed – and, for millions of them, ended? Who in the years, say, 1910 to 1913, could have imagined that the decades of peace, progress, and civilization in which they had grown up, and which seemingly would continue indefinitely, instead would soon descend into a horror of industrial-scale slaughter, revolution, and brutal ideologies?

The answer is, probably very few, just as few people today care much about the details of international and security affairs. Normal folk have better things to do with their lives.

To be sure, in that bygone era of smug jingosim, there was always the entertainment aspect that “our” side had forced “theirs” to back down in some exotic locale, as in the Fashoda incident (1898) or the Moroccan crises (1906, 1911). Even the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 seemed less a harbinger of the cataclysm to come than local dustups on the edge of the continent where the general peace had not been disturbed even by the much more disruptive Crimean or Franco-Prussian wars.

Besides, no doubt level-headed statesmen were in charge in the various capitals, ensuring that things wouldn’t get out of hand.

Until they did.

A notable exception to the prevailing mood of business-as-usual, nothing-to-see-here-folks was Pyotr Durnovo, whose remarkable February 1914 memorandum to Tsar Nicholas II laid out not only what the great powers would do in the approaching general war but the behavior of the minor countries as well. Moreover, he anticipated that in the event of defeat, Russia, destabilized by unchecked socialist “agitation” amid wartime hardships, would “be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.” Germany, likewise, was “destined to suffer, in case of defeat, no lesser social upheavals” and “take a purely revolutionary path” of a nationalist hue.

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

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A US Army document concedes the real interests driving US military strategy toward Russia: dominating oil pipeline routes, accessing the vast natural resources of Central Asia, and enforcing the expansion of American capitalism worldwide.

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