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Has Russia Given Up on the West?

Has Russia Given Up on the West?

Has Russia Given Up on the West?

By the end of his second term, President Ronald Reagan, who had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” was strolling through Red Square with Russians slapping him on the back.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

And how have we husbanded the fruits of our Cold War triumph?

This month, China’s leader-for-life Xi Jinping stood beside Vladimir Putin as 3,000 Chinese troops maneuvered with 300,000 Russians, 1,000 planes and 900 tanks in Moscow’s largest military exercise in 40 years.

An uncoded message to the West from the East.

Richard Nixon’s great achievement in bringing Peking in from the cold, and Reagan’s great achievement of ending the Cold War, are history.

Bolshevism may be dead, but Russian nationalism, awakened by NATO’s quick march to Russia’s ancient frontiers, is alive and well.

Russia appears to have given up on the West and accepted that its hopes for better times with President Donald Trump are not to be.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is berating Russia for secretly trading with North Korea in violation of U.N. sanctions, saying, “Lying, cheating, and rogue behavior have become the new norm of the Russian culture.”

Cold wars don’t get much colder than defaming another country’s culture as morally debased.

The U.S. has also signaled that it may start supplying naval and anti-aircraft weaponry to Ukraine, as Russia is being warned to cease its inspections of ships passing from the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait into the Sea of Azov.

The three-mile-wide strait lies between Crimea and Kerch Peninsula. In Russia’s eyes, both banks of the strait are Russian national territory.

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

Watching America’s Collapse

Watching America’s Collapse

Existence is running out for America

In the 1950s and 1960s the United States was a vibrant society. Upward mobility was strong, and the middle class expanded. During the 1970s the internal contradiction in Keynesian demand management resulted in stagflation. Reagan’s supply-side economic policy cured that. With a sound economy under him, Reagan was able to pressure the Soviet government, which was unable to solve its economic problem, to negotiate the end of the cold war.

This happy development was not welcomed by powerful forces, both in the US and Soviet Union. In the US the powerful military/security complex was unhappy about losing the Soviet Threat, under the auspices of which its budget and power had soared. Right-wing superpatriot conservatives accused Reagan of selling out America by trusting the Soviets. The American rightwing portrayed President Reagan as the grade-two movie actor dupe of “cunning communists.”

In the Soviet government Gorbachev faced a larger problem. With trust established between the two nuclear powers, Gorbachev released the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe. Hardline elements in the Soviet Communist Party saw too much change too rapidly and concluded that Gorbachev had sold out the Soviet Union to Washington. This conclusion resulted in Gorbachev’s arrest, and the consequence of his arrest was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party.

With communism departed, the Russians forgot all of Marx’s lessons about capitalism and naively concluded that we were all now friends. The Yeltsin government opened to American advice and, by naively accepting American advice, Russia was looted and reduced to penury. Russia under Yeltsin became an American puppet state, and the Russian people paid for it with a great reduction in their living standard.

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

Financial Cold War

Financial Cold War

As we crossed the finish line last week into the longest bull market in human history, a question that has been on my mind for years came bubbling to the surface again: if this is so easy, why didn’t the governments of the world do it before? In other words, since it’s been proved quite clearly that central bankers can prop up equity markets around the world, as well as public sentiment, why did it take them so long to figure it out?

Were they really that dim? Why would the governments, and all the self-interested individuals which comprise them, put themselves through the financial horrors of 2007/2008, the crash of 1987, the Internet bubble collapse of 2000, or the grinding equities-are-dead market that lasted the entire 1970s? It doesn’t make any sense.

However, I’ve been fleshing out something that I think might provide an answer to the question by way of a surprisingly strong analogy. During this “Everything Bubble”, conjured up by Mario Draghi, Ben Bernanke, Haruhiko Kuroda, and Zhou Xiaochuan, the idea of “mutually assured destruction” keeps springing to mind. M.A.D. is defined as “a form of Nash equilibrium in which, once armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.” As a child of the cold war myself, I probably have this M.A.D. analog deeply planted, but as I thought about it more deeply, I was astonished how cleanly it explains our new financial world.

To explain this analogy, I’ll lay out the players involved:

The Pre-Atomic World: In the case of military conflict, there were obviously countless wars throughout the centuries. In the financial world, there were likewise countless periods of booms and busts. The mass of humanity in both the military and financial worlds tended to engage locally, and there certainly was no overarching global “hand” over either of these worlds.

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

Russia, Insanity and the Treason that Wasn’t

Russia, Insanity and the Treason that Wasn’t

It’s become clear to me U.S. politics is reaching a breaking point.  The level of hysteria over Donald Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin is wholly disproportionate to what actually occurred.

Putin declared the Cold War over.  Pat Buchanan agrees and so do I.  For as much grief as I give Donald Trump for his many missteps in foreign policy, his going to first Singapore and then Helsinki in the service of peace and better relations is more than commendable.

It was necessary.

Donald Trump may not be the President many of us wanted.

But, like it or not, he is both the president we have and the one we deserve.  Our politics have been on a collision course with the bottom of the cesspit since 9/11.

We have bathed in the waters of “the archipelago of War Party think tanks beavering away inside the Beltway,” as Buchanan put it in his recent article, and come out stinking like either liberal interventionists or neoconservatives.

Or do I repeat myself.

Both are in service of a greatly-expanded Deep State and corrupted political and financial class that is the height of what Sam Francis termed “Anarcho-Tyranny.”  Lawlessness for those with power and both ends of the truncheon for those without.

The net result is a corporate media that is the very definition of fascism. I’m talkin Mussolini here, not the meaningless pablum of the frothing Twitterati of Soros’ and Brock’s “Resistance.”

Just take the phrase “All within the State, nothing outside the State” and replace ” the State” with “our State of Insanity,” and you’ve got it nailed.

As I wrote recently for Strategic Culture Foundation:

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

Carrier USS Truman Deployed To Atlantic As Russian Submarine Activity Surges

Russia is modernizing its submarine force around Europe to directly challenge American naval dominance — greater than any other period since the Cold War, Admiral James Foggo told Stars and Stripes in an interview last week.

The commander said the U.S. must expand its naval force, along with enhancing its submarine fleet to combat Russian aggression in the region.

Tensions between Russia and NATO have never been higher. According to a new report from the United States Naval Institute(USNI), the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75), the eighth Nimitz-class aircraft carrier of the U.S. Navy, has exited the Mediterranean Sea and is now patrolling the Atlantic Ocean, an unnamed defense official recently told USNI.

USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) conducts a strait transit. Truman is currently deployed as part of an ongoing rotation of U.S. forces supporting maritime security operations in international waters around the globe on April 27, 2018. (Source: US Navy Photo/USNI)

Earlier this week, the Harry S. Truman (CVN-75)/Carrier Air Wing One (CVW-1), a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier air wing based at Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia, and its support vessels sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar, a narrow strait that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.


UNCONFIRMED REPORT USS Harry S. Truman, CVN 75, left the Mediterranean Sea after passing the Strait of Gibraltar, Interfax reported, citing data from systems monitoring the movement of sea-going vessels.



“As a matter of longstanding policy, we do not discuss future operations, but I can tell you that the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group will continue to conduct operations in support of our NATO allies, European and African partner nations, coalition partners, and U.S. national security interests,” Cmdr. John Perkins, a spokesman with U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa, told USNI News.

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

Inside America’s Doomsday Bunkers: “Built To Withstand Apocalypse”

Inside America’s Doomsday Bunkers: “Built To Withstand Apocalypse”

Evidence that officials in the government are planning for an apocalyptic scenario is hiding in plain sight. America’s doomsday bunkers are built to withstand the apocalypse but kept quiet from the public, as the elites’ plans for survival do not include us.

First developed during the Truman Administration, in the early days of nuclear weapons development, the government decided that in event of an apocalyptic scenario, the ruling class must be able to continue to control the masses. COG (continuity of government) measures then expanded greatly during the Cold War. If the government is preparing for something, perhaps you should too. None of us really know what could go down, although a complete economic collapse seems possible at this point.

Across the ages, in every survival story, a disaster of some sort plays a prominent role. Sometimes the part is played by the government, sometimes it is played by Mother Nature, and other times, the role is taken on by a random mishap. If we have learned one thing studying the history of disasters, it is this: those who are prepared have a better chance at survival than those who are not. –The Prepper’s Blueprint

The government wants to ensure that the military will still be able to do whatever the elites command under any disastrous scenario.

[The elite ruling class] can afford to make careless decisions because they are insulated from the results. If there is a war with Russia, which could easily turn into a nuclear war, they’ll have plenty of spacious bunkers to hide out in while the rest of America burns. And that’s been our government’s plan in regards to nuclear war since the beginning of the Cold War.

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

Chrystia Freeland Fails to See the Emerging Multipolar World

Chrystia Freeland Fails to See the Emerging Multipolar World

In a strange case of reversed roles Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, tried to convince US president Donald Trump to return to his lost path of globalization and international trade agreements in an impassionate speech she gave at the Foreign Policy Forum last June 13 in Washington D.C.

Ms. Freeland seems to have a good reputation in some circles in Washington. At least enough to get her centre stage and a nomination as “diplomat of the year.” Though she should know that the recognition she received was not meant to acknowledge necessarily her achievements but rather to use her as an “international voice” on behalf of some US sectors that dissent with Donald Trump’s foreign policy – more specifically, those aspects of US foreign policy that are perceived to hurt business such as international trade and tariffs. Ms. Freeland obliged and that was precisely the focus of her speech.

We don’t know the impact that Ms. Freeland’s speech has had on Donald Trump. But her message would have been fitting had she been on the same stage with the likes of Ronald Reagan whom she did praise once.

What we do know is that her speech – probably meant to be inspirational – was full of liberal, capitalist and imperial rhetoric, and showed little understanding of the geopolitical realities of today. Her tenacious defense of the virtues of capitalism lacked vision and placed her right back at the time of the old Cold War with the only exception of authoritarianism being the nemesis instead of communism. She pointed her accusatory finger at Venezuela, Russia and China as examples of current unruly countries that do not follow her image of international order.

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

US To Double Number Of Marines In Norway To Counter Russia, Before Massive Military Exercise

The Norwegian government intends to add another 400 U.S. Marines to Norway before the most significant military exercise since the Cold War this fall, according to the country’s Ministry of Defense.

Currently, about 330 Marines from the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines (1/6), an infantry battalion in the U.S. Marine Corps based in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, make up the rotational presence for training and exercise in the country. The influx of new Marines are expected to arrive from Romania and would increase the total number to 700 for a period of five years.

The new force of Marines will be situated in Setermoen, Norway, according to the Defense Ministry.

This fall, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will be leading a massive military exercise across the entire country of Norway, an unprecedented maneuver not seen since the days of the Cold War. It seems like Washington and Norway are making the preliminary adjustments before a total of 35,000 troops from 30 different countries kick off the exercise, called Trident Juncture.

Map detailing plans for upcoming military exercise: 

Speaking at the Naval War College Tuesday, General Robert B. Neller said the approval for additional Marines in Norway cleared on Tuesday. Neller has been an advocate for sending Marines to extreme cold-weather environments for Arctic warfare training.


The government of has approved ~400 additional @USMC Marines to be posted in the at Setermoen in Troms, Norway. Norway shares a 122-mile border with Russia and the new location will be bring US Marines closer to that border. There are currently ~300 US Marines in Norway


The Marines are currently on six-month rotations to Norway, where soldiers are preparing for cold-weather warfare to counter Russia.

According to the map below, Norway shares a 122-mile border with Russia and the Setermoen region is roughly 250 miles from the border.

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

Yellow Journalism and the New Cold War

Yellow Journalism and the New Cold War


Like Saddam Hussein a decade and a half ago, Russia and its President Vladimir Putin have been repeatedly vilified in the Western media over the last five years, helping to mobilize popular support for the reemergence of a new Cold War.

Best-selling author Dan Talbot has called it in “one of the biggest fake news operations comparable to the yellow journalism promoted by the Hearst papers which sold military intervention in the Spanish-American War.”

This past Sunday, the British newspapers were filled with screaming headlines about a leading financier of the Brexit campaign’s alleged “Kremlin connection.”

Leaked emails allegedly show how Arron Banks, a millionaire businessman who helped fund Brexit, had been offered a business deal involving six Russian gold mines and had undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador to Britain – set up by a suspected Russian spy – and paid a previous unknown visit to Moscow at the height of the campaign.

Richard Kerbaj and a team of Sunday Times’journalists editorialized that “the revelations raise explosive questions about attempts by Moscow to influence the [Brexit] referendum results.”

The cover story featured a large photo of Donald Trump with Banks, a business associates, Andy Wigmore, and Nigel Farange, the right wing pro-Brexit leader.

The meeting was said to have been consumed over a “boozy lunch” with the Russian ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, who allegedlyproduced a bottle of vodka that “was one of the three in a batch made for Joseph Stalin personally.”

Banks said that “by mid-afternoon, everyone was quite merry and diplomatic protocols were rapidly falling by the wayside.”

Reporter Isabel Oakeshott, who helped break the story, warned readers that “warfare has never simply been about bombs and bullets. Our adversaries [also] seek to weaken us by cultivating relationships with political figures and attempting to turn them into agents of influence. Russia is expert at this. The offer of lucrative business opportunities is a typical tool.”

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

Letter From Britain: An Establishment Blinded By Russophobia

Letter From Britain: An Establishment Blinded By Russophobia

A British elite challenged by large parts of the British population is rallying around trumped-up fear of Russia as a means of protecting its interests, as Alexander Mercouris explains.


Hostility to Russia is one of the most enduring, as well as one of the most destructive, realities of British life. Its persistence is illustrated by one of the most interesting but least reported facts about the Skripal affair.

This is that Sergey Skripal, the Russian former GRU operative who was the main target of the recent Salisbury poisoning attack, was recruited by British intelligence and became a British spy in 1995, four years after the USSR collapsed, at a time when the Cold War was formally over.

In 1995 Boris Yeltsin was President of Russia, Communism was supposedly defeated, the once mighty Soviet military was no more, and a succession of pro-Western governments in Russia were attempting unsuccessfully to carry out IMF proposed ‘reforms’. In a sign of the new found friendship which supposedly existed between Britain and Russia the British Queen toured Moscow and St. Petersburg the year before.

Yet notwithstanding all the appearances of friendship, and despite the fact that Russia in 1995 posed no conceivable threat to Britain, it turns out that British intelligence was still up to its old game of recruiting Russian spies to spy on Russia.

Britain’s Long History of Russophobia

This has in fact been the constant pattern of Anglo-Russian relations ever since the Napoleonic Wars.

Brief periods of seeming friendship – often brought about by a challenge posed by a common enemy – alternating with much longer periods of often intense hostility.

This hostility – at least from the British side – is not easy to understand.

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

The Russians are Coming!

The Russians are Coming!

Photo by Tom Hilton | CC BY 2.0

These days we see a seemingly odd project taking place in the realms of American liberalism: ferocious insistence that the truly outrageous Donald J. Trump is at his worst when….making peace with our enemies! Has he been brainwashed by Russian and/or North Korean agents, perhaps? Or is this all, perhaps, a crude plan to place Trump Steaks in Trump hotels in heretofore unbidden locations? What kind of madness would lessen the threat of American nukes that keeps us all as safe as we may reasonably hope to be?

The story is old, so old that we need to be reminded of an insight offered myself and others in the lecture classes of historian of empire William Appleman WIlliams, more than fifty yeas ago. As he explained, US policy toward Russia was already, in the nineteenth century approximately what it became after the Russian Revolution. Indeed, as nearly every imperial policy going back thousands of years: chop away at competing empires as persistently as possible, rouse internal divisions while threatening domestic populations into submissions with dark warnings about the evil nature of the competitor-empire peoples.

All this acquired a distinctly modern affect with the rise of the Bolsheviks, of course. The American newspaper headlines of 1919, announcing that in the new Russia, women had been “nationalized,” fairly typified the looniness of the orchestrated response, or alternatively, placed Russia among the barbarian non-white races threatening the West and, almost certainly, its fragile womanhood.

In their new book, The Russians Are Coming. Again: the first cold war as tragedy, the second as farce, Jeremy Kuzamarov and John Marciano, scholar-activists of human rights campaigns for decades, offer details reminding us of how hard American leaders struggled to put across the propaganda, but also how determined they have remained to keep as much of their own aims of conquest as secret as possible.

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

How and Why the US Government Perpetrated the 2014 Coup in Ukraine

How and Why the US Government Perpetrated the 2014 Coup in Ukraine

How and Why the US Government Perpetrated the 2014 Coup in Ukraine

This will document that the ‘new Cold War’ between the US and Russia did not start, as the Western myth has it, with Russia’s involvement in the breakaway of Crimea and Donbass from Ukraine, after Ukraine — next door to Russia — had suddenly turned rabidly hostile toward Russia in February 2014. Ukraine’s replacing its democratically elected neutralist Government in February 2014, by a rabidly anti-Russian Government, was a violent event, which produced many corpses. It’s presented in The West as having been a ‘revolution’ instead of a coup; but whatever it was, it certainly generated the ‘new Cold War’ (the economic sanctions and NATO buildup on Russia’s borders); and, to know whether it was a coup, or instead a revolution, is to know what actually started the ‘new Cold War’, and why. So, this is historically very important.

Incontrovertible proofs will be presented here not only that it was a coup, but that this coup was organized by the US Government — that the US Government initiated the ‘new Cold War’; Russia’s Government reacted to America’s aggression, which aims to place nuclear missiles in Ukraine, less than ten minutes flight-time from Moscow. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, America had reason to fear Soviet nuclear missiles 103 miles from America’s border. But, after America’s Ukrainian coup in 2014, Russia has reason to fear NATO nuclear missiles not just near, but on, Russia’s border. That would be catastrophic.

If America’s successful February 2014 overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist Government doesn’t soon produce a world-ending nuclear war (World War III), then there will be historical accounts of that overthrow, and the accounts are already increasingly trending and consolidating toward a historical consensus that it was a coup —

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How the FBI and CIA Restarted the Cold War to Protect Themselves

How the FBI and CIA Restarted the Cold War to Protect Themselves

How the FBI and CIA Restarted the Cold War to Protect Themselves
On December 29, 2016, the Obama Administration – with three weeks remaining in its term – issued harsh sanctions against Russia over supposed election interference.  Two compounds in the United States were closed and 35 Russian diplomats were ordered to leave the country.

Russia responded by calling the actions “Cold War déjà vu.”

In the two years that have elapsed since, it has been learned that the “intelligence” that formed the basis for the sanctions was beyond dubious.

A single unverified “dossier” compiled by an ex-British spy with no discernable connections to Russia was shopped to FISA judges and the media as something real.

The dossier was opposition research by the Hillary Clinton campaign, a fact that was not disclosed and actively hidden by off-the-book transactions through the law firm Perkins Coie.

As a dog that chases its tail, the fake dossier was being used to cause the investigation which itself lent credibility to the notion of Russian interference.

The FBI and CIA thumbed the eye of an armed nuclear state based on false intelligence.  Why?

The answer is now obvious: to cover up their own election year shenanigans they thought would remain forever hidden in the inevitable Hillary Clinton victory.

Russian collusion had first come to the electorate’s attention in July.  The DNC had lost a cache of its emails either to a phishing scheme or to a hacker.  The emails showed the Clinton campaign and the DNC conspiring to fix primaries against Bernie Sanders.

The outcry among Sanders supporters was sufficiently loud that DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned on the eve of the democratic convention.

It was a huge scandal.  To squelch it for their expected future boss Hillary Clinton, the FBI and CIA constructed a Rube Goldberg machine of “Russian collusion” to blame Trump.

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

2018: When Orwell’s 1984 stopped being fiction

2018: When Orwell’s 1984 stopped being fiction

This is the moment when a newspaper claiming to uphold that most essential function in a liberal democracy – acting as a watchdog on power – formally abandons the task. This is the moment when it positively embraces the role of serving as a mouthpiece for the government. The tell is in one small word in a headline on today’s Guardian’s front page: “Revealed”.

When I trained as a journalist, we reserved a “Revealed” or an “Exposed” for those special occasions when we were able to bring to the reader information those in power did not want known. These were the rare moments when as journalists we could hold our heads high and claim to be monitoring the centres of power, to be fulfilling our sacred duty as the fourth estate.

But today’s Guardian’s “exclusive” story “Revealed: UK’s push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance” is doing none of this. Nothing the powerful would want hidden from us is being “revealed”. No one had to seek out classified documents or speak to a whistleblower to bring us this “revelation”. Everyone in this story – the journalist Patrick Wintour, an anonymous “Whitehall official”, and the named politicians and think-tank wonks – is safely in the same self-congratulatory club, promoting a barely veiled government policy: to renew the Cold War against Russia.

It is no accident that the government chose the Guardian as the place to publish this “exclusive” press release. That single word “Revealed” in the headline serves two functions that reverse the very rationale for liberal, watchdog-style journalism.

First, it is designed to disorientate the reader in Orwellian – or maybe Lewis Caroll – fashion, inverting the world of reality. The reader is primed for a disclosure, a secret, and then is spoonfed familiar government propaganda: that the tentacles of a Russian octopus are everywhere, that the Reds are again under our beds – or at least, poisoning our door handles.

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

Russia Really Is America’s No. 1 Enemy – Depending on Who ‘America’ Is

Russia Really Is America’s No. 1 Enemy – Depending on Who ‘America’ Is

Russia Really Is America’s No. 1 Enemy – Depending on Who ‘America’ Is

US-Russia enmity is here to stay. Cold War II is a fact of life for the foreseeable future. The only questions are where, when, and how it might turn hotThat didn’t happen in Syria this past Friday the Thirteenth, for reasons yet to be explained. But the danger is by no means gone.

Rather, the threat of a major war will continue to intensify as President Donald Trump continues to stack his team with GOP retards who diametrically oppose his oft-repeated desire to improve ties with Moscow. Whether or not his desire is genuine is irrelevant. With each new appointment to the National Security Council and the State Department the Russophobic critical mass grows.

Personnel is policy. The door to rapprochement is being nailed ever more firmly shut

“FISAgate” and the Christopher Steele “dirty dossier,” on top of bogus claims of Russian election meddling, have done their job. It would be remiss not to mention the major role played by British special services. The dossier itself, authored by a “retired” MI6 agent. The British diplomat (or another spook?) who passed it on to a top GOP Trump critic, and thence to then-FBI Director James Comey. The likelihood that GCHQ spied on Trump and his team. The Salisbury chemical provocationThe Douma chemical provocation.

Never forget that however culpable the likes of Comey, James ClapperJohn Brennan, and others are, they had a lot of help from their “Five Eyes” pals abroad. There was foreign interference, alright, in what we still quaintly call “our democracy.” But it was British, not Russian.

The fact that the House Intelligence Committee wrapped up its investigation having found no evidence of Russian collusion makes no difference. Neither does the fact that Robert Mueller’s probe won’t turn up any evidence either, since it doesn’t exist.

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

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