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Posts Tagged ‘Vladimir Putin’

An Anti-Russian Europe Is a Europe That Destroys Itself!

Posted by M. C. on February 19, 2024

This European Union is demonizing the country that saved it from Nazi-fascist terror by rewriting its past, desecrating its dead, misrepresenting its thinking and conspiring with its achievements.

A European Union that — as a neoliberal globalist project — disregards national sovereignty, defeated precisely by the antagonistic relationship it develops against a country that, above all, strives to defend its national sovereignty! And NATO beware… It too shares the same identity with the EU, the same original sin!

Hugo Dionísio

According to Syrsky, the new commander-in-chief of Kiev’s troops, the lives of Ukrainian soldiers are the most important thing the army has. An assumption that was only made when it became obvious to everyone that there was no chance of victory in a direct fight against Russia.

As long as it was possible to feed the idea that „Ukraine was beating Russia“, when it was Russia that had the initiative — and never lost it — the lives of Ukrainian soldiers were worth little. Men — and some women — in their hundreds of thousands were thrown into muddy trenches, poorly fed and with ammunition in short supply, against an opponent who never lacked anything.

The fact is that when the Kiev forces had combat capability — not to be confused with „the ability to win“ — the official communication was that „Ukraine was winning the war“; when it became clear that the cost of fighting the Russian forces was so high that it could not be sustained, the pro-Kiev media, financed by Uncle Sam’s NGOs and primary sources of Western official information, began to say „Ukraine cannot lose the war“; when it could no longer be hidden that the „counter-offensive“ had failed and with it, the hopes — fanciful — of a Kiev victory, we moved on to the „Ukraine and Russia are in a stalemate“ phase.

The Ukrainian reality, under the Kiev regime, is characterized by always being in direct contradiction with the Russian reality and, coincidentally, with the concrete observable reality. This is why the relationship between the two realities is an invaluable dialectical example from a pedagogical point of view.

While living with Russia, Ukraine has become one of the world’s greatest powers. There is not, and never has been, a successful Ukraine without Russia on its side. Vladimir Putin did not lie about the fact that Russia has always helped Ukraine. For those who don’t know, it wasn’t out of any kind of adventurism that the Donbass was annexed to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1917, Ukraine was an eminently rural and de-industrialized region of the Russian empire, so, in 1918, in order to guarantee conditions for the territory’s development and, in this way, a more harmonious development of the nascent Soviet state, the Donbass became part of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic, as a way of guaranteeing the progress of the newly formed homeland.

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What Everyone Is Missing About the Putin/Carlson Talk

Posted by M. C. on February 15, 2024

How many Americans learned that Putin asked Bill Clinton for Russia to become part of NATO, thus ending NATO’s raison d’etre?

Or that Bush the Lesser unilaterally abrogated the ABM Treaty?

Or that the Minsk Agreements were our last hope for a settlement of the differences between the Donbass and Kiev, and that Putin was the one pushing to make them work?

There are at least a half-dozen other things people learned in this interview, if they had ears to listen,

Author: Tom Luongo

“The Vorlons say, understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth”
— John Sheridan, Babylon 5

The biggest media story of 2024 so far has come and gone. Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin last week.

Everyone, even the Davos/UK dominated media, has put forth their opinion on it. I gave out a quick take for my Patrons the morning after just like everyone else. And like everyone else I missed the biggest takeaway from this interview.

Now, if you go through the commentary what you will mostly see is people, as always, doing what traders call “talking their book.” In other words, as opposed to dealing with the information presented and the motivations of the people involved, most media outlets and commentators put forth their opinion on whether this interview satisfied their needs from it.

So, for the hardcore geopolitical types and armchair psychoanalysts, we heard a lot of opinions second-guessing Putin’s strategy to open the interview with a nearly thirty minute recitation of Russian/Ukrainian history. Why would he do this, was the common refrain.

I’ll use my former-bellwether-for-normies, Scott Adams, as an example of this.

How many of you thought Putin was “all there” in the Tucker interview?

If he seemed lucid to you, it’s because Biden is your comparison.

I thought Putin seemed unhinged. The history lesson was not a good sign. https://t.co/VZiEIHRZ2t— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) February 9, 2024

This was the kindest of the ‘bad takes’ I found on this. But I’m having one of Scott’s “One movie, two screens,” moments here. Because Putin looked anything other than “unhinged.” In fact, he looked as calm as I’ve ever seen him, taking a relaxed posture to put Carlson, who was clearly unsure of where he stood at the beginning of the interview, at ease.

But this is the message that Adams wanted to see, framing Putin in relation to Biden, because he needed something unique to say to justify his even being in the conversation.

By contrast, Martin Armstrong had a great post curating all of the crazy Neocon takes from the “media” on his blog over the weekend.

What’s obvious from those is that they understood that Putin’s 30 minute opening monologue would put off a lot of casual watchers who would tune him out at that point. So, their “analysis” focused on steering the conversation to Putin’s ‘false history’ of Russia and Ukraine.

This way that ‘false history’ would dominate everyone’s opinions the next day, managing the Overton Window of the entire interview, making it all about that. This would be the basis of how they discredit Putin.

Then to discredit Carlson, people like Hillary Clinton was trotted out to lie about Tucker Carlson, calling him a “useful idiot,” and “puppy dog” and a joke in Russian media, which is an outright lie. Hillary’s harpy laugh made an appearance alongside a sycophant interviewer as they joked about Carlson’s having been fired from every legitimate news agency.

We were treated to a common sight: Two Beltway insiders laughing inside their echo chamber and only our sick fascination with roadkill makes it even remotely interesting.

So, the whole exercise is reframed as Puppy Dog Tucker throwing softballs to Liar Putin to distract us away from the sum and substance of their talk.

I know… in other news water is wet

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Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin Interview: What President Putin Really Said

Posted by M. C. on February 13, 2024

by Peter Koenig

https://michelchossudovsky.substack.com/p/tucker-carlson-and-vladimir-putin

Peter Koenig and Michel Chossudovsky

NATO Confirmed that Ukraine “War Started in 2014”. Who Started the War? (February 11, 2023)

I focussed on the implications of a controversial statement by NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed (speaking on behalf of NATO) that the “war didn’t start in 2022”. 

 Jens Stoltenberg unequivocally confirmed that “the war started in 2014″. 

What this statement unequivocally confirms is that US-NATO was already at war in 2014. It also tacitly acknowledges that Russia did not “initiate the war” on Ukraine in February 2022.

Jens Stoltenberg’s bold statement (which has barely been the object of media coverage) has opened up a Pandora’s Box, or best described “A Can of Worms” on behalf of the Atlantic Alliance.

What Stoltenberg’s statement bears out is that the beginning of the Ukraine war coincided with a U.S. sponsored Coup d’état, confirmed by Victoria’s Nuland‘s “F**k the EU telephone conversation with U.S. Ambassador Pyatt  in February 2014.

That was exactly ten years ago.

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Exclusive: Tucker Carlson Interviews Vladimir Putin

Posted by M. C. on February 12, 2024

Tucker Carls

Definitely worth your time. I never seen anything in the MSM that represents the Russian point of view like this does.

Watch the entire interview then ask yourself: What politician, American, International, your favorite, that can meet this level of discourse.

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I was naive about the West – Putin

Posted by M. C. on January 2, 2024

The president has admitted believing the crusade against Russia would be over after the Soviet Union’s collapse

From a KGB veteran! Washington doesn’t have a lock on whoppers!

ttps://www.rt.com/russia/589201-west-wanted-russia-disintegration-putin/

President Vladimir Putin has said he was wrong to assume the West would establish productive relations with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In reality, it was determined to break the nation apart, the Russian leader explained.

In an interview with Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin aired on Sunday, Putin admitted that he was a “naive” leader early in his political career even though he had a solid background in Soviet intelligence.

The Russian president said that he had believed that the West understood that Russia had become a completely different country after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that there were no further ideological differences warranting a serious stand-off.

According to Putin, even when he saw Western efforts to support terrorism and separatism in Russia two decades ago, he thought that it was the “inertia of thinking” that was to blame. “They had just got used to fighting the Soviet Union,” he believed.

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US Officials Really, REALLY Want You To Know The US Is The World’s “Leader”

Posted by M. C. on March 23, 2023

The message they’re putting out is, “This is our world. We’re in charge. Anyone who claims otherwise is freakish and abnormal, and must be opposed.”

https://open.substack.com/pub/caitlinjohnstone/p/us-officials-really-really-want-you?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android

Caitlin Johnstone

In response to questions he received during a press conference on Monday about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin cementing a “new era” in strategic partnership between China and Russia, the White House National Security Council’s John Kirby made no fewer than seven assertions that the US is the “leader” of the world.

Here are excerpts from his comments:

  • “The two countries have grown closer. But they are both countries that chafe and bristle at U.S. leadership around the world.”
  • “And in China’s case in particular, they certainly would like to challenge U.S. leadership around the world.
  • “But these are not two countries that have, you know, decades-long experience working together and full trust and confidence. It’s a burgeoning of late based on America’s increasing leadership around the world and trying to check that.”
  • “Peter, these are two countries that have long chafed, as I said to Jeff — long chafed at U.S. leadership around the world and the network of alliances and partnerships that we have.”
  • “And we work on those relationships one at a time, because every country on the continent is different, has different needs and different expectations of American leadership.”
  • “That’s the power of American convening leadership. And you don’t see that power out of either Russia or China.”
  • “But one of the reasons why you’re seeing that tightening relationship is because they recognize that they don’t have that strong foundation of international support for what they’re trying to do, which is basically challenge American leadership around the world.”

Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

John Kirby really wants everyone to know that America is in charge of the world. This is from one single press conference.

11:17 PM ∙ Mar 21, 2023


3,067Likes978Retweets

The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias which causes people to mistake something they have heard many times for an established fact, because the way the human brain receives and interprets information tends to draw little or no distinction between repetition and truth. Propagandists and empire managers often take advantage of this glitch in our wetware, which is what’s happening when you see them repeating key phrases over and over again that they want people to believe.

We saw another repetition of this line recently at an online conference hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce, in which the US ambassador to China asserted that Beijing must accept the US as the “leader” of the region China happens to occupy. 

US empire managers are of course getting very assertive about the narrative that they are the world’s “leader” because that self-appointed “leadership” is being challenged by China, and the nations which support it with increasing openness like Russia. Most of the major international news stories of our day are either directly or indirectly related to this dynamic, wherein the US is struggling to secure unipolar planetary domination by thwarting China’s rise and undermining its partners.

The message they’re putting out is, “This is our world. We’re in charge.

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Sen. Lindsey Graham Says Ukraine War Will Only End If Putin Is ‘Taken Out’ – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on December 27, 2022

No doubt the warmeister will say the same for Xi when he sends sons and daughters to die for Taiwan.

https://news.antiwar.com/2022/12/22/sen-lindsey-graham-says-ukraine-war-will-only-end-if-putin-is-taken-out/

by Dave DeCamp

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has repeated a call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be assassinated, saying that the only way the war in Ukraine could end is if Russia “breaks” and someone “takes Putin out.”

“How does this war end? When Russia breaks, and they take Putin out. Anything short of that, the war’s gonna continue,” Graham said on the Fox News program America Reports on Wednesday.

Graham said the US is “in it to win it, and the only way you’re gonna win it is to break the Russian military and have somebody in Russia take Putin out to give the Russian people a new lease on life.”

The hawkish senator made similar comments back in March when he asked if there was a “Brutus” in Russia who could kill Putin. In his comments on Wednesday, Graham also said the Biden administration should send Ukraine the advanced and long-range weapons that Kyiv has been asking for.

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Blowing Up the World When So Little Is at Stake | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 16, 2022

By no means should Anton be taken as a supporter of the policies of Vladimir Putin, and those who in response urge the defects of the Russian dictator have not grasped the key point of Anton’s argument. We no longer face the bleak prospect of being “Red or Dead,” if indeed we ever did, and nothing less than this could justify pushing Russia to the nuclear brink.

https://mises.org/wire/blowing-world-when-so-little-stake

David Gordon

In last week’s column, I discussed Christophers Coyne’s excellent book In Search of Monsters to Destroy, a cogent account of America’s endeavor to build a “liberal” informal empire. Coyne shows the inherent contradiction of using brutal means to achieve humane values. This week, I’d like to discuss an even more deplorable part of American foreign policy, one which threatens the world with destruction. During the Cold War, the United States risked nuclear war with the Soviet Union; and though the Cold War ended long ago, American support for Ukraine in its war with Russia again risks atomic war. The dangers inherent in American policy have been discussed by Michael Anton, whom readers will recall from previous columns, in his thoughtful article “Nuclear Autumn,” which appeared in the fall 2022 Claremont Review of Books, and I’m going to focus my comments on his remarks.

Anton’s argument is in essence this: The United States came close several times during the Cold War to nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and this would have had appalling consequences. Nevertheless, the danger of losing the world struggle to communism made this risky policy at least arguably rational, at least until 1983, after which the Cold War lessened in intensity. In present circumstances, though, matters are entirely different. Russia, unlike Soviet communism, poses no threat to the United States, yet America’s nuclear policy is more reckless than ever before. Given the consequences of nuclear war, we ought to adopt a less interventionist Ukrainian policy.

As you would anticipate, I agree with the latter part of Anton’s analysis, but the former seems questionable. Anton says,

Conservative conventional wisdom soon hardened around this interpretation, where it has remained ever since: Reagan’s initial toughness was a necessary corrective to Carter’s fecklessness and Nixon’s détente, put the Soviets on their back foot, and forced them back to the table, resetting the stage for a Western victory. Nineteen eighty-three came to be seen as a kind of mirror-image of 1938, teaching the same lesson: appeasement begets war, toughness brings peace—or better yet, victory.

There is no doubt something to this, but even on its own terms, this rendering skips over important elements. The first is that the stakes matter. And the stakes in the Cold War were the very highest: the survival of the free world and maybe even the existence of the whole world. By 1980, it was plausible to fear that freedom and even humanity were losing. It was therefore not unreasonable to believe that calculated risks were warranted.

But you never know where toughness might lead, what it might provoke. When the consequences of toughness could be total destruction, it is rational—moral, even—to be tough only when the stakes are equally enormous. Toughness not in the service of a core interest—or the core of all core interests—is not merely foolish but reckless.

The apostles of nuclear brinkmanship said that the survival of the free world was at stake during the Cold War, but though they were no doubt right that the horrors of living under the gulag were worth fighting to prevent, it is not evident that the nations of the “West,” to use the Cold War argot, faced this threat. The Soviet Union had a relatively poor economy and had enough trouble keeping the Warsaw Pact nations in line without pursuing Western expansion in serious fashion. The Cold Warriors would have done better to heed the lessons of Ludwig von Mises’s calculation argument: so long as the Soviets continued their efforts at central planning, their economy was bound to collapse.

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Vladimir Putin’s Vision of a Multipolar World

Posted by M. C. on December 1, 2022

An end to US hegemony?

PHILIP GIRALDI

In history books as well as in politics every story is shaped by where one chooses to begin the tale. The current fighting in Ukraine, which many observers believe to already be what might be considered the opening phase of World War 3, is just such a development. Did the seeds of conflict arise subsequent to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s consent to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 after having received a commitment from the United States and its allies not to advance the West’s military alliance NATO into Eastern Europe? That was a pledge that was quickly ignored by President Bill Clinton, who intervened militarily in the former Yugoslavia before adding new NATO members from amidst the ruins of the Warsaw Pact.

Since that time NATO has continued its expansion at the expense of Russian national security interests. Ukraine, as one of the largest of the former Soviet republics, soon became the focal point for potential conflict. The US interfered openly in Ukrainian politics, featuring frequent visits by relentlessly hawkish Senator John McCain and State Department monster Victoria Nuland as well as the investment of a reported $5 billion to destabilize the situation, bringing about regime change to remove the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich and replace it with a regime friendly to America and its European allies. When this occurred it inevitably led to a proposed invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, a move which Moscow repeatedly warned would constitute an existential threat to Russia itself.

Finally, Moscow tried assiduously to negotiate a solution to the developing Ukraine crisis in 2020-2021 but the US and its allies were not interested, allowing the corrupt Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelensky to refuse any accommodation. So Russia itself has perceived that it has been misled or even lied to repeatedly by the US and its allies. It has been particularly vexed by the looting of its natural resources by mostly Western oligarchs operating under protection afforded by the feckless President Boris Yeltsin between 1991 and 1999, a puppet installed and sustained through US and European interference in the Russian elections. Just when Russia was on its knees, perhaps intentionally, there arrived on the scene in 1999 former KGB officer Vladimir Putin who, as Prime Minister and later president, proceeded to clean house. Ever since that time, Putin has very carefully explained himself and what he has been doing, making clear that he is no enemy of the West but rather a partner in a relationship that respects the interests and cultures of all players in a global economy that maximizes freedom and individuality.

Given the danger of dramatic escalation of the current situation in Ukraine, with talk coming from both sides about the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons, an October 27th speech made by President Vladimir Putin at the 19th meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, held near Moscow, should be required reading for the Joe Bidens and Jens Stoltenbergs of this world. The theme of the meeting was A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for Everyone. The four day-long session included 111 academics, politicians, diplomats and economists from Russia and 40 foreign countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Turkey, Uzbekistan and the United States. In his speech, Putin laid out his vision of a multipolar world in which there is no concept of a politically hegemonic “rules based world order” which substitutes “rules for international law.” And, he observed, the rules have themselves been regularly dictated by one country or group of countries. Putin instead urged a transition into a willingness to accept that all countries have interests and rights that should be respected.

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Russia Is Winning the Financial War

Posted by M. C. on June 24, 2022

By Alasdair Macleod

Goldmoney

The ending of the petrodollar era

https://www.goldmoney.com/research/russia-is-winning-the-financial-war

Sanctions have backfired on those described by Vladimir Putin as the unfriendly nations. It is setting in train a series of events likely to undermine the whole Western financial system, as prices rise driving interest rates higher, and economic activity shrinks. These developments alone are leading to contracting bank credit, crashing stock markets, and sharply higher bond yields.

Last week, I wrote about the impact on the banking system and the likely consequences. Russia, China, and associated nations who depend upon them for trade and economic development are now moving to protect themselves from what is emerging as a full scale systemic and fiat currency crisis for the dollar and the entire Western financial system. 

These developments are hastening the end of the petrodollar era and the dollar’s role as a reserve currency.  A central Asian replacement is planned to be a new super-currency used for cross-border payments, based on an index of a basket of commodities and currencies of the participating nations. Including currencies is a mistake, but otherwise the proposition has merit. 

This article explains why and how a properly constructed scheme would work. I demonstrate why it could act as a de facto gold standard.

Its designers intend this new trade currency to appeal to other important nations, such as Saudi Arabia, into using a commodity-linked currency for settling their trade payments, replacing the dying petrodollar. But its success could prove to be fatal for the fiat dollar and other Western currencies. With the demise of the dollar, the new super-currency can be expected to lead eventually to some national currencies adopting gold standards.

The ending of the petrodollar era

Put Ukraine to one side, it’s not the major issue. We should realise what really matters to us all is the real war, which is Russia’s attempts to banish American hegemony in Europe. While in the West we have an image of President Putin as an evil despot determined to take Ukraine back under Russian control, in a speech at St Petersburg’s International Economic Forum this week, Putin’s diagnosis of the West’s problems was more to the point than anything you will hear from our own Dear Leaders: Joe, Boris, Emmanuel, Olaf, et al. It is worth citing relevant extracts from the official English translation of Putin’s speech to highlight his economic understanding of the pickle we in the West have got ourselves into:

“Surging inflation in product and commodity markets had become a fact of life long before the events of this year. The world has been driven into this situation, little by little, by many years of irresponsible macroeconomic policies pursued by the G7 countries, including uncontrolled emission and accumulation of unsecured debt. These processes intensified with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when supply and demand for goods and services drastically fell on a global scale…

“Because they could not or would not devise any other recipes, the governments of the leading Western economies simply accelerated their money-printing machines. Such a simple way to make up for unprecedented budget deficits…

“I have already cited this figure: over the past two years, the money supply in the United States has grown by more than 38 percent. Previously, a similar rise took decades, but now it grew by 38 percent or 5.9 trillion dollars in two years. By comparison, only a few countries have a bigger gross domestic product. The EU’s money supply has also increased dramatically over this period. It grew by about 20 percent, or 2.5 trillion euros.

“Lately, I have been hearing more and more about the so-called – please excuse me, I really would not like to do this here, even mention my own name in this regard, but I cannot help it – we all hear about the so-called ‘Putin inflation’ in the West. When I see this, I wonder who they expect would buy this nonsense – people who cannot read or write, maybe. Anyone literate enough to read would understand what is actually happening.

“The rising prices, accelerating inflation, shortages of food and fuel, petrol, and problems in the energy sector are the result of system-wide errors the current US administration and European bureaucracy have made in their economic policies. That is where the reasons are, and only there.”[i]

Putin shows that he has at least a superficial understanding of where the West has erred with its neo-Keynesian monetary and economic policies. While some of the economic and monetary elements in his address can be criticised, Putin’s grasp of these subjects puts him head and shoulders above his opposite numbers in the G7.

It is from this disadvantage that the US is trying to impose dollar hegemony on Russian interests in the financial and currency war. We must consider the geopolitics of the matter. 

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