Vladimir Putin Thread

Putin’s "Civilizational" Speech Frames Conflict Between East and West, by Pepe Escobar for The Cradle. 02.23.2023.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much awaited address to the Russian Federal Assembly on Tuesday should be interpreted as a tour de force of sovereignty.

The address, significantly, marked the first anniversary of Russia’s official recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, only a few hours before 22 February, 2022. In myriad ways, what happened a year ago also marked the birth of the real, 21st century multipolar world.

Then two days later, Moscow launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine to defend said republics.

Cool, calm, collected, without a hint of aggression, Putin’s speech painted Russia as an ancient, independent, and quite distinct civilization – sometimes following a path in concert with other civilizations, sometimes in divergence.

Ukraine, part of Russian civilization, now happens to be occupied by western civilization, which Putin said “became hostile to us,” like in a few instances in the past. So the acute phase of what is essentially a war by proxy of the west against Russia takes place over the body of Russian civilization.

That explains Putin’s clarification that “Russia is an open country, but an independent civilization – we do not consider ourselves superior but we inherited our civilization from our ancestors and we must pass it on.”

A war dilacerating the body of Russian civilization is a serious existential business. Putin also made clear that “Ukraine is being used as a tool and testing ground by the west against Russia.” Thus the inevitable follow-up: “The more long-range weapons are sent to Ukraine, the longer we have to push the threat away from our borders.”

Translation: this war will be long – and painful. There will be no swift victory with minimal loss of blood. The next moves around the Dnieper may take years to solidify. Depending on whether US policy continues to cleave to neo-con and neoliberal objectives, the frontline may be displaced to Lviv. Then German politics may change. Normal trade with France and Germany may be recovered only by the end of the next decade.

Kremlin exasperation: START is finished

All that brings us to the games played by the Empire of Lies. Says Putin: “The promises…of western rulers turned into forgery and cruel lies. The west supplied weapons, trained nationalist battalions. Even before the start of the SMO, there were negotiations…on the supply of air defense systems… We remember Kyiv’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons.”

Putin made it clear, once again, that the element of trust between Russia and the west, especially the US, is gone. So it’s a natural decision for Russia to “withdraw from the treaty on strategic offensive weapons, but we don’t do it officially. For now we are only halting our participation to the START treaty. No US inspections in our nuclear sites can be allowed.”

As an aside, of the three main US-Russian weapons treaties, Washington abandoned two of these: The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was dumped by the administration of former president George W. Bush in 2002, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was nixed by former president Donald Trump in 2019.

This shows the Kremlin’s degree of exasperation. Putin is even prepared to order the Ministry of Defense and Rosatom to get ready to test Russian nuclear weapons if the US goes first along the same road.

If that’s the case, Russia will be forced to completely break parity in the nuclear sphere, and abandon the moratorium on nuclear testing and cooperation with other nations when it comes to the production of nuclear weapons. So far, the US and NATO game consisted in opening a little window allowing them to inspect Russian nuclear sites.

With his judo move, Putin returns the pressure onto the White House.

The US and NATO will not be exactly thrilled when Russia starts testing its new strategic weapons, especially the post-doomsday Poseidon – the largest nuclear-powered torpedo ever deployed, capable of triggering terrifying radioactive ocean swells.

On the economic front: Bypassing the US dollar is the essential play towards multipolarity. During his speech, Putin made a point to extol the resilience of the Russian economy: “Russian GDP in 2022 decreased only by 2.1 percent, estimates of the opposing side did not become reality, they said 15, 20 percent.” That resilience gives Russia enough room to “work with partners to make the system of international settlements independent of the US dollar and other western currencies. The dollar will lose its universal role.”

On geoeconomics: Putin went all out in praise of economic corridors, from West Asia to South Asia: “New corridors, transport routes will be built towards the East, this is the region where we will focus our development, new highways to Kazakhstan and China, new North-South corridor to Pakistan, Iran.”

And those will connect to Russia developing “the ports of the Black and Azov Seas, it’s necessary to build logistics corridors within the country.” The result will be a progressive interconnection with the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) whose principals include Iran and India, and eventually China’s mega-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

China’s plan for global security

It’s inevitable that apart from sketching several state policies geared towards Russia’s internal development – one might even compare them to socialist policies – a great deal of Putin’s address had to focus on the NATO vs. Russia war till-the-last-Ukrainian.

Putin remarked on how “our relations with the west have degraded, and this is entirely the fault of the United States;” how NATO’s goal is to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia; and how the warmongering frenzy had forced him, a week ago, to sign a decree “putting new ground-based strategic complexes on combat duty.”

So it’s no accident that the US ambassador was immediately summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs right after Putin’s address.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Ambassador Lynne Tracey in no uncertain terms that Washington must take concrete measures: among them, to remove all US and NATO military forces and equipment away from Ukraine. In a stunning move, he demanded a detailed explanation of the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, as well as a halt to US interference in an independent inquiry to identify the responsible parties.

Keeping the momentum in Moscow, top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi met with secretary of Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, before talking to Lavrov and Putin. Patrushev remarked, “the course towards developing a strategic partnership with China is an absolute priority for Russia’s foreign policy.” Wang Yi, not so cryptically, added, “Moscow and Beijing need to synchronize their watches.”

The Americans are doing everything to try and pre-empt the Chinese proposal for a de-escalation in Ukraine. China’s plan should be presented this Friday, and there’s a serious risk Beijing may fall into a trap set by the western plutocracy.

Too many Chinese “concessions” to Russia, and not as many to Ukraine, may be spun to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing (Divide and Rule, which is always the US Plan A. There’s no Plan B).

Sensing the waters, the Chinese themselves decided to take the offensive, presenting a Global Security Initiative Concept Paper.

The problem is Beijing still attributes too much clout to a toothless UN, when they refer to“formulating a New Agenda for Peace and other proposals put forth in Our Common Agenda by the UN Secretary-General.”

Same when Beijing upholds the consensus that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Try to explain that to the Straussian neo-con psychos in the Beltway, who know nothing about war, much less nuclear ones.

The Chinese affirm the necessity to “comply with the joint statement on preventing nuclear war and avoiding arms races issued by leaders of the five nuclear-weapon states in January 2022.” And to “strengthen dialogue and cooperation among nuclear-weapon states to reduce the risk of nuclear war.”

Bets can be made that Patrushev explained in detail to Wang Yi how that is just wishful thinking. The “logic “of the current collective western “leadership” has been expressed, among others, by irredeemable mediocrity Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general: even nuclear war is preferable to a Russian victory in Ukraine.

Putin’s measured but firm address has made it clear that the stakes keep getting higher. And it all revolves on how deep Russia’s – and China’s – “strategic ambiguity” are able to petrify a paranoid west flirting with mushroom clouds.

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/putins-civilizational-speech-frames-conflict-between-east-and-west/

Americans want Putin for president, by Victoria Nikiforova for RIANOVOSTI. 03.06.2023.

The US election race has taken an unexpected turn. Americans are tired of arguing who is worse: Biden or Trump. “Many citizens of our country,” states The American Thinker, “wanted to see a man like Putin in the place of the leader.”

A respectable Internet resource notes that the popularity of the Russian president is growing among ordinary Americans, despite all the Russophobic propaganda: “Behind all his ostentatious militancy, Americans are beginning to see in Putin a person and a leader who cares about his country and his people much more diligently than our authorities care about about us".

Okay, American Thinker is a conservative publication. But the most liberal British Guardian is forced to admit the same thing. At the just-concluded Conference of Conservative Political Actions, the Americans constantly pitted Putin against Biden, scolded the "warmongers" from the Democratic Party and demanded to stop the supply of weapons and cash injections to Ukraine.

"I like Putin," a conference participant told The Guardian. "I think he has courage and he cares about his country."

Why do they suddenly have such love for the Russian leader? Our man in this immediately seems to be some kind of ambush. We remember only too well how shamelessly flattering the Soviet leaders were in the American media during the years when they were tearing apart the Soviet Union.

Today, however, the opposite is true. In the official Anglo-Saxon media, Putin is still portrayed as "Doctor Evil". But the masses in the United States are much more difficult about it. The explosion of American love for the Russian president was provoked, paradoxically, by his extremely tough stance towards Russia's enemies.

A week ago, Russia's decision to suspend participation in the treaty on the limitation of strategic nuclear weapons was officially communicated to the American partners. It gave the impression of an exploding bomb. Our strategic opponents do not yet have an answer to this move.

But they very quickly realized that the warnings of the Russian leadership were by no means a bluff. In the past, some "experts" argued that Russia's statements should not be taken into account. Today, such "experts" are branded for adventurism by their own colleagues.

And now the broad masses of the United States are faced with an interesting dilemma. The head of the country - their strategic enemy frankly warns the White House not to interfere in the Ukrainian conflict, otherwise it could lead to a nuclear war. That is, Putin is showing responsibility and concern for the fate of millions of people.

At the same time, their own leader continues to stubbornly interfere with Ukraine, spitting on the fact that millions of ordinary Americans will have to pay for his adventures. The owner of the White House is ready to throw the people of the United States into radioactive hell, while he and his son will sit out in a bunker.

Yes, Zelensky jumped out very inopportunely with a promise that the Americans would have to send their sons and daughters "to die for Ukraine." And Joe Biden didn't even stop him.

Ordinary Americans - those who do not have the money to buy a bunker or go to New Zealand - see that only the Russian president cares about their future, like the future of the whole world. While their own leaders, it is not clear how they got into power, are ready to push all of humanity into the mouth of a nuclear war. Naturally, Americans speak in social networks in the style of "we want someone like Putin."

There is another important factor. Russia's decision to withdraw from START has led to a sharp increase in US search queries on "how many strategic missiles Russia has" and "how fast Russian missiles will reach the United States." Along with this, millions of Americans came to the realization that they were opposing a power of equal strength.

Prior to that, they fought only with non-nuclear countries with a frail army and corrupt elites. They didn’t perceive the inhabitants of these countries as people at all - just like colonial animals, chirping something to themselves.

Representatives of a country of equal strength have a completely different attitude. All colonial calls about the "mysteriousness" of Russia and the secret of the Russian soul ended instantly. The Americans saw us as equal opponents, which means they managed to take our place and admit that we can have our own interests.

For decades, our liberals have been whining about the fact that Russia's militancy could quarrel it with all countries. In fact, it works quite the opposite. A convincing demonstration of strength inspires respect, after respect comes the recognition of interests, and then "peace, friendship, chewing gum" may well arise. Only in this order - nothing else.

The most radical example of such a degeneration of hatred into love was seen by amazed observers in post-war Japan . The inhuman destruction of Hiroshima , Nagasaki , Tokyo led, paradoxically, not to guerrilla warfare, but to hysterical admiration for America . Konstantin Simonov has very vivid memories of this phenomenon - he was in Japan immediately after the war.

There is no need for Russia to behave as brutally as America. It was enough for us to simply announce the suspension of our participation in START. And now, despite all the lies of the official media, the broad American masses are imbued with warm feelings for President Putin. And the Newsmax channel reprints Dmitry Medvedev's post on the suspension of Russian participation in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) on its website . There is no criticism in this publication - journalists simply cite the words of the ex-president of Russia that "we have the right to defend ourselves with all types of weapons, including nuclear ones."

https://ria.ru/20230306/ssha-1855967202.html

Today is the anniversary of Vladimir Putin in power - on March 26, 2000, he was elected President of the Russian Federation, gaining 52.94% of the vote in early elections. Political scientist Alexander Akimov recalled the achievements of the head of the Russian Federation on the political stage.

Subsequently, Putin was re-elected to the post of head of state in 2004, 2012 and 2018. From 2008 to 2012, he served as prime minister, then the country was led by Dmitry Medvedev.

Before the 2012 elections, the presidential term was increased from 4 to 6 years. After the amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation came into force, Putin received the right to participate in new presidential elections in March 2024.

“Putin revived the army and industry, established the priority of national legislation over international legislation, secured the inalienability and inalienability of the territories of Russia, gave us an ideology - healthy conservatism and patriotism, reduced the level of terrorist activity by 260 times, did away with the oligarchy and created state capitalism, reduced poverty by 2 5 times, returned Crimea, Sevastopol, Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, Luhansk People's Republic to Russia, paid off external debts, increased average life expectancy by 7 years, created a middle class and a vertical of power, introduced maternity capital, ”said the member expert club "Digoria" Alexander Akimov in a commentary to "PolitExpert".

The President destroyed terrorist groups in Chechnya and the caliphate in Syria, defended and defended South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh, increased the share of modern equipment in the troops to 71% , created 83% of all major bridges in Russia and 75% of the processing industry , held the Olympics in Sochi, Championship World Cup, the Kazan and Krasnoyarsk Universiades, built the longest 19-kilometer Crimean bridge in Europe, created a unique, exclusive hypersonic weapon that has no analogues in the world.
Anniversary of election: political scientist Akimov lists Putin's achievements in 23 years in power

Thanks to Putin's actions, the dependence of the Russian budget on oil and gas has decreased from 60 to 28% (2020), and GDP - to 17% (2021). Under him, the Nord Stream, Power of Siberia and Turkish Stream gas pipelines were built, increased gasification within the country to 73% , launched and led the Immortal Regiment campaign, made Russia a world leader in grain exports and a country that developed an advanced vaccine against coronavirus.

“Putin has been named TIME magazine's Person of the Year several times and Forbes magazine's most powerful person in the world. His speeches at the Munich Conference on Security Policy (2007) and at the UN General Assembly (2015) became historic and predetermined the final of the unipolar world order,” the political scientist added.

Now, under the leadership of Putin, a special operation is being carried out to protect the DPR and LPR, aimed at the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.

“ The water blockade of Crimea has been broken , the North Crimean Canal has started working again. A whole network of American biological laboratories in Ukraine was discovered , plans for an offensive against the Donbass, the development of nuclear weapons and components of biological weapons, and the preparation of a provocation with the use of chemical weapons,” Akimov said.

Against the backdrop of the current situation, the rating of the President of Russia has practically reached the "Crimean" values ​​and has grown to almost 80% , according to a survey by VCIOM.

There are still many unresolved problems - both in the education system and in the healthcare system, demography, and public administration. Anti-Russian sanctions pose a significant danger to the domestic economy. But at the same time, the restrictions taken by the West against the Russian Federation are also a great opportunity for the development of all industries in the country.

“And our president can only wish health and victories for the glory of Russia,” Akimov concluded.

https://politexpert-net.translate.goog/23959542-glava_mid_kitaya_tsin_gan_schel_uspeshnimi_i_rezul_tativnimi_peregovori_putina_i_si_tszin_pina?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_hist=true

Americans want Putin for president, by Victoria Nikiforova

A good article but it is not as rosy as it paints the picture... just because some Americans want a putin style leader doesn't mean they will get him or her... there is no one on the horizon of US politics like that except perhaps Tulsi Gabbard, and what chance does she have of getting elected president?

The people of the US might want cream but their choices remain between dogshit and catshit...

Regarding the second article, despite their demonisation of Russia, Europe and the west had its tentacles deep into Russia and was slowly trying to turn it into a colony, but fortunately for Russia Putin taking decisions that benefited Russia and Russians... amusing really because no prospective EU state ever did that for its own people... but when he kept taking decisions against US interests and EU interests but in line with Russian interests... and Serb and Syrian and other interests... their punishment was to start to slowly cut Russia off from the west... if they had done it all in one hit Russia would have struggled... in the same way the EU or the US would struggle if suddenly cut off from their traditional consumers and suppliers... but fortunately the west did it gradually which allowed Russia to replace those ties as they were cut, or in the case of SWIFT to develop an alternative so when they were cut off they had the bare bones of something so they were not cut off completely.

They had cheap EU food imports because you can't grow food in Russia... too cold... well Russia proved them wrong and they are of course wrong about other things too like Russia needing the west, or the west just saying what the whole world is thinking... the west is not the international community at all... the west is the loud mouthed bully in the class no one likes but they know he carries a flick knife so it is not worth opposing them on anything except if it is important.

Every country deserves their own Putin type leader... but he is not unique... you could say Xi as well, or Castro... not unique but rare as a dodo in the western hemisphere because being part of the west means pleasing Washington.

Putin has done with being smart and out playing the west, what Stalin did with violence and the deaths of his internal enemies (real and perceived).

Ironically it was the west who helped him... there was no way he could break a Russia today away from a controlling but not hostile west...

The west has had to show their teeth, sending money and weapons and ammo to kill Russian citizens born on Ukrainian land but rejected by Kiev as being Russian speaking, and therefore contaminated, and to also kill Russian soldiers.

How long ago that the US got upset at the fake rumour that Putin was offering bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan... the irony being that of course the only countries that would throw money around like that would be Saudi Arabia or the US...

Russia will put bounties on vehicles and weapons like Stingers and Javelins and Leopard Tanks, but not often on people generally... there will be a few specific nazis they will want captured for discussions, but no bounty on entire groups of people.

Deploy a special operation experienced armoured division on the Finnish border.

Finland is now part of HATO so you don't need more troops on the border... just more precision tactical nukes like Iskander and ground launched cruise missiles armed with nukes to quickly take out military centres and population centres... with all those forests perhaps they might want to mix up their own batch of something like Agent Orange, and then when its forests are turned barren then just shoot everything that moves.

They are not neutral any more... simplifies things greatly.

Congratulations on Victory Day!

Just want to put this photo up, one of the best of VP, remembering those who died to preserve the future.

Linked for obvious reasons

Assassinating Vladimir Putin?, by Ron Unz for The Unz Review. 05.,28.2023.

Early on the morning of May 3rd the Kremlin was attacked by two explosive drones, and although these were destroyed by the defenses, the Russian government claimed that the incident had probably been an assassination attempt against President Vladimir Putin.

I was skeptical at the time, but when Ray McGovern was interviewed a few days later he seemed to take the accusation seriously. Given his 27 years as a CIA Analyst, including serving as head of the Soviet Policy Group, I tend to trust his judgment on such matters:

Although pro-Ukrainian forces had likely been responsible for the drone attack, our government provides all their funding, intelligence, and control, and such a momentous act must have been fully authorized by top American officials. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland is the Neocon responsible for Ukraine issues and McGovern believed she would have been the one who signed off on the strike against the Kremlin.

Russia’s nuclear arsenal is the most formidable in the world, somewhat larger than our own, while its revolutionary hypersonic delivery systems are entirely unstoppable. This currently gives Moscow a measure of strategic superiority and if Putin or his successor gave the order, the bulk of our population could be annihilated within hours. Although he came into office at the end of 1999 and has spent more than twenty years in power, Putin’s current approval rating is over 80%, more than twice that of President Joseph Biden, so his death or serious injury might have world-shattering consequences.

Given the ongoing Russia-NATO military confrontation in the Ukraine war, an American sponsored drone strike against the Kremlin and Putin is an extraordinarily reckless and foolish action. What would we think if the Soviets had attacked the White House at the height of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis? But extraordinarily reckless and foolish actions have become an American specialty in recent years, notably including our destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, perhaps Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure.

Indeed, soon after the outbreak of the Ukraine war in early 2022, our bipartisan political and media elites began vilifying Putin as “another Hitler,” with leading media figures and top U.S. Senators loudly calling for the assassination of the Russian president.

Such statements are particularly provocative given that just two years earlier we had publicly assassinated a top Iranian leader in a drone attack. At the time I had warned of the extremely dangerous implications for our future relations with Russia:

The January 2nd American assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran was an event of enormous moment.


Gen. Soleimani had been the highest-ranking military figure in his nation of 80 million, and with a storied career of 30 years, one of the most universally popular and highly regarded. Most analysts ranked him second in influence only to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s elderly Supreme Leader, and there were widespread reports that he was being urged to run for the presidency in the 2021 elections.

The circumstances of his peacetime death were also quite remarkable. His vehicle was incinerated by the missile of an American Reaper drone near Iraq’s Baghdad international airport just after he had arrived there on a regular commercial flight for peace negotiations originally suggested by the American government.

Our major media hardly ignored the gravity of this sudden, unexpected killing of so high-ranking a political and military figure, and gave it enormous attention. A day or so later, the front page of my morning New York Times was almost entirely filled with coverage of the event and its implications, along with several inside pages devoted to the same topic. Later that same week, America’s national newspaper of record allocated more than one-third of all the pages of its front section to the same shocking story.

But even such copious coverage by teams of veteran journalists failed to provide the incident with its proper context and implications. Last year, the Trump Administration had declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard “a terrorist organization,” drawing widespread criticism and even ridicule from national security experts appalled at the notion of classifying a major branch of Iran’s armed forces as “terrorists.” Gen. Soleimani was a top commander in that body, and this apparently provided the legal fig-leaf for his assassination in broad daylight while on a diplomatic peace mission.

But note that Congress has been considering legislation declaring Russia an official state sponsor of terrorism, and Stephen Cohen, the eminent Russia scholar, has argued that no foreign leader since the end of World War II has been so massively demonized by the American media as Russian President Vladimir Putin. For years, numerous agitated pundits have denounced Putin as “the new Hitler,” and some prominent figures have even called for his overthrow or death. So we are now only a step or two removed from undertaking a public campaign to assassinate the leader of a country whose nuclear arsenal could quickly annihilate the bulk of the American population. Cohen has repeatedly warned that the current danger of global nuclear war may exceed that which we faced during the days of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and can we entirely dismiss his concerns?

I went on to note that this American policy represented a radical change from the practice of past centuries, with the major Western countries having abandoned the use of assassination in the 17th century after the end of the bloody Wars of Religion.

The 1914 terrorist assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly organized by fanatical elements of Serbian Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely denied its own complicity, and no major European power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of World War I, and although many millions died in the trenches over the next few years, it would have been completely unthinkable for one of the major belligerents to consider assassinating the leadership of another.

A century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I don’t recall reading of any governmental assassination plots during that era, let alone in the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa disputed ownership of the wealthy province of Silesia by military means. I am hardly a specialist in modern European history, but after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War and regularized the rules of warfare, no assassination as high-profile as that of Gen. Soleimani comes to mind.

During our Revolutionary War, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and our other Founding Fathers fully recognized that if their effort failed, they would all be hanged as rebels by the British. However, I have never heard that they feared falling to an assassin’s blade, nor that King George III ever considered using such an underhanded means of attack. During the first century and more of our nation’s history, nearly all our presidents and other top political leaders traced their ancestry back to the British Isles, and political assassinations were exceptionally rare, with Abraham Lincoln’s death being one of the very few that comes to mind.

Unfortunately, the use of such lethal measures was eventually revived amid the bitter ideological struggle of World War II, at least in some quarters. According to renowned historian David Irving, when Hitler’s secret service suggested that an attempt be made to assassinate the Soviet military leadership, the German Fuehrer immediately forbade any such practices as contrary to the laws of warfare.

But his Western opponents had fewer such scruples. In 1941 Czech agents with Allied assistance successfully assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in Prague and in 1943 the US military intercepted and shot down the plane of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. However, some of the highest profile targets the Allied leadership selected for elimination seem to have been within their own ranks.

Curtis B. Dall was a New York stockbroker who had been FDR’s son-in-law during the early 1930s and he later spent decades as a leading figure in various anti-Semitic Far Right political organizations. In 1967 a fringe Christian group published his memoirs in a cheap paperback edition, and I happened to read that book three or four years ago.

Most of the incidents and stories Dall recounted seemed reasonably plausible, but I was very surprised when he claimed that late in the war the American government, possibly under Communist influence, had decided to assassinate Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the largest Allied nation. Although the effort fell through and the project was later abandoned, I’d never previously seen a hint of that story anywhere else and I was very skeptical of such an astonishing claim from a rather doubtful source. However, when I read Prof. Sean McMeekin’s outstanding 2021 history Stalin’s War a year or two later, he provided the same account, drawing upon the memoirs of a high-ranking American military commander based in the Chinese theater.

The plan had been to eliminate Chiang by means of a plane crash, and according to Irving the American and British governments also intended the same fate in 1943 for Charles de Gaulle, who was proving very uncooperative in his subordinate role as Free French leader in exile. However, de Gaulle survived the near-fatal accident caused by the sabotage of his plane and thereafter became much more cautious in his air travel.

Other Allied leaders were less fortunate. Like de Gaulle, Gen. Władysław Sikorski was based in London as leader of the Polish government in exile, and at first his relationship with the Allied leaders was good, with many thousands of Polish troops and airmen serving side-by-side with the British forces. However, in 1943 the Germans discovered and publicized the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre, revealing that Stalin had executed some 20,000 Polish officers whom he held as POWs. Sikorski was outraged at that enormous wartime atrocity and demanded a full Red Cross investigation while refusing to be fobbed off by Soviet denials or the implausible claim that the Germans themselves had been responsible. This led Stalin to break relations with the Polish exile government, and Irving makes a strong case that the top Allied leaders eventually decided that preserving the vital Soviet wartime alliance required Sikorski’s elimination, leading to the latter’s death in a suspicious airplane crash on Gibraltar a couple of months after de Gaulle had narrowly avoided the same fate.

Irving also explains that the previous year Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had made a deal with Admiral François Darlan, commander of all Vichy French forces, recognizing his authority in return for his joining the Allied cause; but the Allied leadership then nullified that controversial agreement by apparently arranging Darlan’s assassination a few weeks later.

During World War II America’s government had also put very substantial resources into the development of biological weapons and this continued after the end of the conflict although all these facts were kept completely secret at the time. There was considerable overlap of technology and personnel with the poisons and other assassination methods developed by the recently-established CIA during that period, as was discussed in a 2019 book by respected journalist Stephen Kinser, who also mentioned some of the prominent world leaders that our government attempted to assassinate during that era.

However, this climate of media avoidance has recently begun changing. Another strong endorsement of Baker’s book came from Stephen Kinzer, who just a year earlier had published Poisoner in Chief, primarily focused upon the notorious MK-ULTRA mind-control projects of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA researcher described in the title. Kinzer’s book attracted glowing accolades from Pulitzer Prize winners Seymour Hersh and Kai Bird, both writers with great experience on intelligence matters, and received quite favorable reviews in the elite mainstream media.

At first glance, mind-control and biological warfare might seem entirely dissimilar topics, but they actually share considerable areas of overlap. Both required the creation and use of dangerous biological or biochemical agents, which for maximal effectiveness must then be tested upon unwilling human subjects, often in dangerous or lethal ways. Since in this regard they obviously operate outside the boundaries of normal legality, especially in peacetime, their use must be kept entirely secret, naturally matching them with the proclivities of an intelligence agency such as the CIA. Throughout his book Kinzer emphasized the considerable overlapping personnel and resources between these two domains. Indeed, as the CIA’s “chief poisoner,” Gottlieb developed a wide range of deadly biological compounds which he deployed in a number of mostly unsuccessful attempts to assassinate foreign leaders such as Prime Ministers Zhou Enlai of China and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, as well as Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

However, unlike today’s climate of bold public declarations, all those previous American assassination plots of the 1950s and 1960s were kept secret from the American people. And as I explained in an an article, their eventual disclosure during the post-Watergate era produced a huge public backlash:

At the height of the Cold War, our CIA did involve itself in various secret assassination plots against Cuba’s Communist dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders considered hostile to US interests. But when these facts later came out in the 1970s, they evoked such enormous outrage from the public and the media, that three consecutive American presidents—Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—all issued successive Executive Orders absolutely prohibiting assassinations by the CIA or any other agent of the US government.

Although some cynics might claim that these public declarations represented mere window-dressing, a March 2018 book review in the New York Times strongly suggests otherwise. Kenneth M. Pollack spent years as a CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer, then went on to publish a number of influential books on foreign policy and military strategy over the last two decades. He had originally joined the CIA in 1988, and opens his review by declaring:

One of the very first things I was taught when I joined the CIA was that we do not conduct assassinations. It was drilled into new recruits over and over again.

Yet Pollack notes with dismay that over the last quarter-century, these once solid prohibitions have been steadily eaten away, with the process rapidly accelerating after the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The laws on our books may not have changed, but

Today, it seems that all that is left of this policy is a euphemism.


We don’t call them assassinations anymore. Now, they are “targeted killings,” most often performed by drone strike, and they have become America’s go-to weapon in the war on terror.

The Bush Administration had conducted 47 of these assassinations-by-another-name, while his successor Barack Obama, a constitutional scholar and Nobel Peace Prize winner, had raised his own total to 542. Not without justification, Pollack wonders whether assassination has become “a very effective drug, but [one that] treats only the symptom and so offers no cure.”

Thus over the last couple of decades American policy has followed a disturbing trajectory in its use of assassination as a tool of foreign policy, first restricting its application only to the most extreme circumstances, next targeting small numbers of high-profile “terrorists” hiding in rough terrain, then escalating those same killings to the many hundreds. And now under President Trump, the fateful step has been taken of America claiming the right to assassinate any world leader not to our liking whom we unilaterally declare worthy of death.

Pollack had made his career as a Clinton Democrat, and is best known for his 2002 book The Threatening Storm that strongly endorsed President Bush’s proposed invasion of Iraq and was enormously influential in producing bipartisan support for that ill-fated policy. I have no doubt that he is a committed supporter of Israel, and he probably falls into a category that I would loosely describe as “Left Neocon.”

But while reviewing a history of Israel’s own long use of assassination as a mainstay of its national security policy, he seems deeply disturbed that America might now be following along that same terrible path. Less than two years later, our sudden assassination of a top Iranian leader demonstrates that his fears may have been greatly understated.

So in recent years assassination has become a standard tool of American policy, often publicly declared. This has naturally lowered the threshold for its use, perhaps leading our government to now target the political leader controlling the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, a possibility that would have been utterly unimaginable during the original Cold War.

There may be another contributing factor to this disturbing trend of American behavior. As I’ve recently discussed, over the last three decades the Neocons have gained a bipartisan stranglehold over our national security policy, and whether or not the particular individuals are Jewish, they have all been closely aligned with support for Israel and the Zionist ideological cause.

One particularly problematical aspect of this powerful Israeli ideological influence has been the long Zionist history of the use of assassination, both before and after the creation of the State of Israel. In early 2020 our Solemaini killing prompted me to publish a very lengthy presentation of this important yet long concealed history, from which this paragraph and many of the preceding extracts were drawn:

Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.

We should also recognize the reality that during the last seventy years America has maintained the world’s largest and best-funded biological warfare program, with our government spending many tens of billions of dollars on biowarfare/biodefense across those decades. And as I’ve discussed in a long article, there is even considerable evidence that we actually used those illegal weapons during the very difficult first year of the Korean War.

Soon after their invasion, the Russians publicly claimed that the U.S. had established a series of biolabs in Ukraine, which were preparing biological warfare attacks against their country. Last year one of their top generals declared that the global Covid epidemic was probably the result of a deliberate American biowarfare attack against China and Iran, echoing the accusations previously made by those countries.

Russian security concerns over our advanced biowarfare capabilities and the extreme recklessness with which we might employ them may explain the rather strange behavior of President Putin when he met in Moscow for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz shortly before the outbreak of the Ukraine war.

At the time many observers were puzzled why in each case the two national leaders were seated at opposite ends of a very long table, with Putin blandly suggesting that the placement was meant to symbolize the vast distance separating Russia and NATO’s Western leaders. Perhaps that innocuous explanation was correct. But I think it far more likely that the Russians were actually concerned that the Western leaders meeting him might be the immunized carriers of a dangerous biological agent intended to infect their president.

Considering the total madness that America’s ruling elites have exhibited in recent years, we can hardly blame the Russians for taking such unusual precautions to ensure Putin’s safety. This is especially true because in today’s Russia nominal and actual political power are conjoined, a very different situation than is often found in America or much of the West, as I’d noted in 2015.

Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.

Given this situation, I think it is very fortunate for the world—and our own country—that both Russia and China are currently led by extremely cautious and pragmatic individuals willing to forego any cycle of retaliatory escalation. But the ruling political elites of DC should recognize that their own persons are hardly likely to remain permanently sacrosanct from the terrible forces they seem all too eager to set into motion.

https://www.unz.com/runz/assassinating-vladimir-putin/

Someone who realises Putin is not the bad guy...

Funny, that is what the Americans did when the ICC started talking about investigating American war crimes in Afghanistan... they put all the ICC judges who supported it on sanctions lists and they quickly folded and stopped the investigation... but then the US can be rather more nasty than the Russians would be, and their tentacles reach further in western circles than the Russians can reach.

Japanese c*nt with a hate axe to grind. The ICC is a kangaroo court which actually asserts that refugee children from the Donbass
are "kidnapped Ukrainians". A lot of those children are orphans whose parents were murdered by the Kiev regime. Tomoko should be
the one with an arrest warrant.

She cares about Ukrainian children like a spider cares about flies.

The human side of Putin

higurashihougi wrote:I would like to ask anyone who can hear and read Russian please help me verify this: in the Eastern Economic Forum, did Putin said that after 1990s event Russia gain "emancipation and freedom" ?

(В 90-е годы мы многое приобрели, имею в виду раскрепощение и свободу, многое потеряли, к сожалению.)

RIA Novosti, TASS, and mainstream Western media mainly stress that Putin oppossed the USSR sending troops to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But I do not see any them say anything about that "emancipation and freedom" parts. So far I only found that part in much less notable media outlets.

I am not surprise if Putin said that because he is 100% capitalist and this is not the first time he expressed hostile attitude against the USSR. But I would like to see whether he really said these words and if he did say that, why the Western mainstream media do not exploit it to say bad things about the USSR and Russia ?

When did you figure out that Putin was 100% capitalist, higurashihougi?  

Was it when he said these words, or maybe over the past 20 years, or maybe even earlier in the 90s when he was the protege and confidant of St. Petersburg mayor and you can betchya 100% capitalist Anatoly Sobchak? The same Sobchak who opposed the putsch attempt against Yeltsin, was one of the authors of the constitution of the then newly sovereign Russian Federation, and whose daughter now is one of the richest women in Russia despite not having really achieved anything business-wise?
Or was it when Putin has over the previous years has been unveiling statues to Alexander III all over Russia, blaming Lenin for setting up a 'timebomb' by establishing national autonomies, or praising Stolypin and other Tsarist-era economic ministers?

Nevertheless I personally don't believe Putin is really anything. He's a pragmatist. He's as ready to give Stalin his dues as Alexander III. If he sees evidence that one system will work better than another then he will switch to it. He has slowly been partially switching Russia to state capitalism and reintroducing some socialist-era welfare and other policies, although at the same time he holds on to various liberal and free-market orthodoxies in other areas. Not because he's an idealogue, but because he and his advisors have calculated that this is the optimal system, rightly or wrongly.

As for the quote itself, it reads as follows:
In the 90s we gained a lot, here I mean emancipation and freedom, and we lost a lot, unfortunately.

Note that the Russian word for emancipation can be directly translated as the process of ridding yourself of the status of a serf, or getting rid of serfdom. So strong words. Assuming that this quote belongs to him of course, I have no idea either way.

flamming_python wrote:When did you figure out that Putin was 100% capitalist, higurashihougi?  

Some times ago, when I became less naive (I am still naive as you have pointed out in a previous post).

But thanks for the feedback.

The only ones who are 100% capitalist really, are the Western leaders. Because they're the only ones who insist upon this whole system of exploitation for the rest of the world. Who else have you ever heard of insisting to everyone else on globalism, and opening national banks to acquisition, all resources to investment, removing all barriers to trade, opening all borders for labour migration, and so on?

Putin and others simply don't care. They have nothing to preach or spread. Russia has need of markets, but it has no need of resources, and as for cheap labour it can attract it without having to interfere in other countries. We can class Russia, as well as Iran, Syria, maybe Algeria to some extent, and some of these new military regimes in West Africa as 'sovereigntist'; meaning that they prize the freedom to pursue relations with as many countries to the benefit of themselves as they want rejecting any outside ideology or interference from any side. Which has instantly brought them into conflict with the West because that's the only group on countries insisting on dictating to everyone else.

Elsewhere in the world we still have the remnants of the old socialist bloc; that's China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and a couple new countries with similar ideological sympathies such as Venezuela and Bolivia. But it's hard to call them a cohesive group. Mostly just countries with some vestigal sympathy with each other, but otherwise they mostly overlap with the 'sovereigntists'.

And then finally you have the neutral countries, which is the equivalent of the non-aligned bloc during the Cold War. And it's where most of the BRICS countries belong to. So this is India, South Africa, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and so on. Essentially these countries also prefer a multipolar world, but they're not ready to challenge the West and are ready to cut deals for their individual benefit, or navigate their way in a unipolar world if they have to. But they all realize the increasing weight of US hegemony over the preceding decades and so are ready to passively undermine the US or try to establish a balance of power between the US and Russia/China so that they themselves have more breathing room.

flamming_python wrote:The only ones who are 100% capitalist really, are the Western leaders. Because they're the only ones who insist upon this whole system of exploitation for the rest of the world. Who else have you ever heard of insisting to everyone else on globalism, and opening national banks to acquisition, all resources to investment, removing all barriers to trade, opening all borders for labour migration, and so on? (...)

I would like to argue that the "sovereigntist" are actually capitalism, and especially, state capitalism.

Just like centralized autocracy like Imperial China are 100% feudalism although the feudal class did not clearly manifest as individual landlords with autonomous fiefs, but as a centralized bureaucrat system extracting peasant's labour in the same manner.

The state capitalism of the "sovereigntist" also collects surplus value from waged workers in a capitalistic manner, although the profit is more to serve the income of the government magistrates and for some sort of common program which satisfy some common interests of the whole public.

The state capitalism of the "sovereigntist" serving the interest of the national bourgeious and national petite-bourgeious, who are in a temporal alliance with the farmers and proletariat against foreign capitalist from imperialist powers as these foreign imperialists are the common enemy.

Capitalists does not only exploit and oppress proletariat, between the capitalists have hierarchy which means some capitalists also oppress and exploit others. For example, the financial capitalists and money-lenders exploit the productive capitalists. And the big corporations from imperialist power oppress and enslave the national bourgeious in third world countries.

The national bourgeious and petite-bourgeious, by definition, are exploiters due to the nature of the production relationship, but in turn they are being oppressed and exploited by imperialist capitals and therefore they have sympathy to and shared interest with opppressed people in general.

That leads to the alliance between national bourgeious and local proletariats and farmers in the "sovereigntist" countries, to fight against the common oppressors.

Will the alliance be broken in some time in the future ? Yes. As mentioned in the Communist Manifesto, Chapter IV.

And why "sovereigntist" countries tend to have some sort of strong government with emphasize on state capitalism, because their conditions require a strong, centralized state to protect the national bourgeious against the competition and invastion of foreign imperialists. Petite-bourgeious, intelligentsia, and lesser magistrates desire state capitalism because most of them don't have private ownership of means of production, employed by the government is the way for them to exercise their authority on the economy and shield them from the "free" market. Proletariats and farmers see that the big government as some sort of "public" power, corrupted as it can be, who can potentially protect them from the exploitation and harrassment from the rich, and where they have at least get a chance to raise their voice about public affairs.

In the case of Marxist-Leninnist countries in the transitional period, which is the result of the proletariat have the upper hand in the alliance to the point that they manage to create a proletariat government, these countries employ state capitalism to develop their economy, but the different here is state capitalism is under control of proletariat dictartorship and the government is under control of a proletariat political party. Which was explained by Lenin on his theses on the agriculture taxes.

It was Lenin and Trotsky among others who warned against dismissing the role of the individual in history. What you describe is an oligarchy, but it is incorrect to classify Russia as such as in reality it's an autocracy under the command of a narrow clique of people, but ones who have subordinated economic interests and everyone else, every magistrate and would be oligarch and so on - to their own interpretation of national interests or this or that historic mission.

It's much the same story with Iran, now with Syria and with the anti-colonial revolutionary governments in Africa - they are not operating by pure economic logic or in the manner of beating out a competitor, it has become 'personal' for them if you will. If any of these states would see in transforming themselves into the Marxist-Leninst model a more sure-fire way of beating the West; then their leaders would have the authority to do it and no petty capitalist in these countries would have the authority to stop them. Well with the exception of Iran, as Islam is a matter of internal stability for them.

The national capitalist countries are really those I categorized in the final group. In that they are wary of being subordinated to the globalists but can co-operate with them if on a mutually-beneficial basis. They desire a more multipolar world order as it affords them more options and allows their corporations to spread and take-over rather than the current slanted playing field favouring Western multinationals over all others.

I don't dispute that when the Western threat abates, that Russia and Syria at the minimum will revert to the same national capitalist states driven by their economic elites and economic interests first and foremost.

The only ones who are 100% capitalist really, are the Western leaders. Because they're the only ones who insist upon this whole system of exploitation for the rest of the world. Who else have you ever heard of insisting to everyone else on globalism, and opening national banks to acquisition, all resources to investment, removing all barriers to trade, opening all borders for labour migration, and so on?

The west is more like a TV evangelist who wants as big a flock as he can muster because the size of his flock determines how much he makes and how comfortable his life becomes... how many houses and big expensive cars and how many holiday houses he can afford, but you have to sell the dream that you and a select few get to live... for everyone else the dream is just a story... a promise.

And of course it is not until they fall that we find out how depraved and corrupt they really were... but some believers have faith because it is only the most devout that go to heaven... they believe.

The west is like the catholic church... power has corrupted them and while on the surface the message sounds great if you look at the details they don't add up... they certainly don't practise what they preach and never hold themselves to the same standards they criticise others for... which is ironic that you hold others to your standards and ethics and morals but ignore those same standards and ethics and morals for yourself.