A senior Russian diplomat confirms: “Russia is preparing for war” – is anybody listening?

The Saker

November 02, 2018

[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

Andrei Belousov, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department of Nonproliferation and Arms Control, has recently made an important statement which I shall quote in full and then provide a translation.

Original Russian text: “Тут недавно на заседании Соединенные Штаты заявили, что Россия готовится к войне. Да, Россия готовится к войне, я это подтверждаю. Да, мы готовимся защищать нашу родину, нашу территориальную целостность, наши принципы, наших людей. Мы готовимся к такой войне. Но у нас есть серьезные отличия от Соединенных Штатов Америки. И в лингвистическом плане это отличие заключается всего в одном слове, что в русском языке, что в английском языке: Российская Федерация готовится к войне, а Соединенные Штаты Америки готовят войну”

Translation: “Recently at a meeting the United States stated that Russia is preparing for war. Yes, Russia is preparing for war, I can confirm it.  Yes, we are preparing to defend our homeland, our territorial integrity, our principles, our values, our people. We are preparing for such a war.  But there is a major difference between us and the United States.  Linguistically, this difference is just in one word, in both Russian and English: Russia is preparing for war while the United States is preparing a war” (emphasis added).

We are so used to western diplomats and politicians saying more or less anything and everything (as the joke goes: when do you know that a politician is lying? When his lips move) that many of us stopped paying attention to what is being said. If tomorrow Trump or some “Congressperson” goes on national TV and declares “read my lips – up is down, dry is wet and yes means no” – most of us will just ignore it. The truth is that being exposed to that constant stream of empty, bombastic and always dishonest statements makes most of us immune to verbal warnings, even when they come from non-western political figures.

It is, therefore, crucial to fully realize that Russian official and diplomats carefully measure every word they say and that when they repeat over and over again that Russia is ready for war, they actually and truly mean it!

Of course, there have been those in the West who fully saw this danger and have been warning about it for years, I especially think of Prof. Stephen Cohen and Paul Craig Roberts here.  And I have been warning about this for four years now, beginning with the article “Obama just made things much, much worse in the Ukraine – now Russia is ready for war” posted on March 1st, 2014, followed by many more articles with the same warning since (see “The Russian response to a double declaration of war” on September 27th, 2014; “Did Russia just “gently” threaten the USA?” on November 12th, 2015; “Debunking popular clichés about modern warfare” on May 19th, 2016; “How Russia is preparing for WWIII” on May 26, 2016; “A Russian warning” on June 1st 2016; “Assessing the Russian Military as an Instrument of Power” on August 25th, 2016; “Progress report on the US-Russian war” on December 1st, 2017; “What price will mankind have to pay for the collapse of the Empire?” on April 13th, 2018; “Each “click” brings us one step closer to the “bang!” on April 20th, 2018).  But for all our efforts, we have been “voices crying in the wilderness” which is hardly surprising since even Putin’s blunt warning during his March 1st speech to the Russian Federal Assembly was quickly dismissed as “posturing” and quickly forgotten.  This is why two weeks following that historical speech I compared Russia to a peaceful rattlesnake (yes, they are peaceful creatures!) desperately trying to warn a drunk idiot to back-off but to no avail: the drunk idiot just boastfully declares “hold my beer and watch this” and tries to grab the snake.  I concluded by saying that:

May, Trump, Macron and Merkel, of course, but also their sycophantic presstitutes and the herds of zombified followers all believe in their invulnerability and superiority. The terrifying truth is that these folks have NO IDEA whom they are dealing with nor do they understand the consequences of pushing Russia too hard. Oh, in theory they do (yeah, yeah, Napoleon, Hitler, we know!). But in their guts, they feel safe, superior and just can’t conceive that they can die, and their entire society can just disappear.

Sadly, since then things have only gotten worse.  This is why a clearly disgusted and frustrated Putin recently declared that

“Any aggressor should know that retribution will be inevitable and he will be destroyed. And since we will be the victims of his aggression, we will be going to heaven as martyrs. They will simply croak and won’t even have time to repent,”

Needless to say, the western ziomedia interpreted this warning as a sign of “Russian aggression,” not as a desperate attempt to wake up a delusional and infinitely arrogant Empire.

By the way – something very similar has been happening between the USA and China with an increasing number of Chinese officials publicly declaring that the Chinese armed forces need to prepare for war (here is just the latest such warning).

Sadly, the Chinese warnings are as ignored and as dismissed as the Russian ones.  And that is truly frightening.

At least during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the entire world press was reporting about the confrontation minute by minute, and everybody knew that the danger of war was very real. In contrast today, hardly anybody gives the possibility of war much thought. In fact, the leaders of the AngloZionist Empire seem to be dead set on multiplying their provocations against Russia ranging from holding major military exercises right at the Russian border to giving the most prestigious EU human right prize to a convicted terrorist (the Poles, always so helpful, even suggested that Sentsov ought to be given the Nobel!). The EU also failed to notice the Ukronazi acts of piracy in the Sea of Azov but instead, condemned Russia for strictly enforcing her legal right to retaliate for the Ukronazi actions.

Such a level of hypocrisy is disgusting, of course.  But it is also very, very dangerous.

Frankly, considering the fantastic and genuinely heroic efforts of Putin and Xi to avoid a major (nuclear) war with the Empire, I would suggest that they, not convicted terrorists, be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (but I am not holding my breath here…)!

In sharp contrast to the western corporate media, the Russian media has been discussing the possibility of war with the US/NATO on a daily basis, and the discussion always revolves around the question “are they really crazy enough to actually attack us even though that would mean their certain destruction?!“. In fairness to the Russians, seeing folks like Nikki Haley or John Bolton, the question of “are they crazy?” is a logical one. But I think that it is also possibly misleading. Here is why:

While clearly some Neocons are truly batshit crazy, most are not. Stupid, ignorant, arrogant, hateful and evil – yes. But not necessarily insane. And for that reason, I don’t think that the AngloZionist leaders will stumble into a war against Russia as a result of their insanity. Besides, while US politicians are, indeed, amazingly stupid and ignorant, there are enough men in the US armed forces who remember the warning of Field Marshal and Viscount of Alamein Bernard Montgomery who famously declared to the House of Lords:

“Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow”. Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: “Do not go fighting with your land armies in China.” It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives“.

Most senior US military commanders must realize that war against Russia and/or China is a suicidal proposition.

But while the insanity of western leaders is unlikely to cause a war, I am afraid that their despair might.

Think of it: right now the USA is engaged in two parallel processes: on the one hand the USA is involved in sanctions and economic wars against most of the planet while on the other hand, the USA is withdrawing from one major international treaty after another (including arms control treaties). Ask yourself a simple question: is this the behavior of a country which is weak or strong? What does this “full-spectrum” policy of confrontation and self-isolation (because that is what withdrawing from so many agreements and treaties does: isolate the USA) mean? Does it signal the actions of a confident and strong power or one which is desperate and lashes out on all levels?

As this short post by Larchmonter445 reminds us, the current batch of US leaders are first and foremost *losers* and while they are still doing a pretty good job of window-dressing and flag-waving, it is becoming increasingly impossible to hide the magnitude of the multi-level slow-motion collapse of the AngloZionist Empire. I suppose that the band playing on the deck of the Titanic also played louder and louder, but the outcome of the show was never in doubt. The same is happening here and therein lies an enormous danger: the harder it becomes to conceal the magnitude of the unfolding disaster, the more the Empire lashes out, making the situation even worse which then makes it even harder to conceal the magnitude of the disaster. The Empire in general, and the USA specifically, is literally cracking on all levels and there is absolutely no reasonable and halfway viable way to reverse this trend because the one and only solution for the USA to survive is to give up the Empire and become a “normal” country – something US leaders are not even willing to contemplate. The Neocons, especially, seem to have a quasi-religious belief (or maybe it is just an uncontrolled knee-jerk reaction) that when one of their putative “clever” plans fail, the correct solution is to double-down. They seem to have fully internalized the German aphorism “wenn es mit Gewalt nicht geht, dann geht es mit mehr Gewalt!” (if violence can’t fix it, then even more violence will), forgetting that this belief did Germany no good against Russia. As for the general western public, it has been successfully turned into what I call “ideological drones“: brainwashed automatons who will wave their (Chinese made) flags to cope with any residual cognitive dissonance.  When their certitudes finally come crashing down, they will also lash out at everything and everybody in abject despair and impotent rage.

Right now the USA and the “global West” (aka the AngloZionist Empire) are on a direct collision course with Russia (and probably China too).  Right now, I see very few signs that anybody in the western elites is able (or willing) to admit that at the end of that road there is war and the destruction of the USA (and possibly much of Europe).  Right now, the leaders of the Empire appear to be firmly locked into what the French call the “fuite en avant” (which can roughly be translated as “flight forward”, or “headlong rush”, “panic-induced compulsion to further exacerbate a crisis or calamity” or even “unconscious mechanism that causes a person to throw himself/herself into a dreaded danger”). I suppose that there is a sad and tragic irony in the fact that the result of the US elites constantly conjuring up some completely imaginary Russian “interventions” (in the USA and elsewhere) might eventually result in a very real Russia intervention, in the form of devastating missile strikes, but this is hardly a consolation.

How likely is that to change in the foreseeable future?

Not very likely, I am afraid.

Will Putin and Xi be able to avert the looming war with the West?

Maybe.  But with each passing day bringing only further escalations and provocations from the “global West” their task is becoming harder and harder.

So far all the Russian and Chinese warnings have fallen on deaf ears and, frankly, I don’t believe that more warnings will do any good.

This might be the time for Russia and China to begin pushing back seriously. Everything else has failed, at least so far.

The Saker

Eastern Ukraine, neo-nazis, Trump, Ukraine, USA

October 29, 2018

by GH Eliason for The Saker Blog

Leonid Pasechnik, the acting Head of Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR)has been in office for almost one year. With the state of his reforms in LNR, you want to judge him against leaders of countries at peace, not as one that just formed in the middle of a war four years ago.

For the last thirty years, Donbass was neglected in Ukraine. The infrastructure across Ukraine was bad, but in Donbass it was notorious. Key infrastructure like the water supply has been neglected since 1983.

Political Leaders and oligarchs from what would become LNR historically were only interested in what they could take out of the region. Donbass coal and industry historically provided the basis of Ukrainian wealth. No other region contributed as much and no one including Victor Yanukovych had any interest in investing any of that money back in the region to build it up.

Pasechnik is providing a marked difference. During what is still considered nation building, his interim administration is taking the economic and social problems in the newly formed republic head-on.

In the spring of 2018, his administration introduced their five-year socio-economic development plan called “Our Choice.” His administration included input from 70,000 LNR residents to make sure people’s concerns about the future are addressed as reforms go forward.

LNR’s Current Outlook

For the last four years, LNR has worked to build a lasting peace. Fulfilling their side of the Minsk Agreements LDNR (Lugansk &Donetsk People’s Republics) negotiated with Poroshenko’s regime has been a key part deciding what direction the republic is taking. Kiev hasn’t attempted to fulfill any point agreed to and tries to use the agreement to beat Russia over the head within the US and the EU.

The often overlooked part of the Minsk agreement in the west is Ukraine is not negotiating with Russia. Russia is a guarantor for the agreement the same as the EU is, nothing more. If Poroshenko had any intention of reintegrating Donbass, Ukraine would negotiate in good faith and keep its word. This hasn’t happened.

Because of this, Pasechnik’s government recognizes the fact that until the government in Ukraine changes, real negotiation and progress remain impossible. For Ukraine to be taken seriously, decentralization in the form of federalization will have to take place. Ukraine will also have to start creating the conditions for building an economy in all its regions.

Even in view of this LNR has consistently fulfilled its part of the Minsk agreements.

The West’s Shortsighted Spectacle

Unfortunately, even recent history shows there is no reason to take any offer Ukrainian nationalists make or are part of negotiating seriously. Poroshenko is only after sound bites and not substance. Pravy Sektor nationalist leader Dimka Yarosh has announced he is pulling his troops away from the front line to monitor Ukrainian elections. Ultra-nationalists monitoring elections? Yeah, this should go well.

In a recent interview with Ukrainian “Novoye Vremya,” Condoleezza Rice commented it was “bad” that the world was starting to believe Russia’s version of what was going on in Donbass.

At the end of the day, world leaders still have to believe somebody. After four years of looking at the diplomatic and economic train wreck, Ukraine has evolved into, they have no reason to believe Ukraine.

Instead of becoming the promised European model they could all look to, Ukraine has taken away every safety net even marginal civilizations provide for their people. Manufacturing is gone and instead of working through internal issues, the new government attacked its powerhouse region in Donbass. LNR and DNR provided a lion’s share of wealth because of the coal industry and manufacturing. The nation’s most important engineering universities are ensconced in the capitals because of this.

That isn’t something the EU or the rest of the world can take lightly. With no possibility of recovery in the near to mid future, Ukraine’s only hope is to find work in Europe. Ukrainians making it to Europe are finding low paying bottom tier work as well as the illegal sex trade.

Under Donald Trump, there is no reason to believe the US would be willing to take in violent nationalists from a country that tried to destroy his candidacy and his presidency.

All of this is the result of Poroshenko’s Ukraine destroying every possible growth industry it had including rocket engines, weapons, and technologies, and traded that for giant corporate farms. Agribusiness giants and agro-holdings companies are the big growth areas but provide no jobs.

The outlook for Ukraine is very poor for the foreseeable future unless drastic policy changes are implemented.

When you contrast this to what LNR is accomplishing under Leonid Pasechnik, it’s easy to see why Condi Rice is so upset.

Lugansk People’s Republic’s Reform Renaissance

It’s easy to argue renaissance is too strong a term to use for the reforms going on in LNR because there is a war going on. The infrastructure and economy have taken serious hits over the past four years. Nineteen bridges have taken extensive damage or collapsed in LNR hampering transportation. Roads were also shelled and in many areas need to be rebuilt.

On top of this, starting at day one, Pasechnik’s government had to fight the civil war as well as the systemic corruption that had not been touched by his predecessor. It’s very difficult to imagine a government starting out with a weaker hand.

In the short time Pasechnik has been in office, his government not only formulated a five-year plan, but they also started implementing it in a grand way. It started with building an energy bridge to power the steel mill in Alchevsk. High voltage transmission lines were installed that not only allowed the plants to go into production, but they are also increasing production and hiring plant workers. Business is opening in other manufacturing sectors because the government has been able to negotiate its way around sanctions to a small degree. In the garment industry, this is creating jobs.

Large-scale road work and bridge work has commenced and the bridge connecting Lugansk to Donetsk is complete. Part of the 5-year plan is to restore the railways for large-scale transportation to service commerce and commuters. Pasechnik just announced fuel prices in LNR will be dropping to Russian levels. This is while a war is being fought.

Water has been an issue for the last four years and part of LNR’s water supply is purchased from Ukraine. Pasechnik has ordered pipelines from LNR’s own aquifers be rebuilt to solve this problem. Redundancy is a consideration for the design of the project. If one water main is down for repair or maintenance, a second water main will be put in use according to the building specifications.

The farming industry was in tatters because of the war. The current government is working to increase yields of high-quality grains like wheat. LNR has achieved food security for the republic. This by itself is an incredible feat given the fluidity of the situation with the civil war.

As part of the reforms, Pasechnik ordered the customs borders be taken down between LNR and DNR on April 1, 2018. DNR still needs to reciprocate but it is only logical considering how closely both republics need to cooperate.

Along with all these concrete reforms, LNR is also writing new equitable laws to replace the old corpus. More importantly, reformation of the judicial system is underway. Currently, the family courts are complete and work has begun on Supreme Court reform.

It is easy to see why Condoleezza Rice would be a little upset when little tiny upstart countries believe in federalized representative governance and can build a society even with all the stumbling blocks and chaff the US and Europe throw at it. While Ukraine, Rice’s model of what a European country should be, looks anemic by comparison.

It’s easy to have the support of the EU and the USA and make these reforms when they give you billions of dollars to do so. It’s certainly easier to jumpstart an economy when the economic zones are in safe areas.

Pashichnik and his political party Peace for Lugansk (Мир Луганщине) have shown the world they can do it on their own. This is what former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is concerned Russia will tell the world.

We’re going to start exploring the reforms listed above as well as others going on in depth. We’ll also get to know his party and the other political parties in LNR. I like looking at concrete results and Pasechnik is providing that in a substantial way.

After being here from before the beginning of Kiev’s Euromaidan coup, you get a little-jaded writing about politics and political leaders. From my perspective, it’s a shame he and his party wasn’t elected in the first place. I believe both republics would be in a better place.

After taking a real look at this overview, how do political leaders where you live measure up?

Jerusalem Patriarchate looking to dialogue between Local Churches to solve Ukraine issue

Jerusalem Patriarchate looking to dialogue between Local Churches to solve Ukraine issue

October 29, 2018

The Jerusalem Orthodox Church prays for the unity of Orthodoxy and hopes that it will be possible to resolve the conflict between the Ecumenical and Moscow Patriarchates through dialogue, a representative of the Jerusalem Patriarchate told RIA-Novosti today.

“We always pray for the unity of the Church. We believe that an appropriate solution to this situation will be found through discussion. We are concerned about this and we pray for unity. We want there to be love between the Churches,” the representative said.

He also expressed confident that “Jesus Christ will not abandon the Church, because, as the Gospels say, it is built on a rock, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

The Jerusalem Churches hopes that it will be possible to solve the Ukraine problem through dialogue with the participation of the Local Churches of the Orthodox Church, the interviewee added.

This aligns with the earlier statement of His Eminence Archbishop Theodosios of Sebastia of the Jerusalem Church, who called on the primates of the world’s Orthodox Churches to immediately join in the settlement of the current dispute, which is, according to him, fraught with disaster for the entire Orthodox world.

The same Jerusalem hierarch has also stated that the Jerusalem Patriarchate recognizes Ukraine as the canonical territory of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine, an autonomous and self-governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In calling for dialogue between the various Orthodox Churches, the Jerusalem Church echoes the call of not only the Russian Church, but also of the Romanian Synod which met yesterday, and the Antiochian and Georgian Holy Synods. The same call has also been made by the primates of the Polish, Serbian, Antiochian, and Czech and Slovak Churches, and also by a joint Antiochian-Serbian statement.

His Beatitude Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem has consistently criticized the violent actions of the schismatic bodies in Ukraine, calling them “lost.” Conversely, the Ecumenical Patriarchate recently entered into communionwith the two bodies of Ukrainian schismatics.

According to Evstraty Zorya, the speaker for the schismatic “Kiev Patriarchate,” who Constantinople now considers a canonical bishop under its jurisdiction, as they have reclaimed Ukraine as their canonical territory, has stated that Constantinople rejects the call for a pan-Orthodox discussion on the matter, but will move ahead unilaterally.

source: http://orthochristian.com/116835.html

Sins without Recourse, Beast without Remorse

October 26, 2018

by Norman Ball for The Saker Blog

“[W]e, as serious people, cannot examine the concrete problems that are thrown when the Russian Federation is accused of all mortal sins without recourse to the processes (norms) created for similar cases,” –from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s October 18th interview with RT France.

Russia labors under a West-imposed Original Sin that can obtain dispensation only with the former’s existential cessation. The root of this Sin is the root itself. Russia is Russia, after all. That cannot be rectified.

In light of this dead-stop, what can only be called an apriori –and fatal– naivete pervades much of the prescriptive analysis we read every day. If Putin would only hop or jump or swagger or dance (it differs from one sage to the next) then, we are assured, the properly calibrated gesture would elicit a jackpot of redemptive good will. Godot would pop over the horizon. The crisis would defuse.

Alas, this is an all-too-human read which, while perhaps befitting of a bygone era, falls short of the present moment’s activated spiritual Principalities.

Speaking of Godot, from the same interview that prefaces this essay, Lavrov resigns himself to a “serious, professional and non-propagandistic” discussion at some later time when the current “outbreak of political rage” abates. Whether or not he believes a terrestrial conclusion will arrive in time, we cannot know. He’s a poet. Is he a Christian? Lavrov, ever the consummate diplomat, is nonetheless obliged to sound the proper notes.

It remained for his boss, on the same day, to access otherworldly coordinates with the most astonishing rhetoric (Radio Free Europe called it, “more biblical than technical”) at a Sochi forum:

Putin is making the remarkable admission that if no honorable approach for Russia remains for recovering a constructive relationship with the West (and since crawling along a contritious path is out of the question), Heaven (or Hell) beckons in the wings for all parties.

For such a circumspect statesman to openly confess to The City of Man’s limitations in world affairs, and allow that God may have to sort it out on the other side, well, that’s a foreboding milestone. One shudders at what information he’s privy to as to warrant such a fatalistic statement of principle. Has the geopolitical tether truly run out?

Archetypes are the prefatory hoops through which all actions spring. With understandable forbearance (some armchair warriors would say belatedness), Putin has finally seized his end of the archetype of the apocalypse. (The gauntlet’s been lying on the ground for some time now; see the late Edward Edinger’s 2002 book of the same name). Nor can an utterances of this sort be retracted by secular communique. There it sits, in the global square, a white-hot psychic ember that must now be contended with.

My fellow prognosticators, this is not our parents’ geopolitics.

Know thy enemy. The snake never alters its stripes, though the prevailing terrain can at times abet its pattern. Like a boa constrictor, the implacable machine (Sartre) always awaits relaxation in its prey as a prelude to further tightening. Demonic eschatology continually splits the distance until it capitulates spasmodically within the claustrophobic space of the capstone. The pyramid is a progressively constricting geometry. There is no placating it. The Beast is an insistent geometric construct.

So it’s a form of madness to continually bemoan the rude particulars of the Beast’s blueprint. Would you kick a car for not being an airplane? The implacability is born of usury, an arithmetic pyramid that must have everything for itself.  Debt-money, eternally ravenous, is cursed to roam the earth paying its keep every minute of every day.

Don’t blame the debt-masters. Pity them. They’re the Machine’s most abject slaves. Witness their propensity for throwing themselves off buildings as a measure of unquenchable Babelian despair:

Master, come to my assistance!
Wrong I was in calling
Spirits, I avow,
For I find them galling,
Cannot rule them now.

–from The Sorceror’s Apprentice, Johann Goethe (tr. Paul Dyrsen)

What Russians must do, and admittedly it’s a problem, is to get out the way of their own country or else prostate themselves atop it. Andrei Fursov outlines the elite’s long-term interest in ‘Northern Eurasia’ (what amounts to Russia), as a post-apocalyptic, resource-rich life raft; what MacKinder might have called, the Heartland of the Heartland.

Mephistopheles comes by way of Sergie ‘the Snake’ Kudrin and his borrowed, if not outright mutinous, prescription.  (Scott Humor translates here):

“Therefore, today Russia’s foreign policy should be subordinated to the reduction of tension in our relations with other countries, and, at least, to the preservation or reduction of the sanctions regime, not to the build-up. Today I would measure the effectiveness of our foreign policy on this indicator.”

Of course selective subordination (of the foreign policy portfolio only) is tantamount to total capitulation further along. Ruslan Ostashko asks the obvious question rhetorically of Kudrin: “What will prevent the West from reinstating these sanctions back, after we make all those changes?” Well yes, what precedent –and please venture beyond Gorbachev’s unilateral dumping of the Brezhnev Doctrine for examples if you must– would compel anyone to think reciprocal accommodations ever arrive?

Anthropomorphic daydreams can never take the measure of the Beast. Left to themselves, human beings rest, commiserate, empathize and trade amicably among themselves with an innate sense of proportionality and fairness. The trouble is Paul’s Principalities, good and evil, never leave us to ourselves. Moreover these forces are vaulting increasingly to the fore as even Putin’s off-world meanderings reveal.

Faustian bargains are the West’s own jealous poison, thank you very much Mr. Kudrin. As such, they’re forever withheld from authentic Russian ingestion. Find your own poison in your own time, we might say, one civilization to another. To jump the tracks for ours would be a form of neo-Petrinism (manifested, in the present era, by doting Atlanticists like, well, Kudrin. Oswald Spengler would recognize him as Petrinism’s “artificial product made of stubborn material”.)

Spengler, more poet than historian, offers the penetrating eye of the stranger. His prescience for the Russian destiny is paraphrased by Kerry Bolton here:

The Russian soul is not the same as the Western Faustian, as Spengler called it, the ‘Magian’ of the Arabian civilization, or the Classical of the Hellenes and Romans. The Western Culture that was imposed on Russia by Peter the Great, what Spengler called Petrinism, is a veneer…The Russian soul expresses its own type of infinity, albeit not that of the Westerner’s Faustian soul, which becomes enslaved by its own technics at the end of its life-cycle.”

Many of those ‘technics’ fall under what Spengler called “money-thinking”. At the twilight of its life-cycle the West threatens to withhold its toxicity from all those who don’t ‘play fair’, plying its financial sanctions like an overused tool-set: fractional reserve banking, impudent debt-money that arrives ex nihilo seeking its keep from God-knows-where, leverage that belabors ever-narrowing denominators of intrinsic value.

When the Beast cannot steal, its existing purloined cache is re-leveraged, pacing frenetically until it can steal again. Somewhere in the bowels of the NY Fed behind iron-clad doors, guarded by an ogre, sits a Leverage Machine, Chartered Accountant to the Beast. The lights are flashing red. How do we know this? Because the 24/7 Russian Demonization Campaign tells us so. The manically repetitive narrative is an audio loop cued to the red-lit console.

The West’s sanctions subtract from its own beleaguered base. The ‘cure’, ever more green-fields, serves only to postpone the patient’s demise. The demands are satanic and mutually self-negating:  If you don’t bleed like me, I promise I will kill you.

The various sanctions regimes harbor no rapprochements and coax no favored outcomes. They are nihilistic in spirit and anti-Christian by design. Spengler spoke of Russia’s peculiar historic mission. Could that mission be Armageddon itself?

The stakes, as we like to say, are incalculably high. The potential recoil, fatal. But then, People of the Book already know this.

Might the intelligence complex incite WW3 as a diversionary alternative to exposure and dismantlement? That’s a reasonable bet. After all, where on this planet today are rumors of wars not breaking out in earnest?

There’s a well-ensconced clique on the planet that views WW3 as the crucial next step. Putin seems to have joined them. In lieu of elaborate WMD contexts perpetrated on a sanguine populace, war planners might prefer a war that’s over almost before it starts. Inhuman velocity curtails the need for consensus-building.

NATO’s provocations are endless. However conventional force border-posturing is simply the aperitif. Nuclear escalation will occur with lightning speed.

In his grim but essential work, Eric Zuesse speaks to the current provocations in Ukraine and its Donbass region and the toss-up potential of a nuclear first strike being strategically ‘rationalized’ and perpetrated by either the Americans or the Russians. How perilous and frightening is that? Both sides are strategically obliged go nuclear first, although Putin seemed to remove a Russian first-strike from the table last week, a very noble and statesman-like assertion, to be sure. Who fully understands the dynamic between he and his Defense Minister? Sergei Shoigu might, on strictly military grounds, beg to differ.

Here’s Zuesse:

“Either way would likely produce from Russia a nuclear blitz-attack to eliminate as many of America’s retaliatory weapons as possible, so as to beat the US to the punch. In military terms, the side that suffers the less damage ‘wins’, even if it’s a nuclear war that destroys the planet. The side that would strike first in a nuclear war would almost certainly suffer the less damage, because most of the opponent’s retaliatory weaponry would be destroyed in that attack. Trump is playing nuclear “chicken” against Putin.”

Nuclear Primacy had been America’s post-MAD doctrine since 2006. (Here are the same two idiot-savants, Drs. Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, on paper, proving once and for all that intelligence is a circle.) The Russian nuclear detection system is horribly antiquated and, in an effort to tamp down the reigning madness, US officials are talking naval blockades and preemptive first strikes. Language is always the first bullet fired. America’s nuclear arsenal is to be upgraded over the next thirty years at an estimated cost of $1.2 trillion (October 2017 CBO report).

Paranoid much? You’d have to be a fool not to be. In fact you’d have to be an irreligious fool not to think thermonuclear exchange isn’t poised to occur in some demented parody of well-considered premeditation and forethought.

It’s the midnight after midnight and Doomsday’s tired of walking around the block. The Beast wants Russia either polishing boots in Basel or moving its Orthodox frontage to Mars. There is no middle ground. There is no dialectical accommodation. People are a temporary impediment to the wealth beneath their feet. Bankers eat birthrights for breakfast.

The inestimable trove of raw goodies under Eurasia must be secured or else the leverage-cubed that’s holding up the leverage-squared is going to collapse in a calamitous heap of non-real numbers and exhausted exponentiality.

Before he exited Stratfor, some say for a surfeit of candor, George Friedman laid out the last hundred-years of the game-plan. Mind you (and our German friends too), it’s nothing personal. It’s primordial, which is to say, quite equally of the future, an ‘interest’ that will not abate.

As Shiekh Iman Hosein insists, the repatriation of Crimea represents a huge and rare setback for the Beast’s cordon sanitaire strategy of containment (constriction?) Sixteenth-century Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (popularly known as the Vilna Gaon) acknowledged much the same:

“When you hear that the Russians have captured the city of Crimea, the ‘Times of the Messiah’ have started, that his steps are being heard”

There are not enough dimension frankly to deploy the appropriate chess game. But then we’re not in a chess game. We’re in an end-game. Finesse is an Enlightenment affectation. In a kingdom of hammers the adroit tactician is just another nail.

So enough please of rehabilitative measures, improved behaviors and well-considered countermeasures. No behavior under the sun will do until nuclear winter blots the sun from the sky. We’ve been staring down the barrel of Oppenheimer’s Shiva ever since some vanguard of Molochian butt-worshippers decided there’s life for them on the back-end of nihilistic cessation.

There is a war on against what Spengler termed, “the world-historical fact of Russia itself”. Putin seems finally to have risen to the existential occasion.

American War Declaration

PATRICK ARMSTRONG | 22.10.2018

American War Declaration

Wess Mitchell, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in the US State Department, gave a remarkable presentation to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 21 August 2018. Titled “US Strategy Towards the Russian Federation” it ostensibly lays out the US reaction to Russia’s continuing aggression, hostility, interference and so forth. It is written in the tone of a sadder but wiser householder who, formerly expecting better from his neighbour, now realises that there will be no better: the neighbour, alas, is not capable of decent behaviour. While remaining ever hopeful that reason will prevail, the peaceful neighbour must gird himself for an unpleasant struggle – Washington must respond to Moscow’s disruption. How sad.

But in all of these areas, it is up to Russia, not America, to take the next step. Our policy remains unchanged: steady cost-imposition until Russia changes course.

But, in an interesting slip of the tongue, he gave away the real policy. I say “slip of the tongue” because the State Department version of his speech leaves out the two sentences that tell you that most of Mitchell’s testimony is sleight of hand to distract the audience.

Senate testimony version

The starting point of the National Security Strategy is the recognition that America has entered a period of big-power competition, and that past US policies have neither sufficiently grasped the scope of this emerging trend nor adequately equipped our nation to succeed in it. Contrary to the hopeful assumptions of previous administrations, Russia and China are serious competitors that are building up the material and ideological wherewithal to contest US primacy and leadership in the 21^st Century. It continues to be among the foremost national security interests of the United States to prevent the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers. The central aim of the administration’s foreign policy is to prepare our nation to confront this challenge by systematically strengthening the military, economic and political fundaments of American power.

The State Department version leaves out the two emphasised sentences.

So, Mitchell – who ought to know – is telling us that a “foremost [but there can be only one foremost] national security interest” of the USA is to

prevent the
domination of
the Eurasian landmass by
Russia and China

In 1904 Halford Mackinder wrote a paper in which he divided the world into “the World-Island” (Europe, Asia and Africa); the “Offshore islands” (British Isles, Japan and others), and “the Outlying Islands” (the Americas and Australia) and discussed the geopolitical implications. In 1919 he summed his theory up as:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;

who rules the World-Island commands the world.

In Mitchell’s presentation, the principal “Outlying Island” and its allies in the “Offshore Islands” must prevent Russia and China from controlling the “Heartland”. Echoed by George Friedman’s remarks that the essence of US policy for a century or more was to prevent Germany and Russia from uniting.

Now Americans have always been a bit uncomfortable about their imperium. Going so far sometimes as to deny that there is any such thing. Perhaps a hegemony but only an empire if President Bush makes the wrong decisions (which I suppose the author would say he did). Niall Ferguson says it’s an “empire in denial“. Friedman seems prepared to use the word. A “tempered American imperialism” maybe. Not an empire; yes it is but it’s a good empire. And so on: there’s as much or as little debate as you want but the central reality is that Americans are not comfortable with the idea of being an imperial power. Not so the Romans: they gloried in it; Rome had the power and it used it. Cato the Elder was delighted with the death and enslavement of the Carthaginians. Caesar claimed to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more and there’s nothing to suggest he lost a moment’s sleep over it. Vae victis.

What Mitchell would be saying, if he were a Roman, is that we intend to remain the world’s predominant power and if Russia is an obstacle, we will crush it. That’s the way of the world and that’s what we’ll do. And China and Iran and anyone else. But he’s an American so he must pretend that the USA is the peaceful householder and Russia is the troublesome neighbour; he must tell the Senate committee, and it so expects, that Moscow has broken the peace and deserves punishment.

The specific charges he makes against Russia are nonsense.

In Ukraine, we have maintained an effort under Ambassador Kurt Volker to provide the means by which Russia can live up to its commitments under the Minsk Agreements.

The word “Russia” doesn’t even appear in the Minsk Agreements; there are no “commitments”.

unprecedentedly brazen influence operations orchestrated by the Kremlin on the soil of our allies and even here at home in the United States

A few Facebook ads, most of which appeared after the election and only “Russian” by assertion. Even at the most generous interpretation of “Russian-influenced”, it’s a negligible number of possibles. And, as I have argued elsewhere, had Moscow wanted to influence the election it would have used the Uranium One case to either blackmail or smear Clinton.

Putin wants to break apart the American Republic, not by influencing an election or two, but by systematically inflaming the perceived fault-lines that exist within our society. His is a strategy of chaos for strategic effect.

I suppose that the “factual basis” for that is that some American who wants to break California into two parts lives part time in Moscow and a Russian professor thought that the USA would break up into a number of pieces. So what? there are lots of opinions around, who cares what some academic says or thinks? Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a lot closer to power than these Russians, thought that a “loosely confederated Russia” of three parts would be a good idea. And Stratfor’s Friedman thinks Russia will break up soon. But when a senior US official says that “Putin wants to break apart the American Republic”, that’s existential; that’s a pretty serious charge. Is it a nuclear war kind of charge?

the Putinist system’s permanent and self-justifying struggle for international dominance.

(But didn’t Mitchell say something about preventing the “domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers”? Wouldn’t his Russian equivalent be able to point to his speech and talk about how Russia must resist Washington’s “permanent and self-justifying struggle for international dominance”?). It’s not Moscow that has 800 or so military bases around the world; Moscow isn’t expanding its military alliance to the US border. Projection.

There’s lots of projection in Washington’s and its minions’ assertions about Russia. As far as official Washington is concerned, Moscow’s resistance to the Imperium can only mean that it wants to crush the US, break it up, incite civil war and impose its imperium on the world. (Romans would agree: either Rome eats, or Rome is eaten.) If you look in a mirror you see yourself. Projection again.

Doing so involves an evolved toolkit of subversive statecraft first employed by the Bolshevik and later the Soviet state, which has been upgraded for the digital age. While these tools and technologies differ depending on the context, the key to their success is that the Kremlin employs them within a common strategic and operational framework aimed at leveraging all available means to achieve a decisive strategic effect.

Bolsheviks, Putinists whatever: Russia, the Once and Future Enemy. I think my favourite part – what adjective? – deluded? crazy? insane? McCartheyesque? is this bit:

we formed a new position – the Senior Advisor for Russian Malign Activities and Trends (or, SARMAT) – to develop cross-regional strategies across offices.

SARMAT – a Russian ICBM named after the Sarmatians, who may have been the origin of the Arthurian legends. Is this a joke? But who can tell these days? But one can be certain that the office will grow and grow as it busily finds evidence of Russian involvement everywhere: Star Wars, organic food, guns, Mueller, vaxx; whatever brings in the salaries and promotions. (But a rather unimaginative name though: why not SPecial Executive for Countering Terrorist Russian Excesses? Or Special Ministry for Engaging Russian Sabotage and Horrors?)

Pretty crazy stuff indeed – frighteningly so – but, thanks to Mitchell giving away the secret, we don’t have to waste our time debating Russia and Ukraine or how cute puppies “sow discord and chaos“. They’re only shoved in because Americans have to be the white hats – “Moscow is attacking us!” – when a Cato would bluntly say: “Moscow must be destroyed!” But it’s the same thing: it’s a Mackinder war. So far with sanctions (the economic fundament) and propaganda accusations (the political fundament). The military fundament fortunately remains offstage.

* * *

But Mitchell is late to the party. Moscow and Beijing know they’re on the hitlist and their alliance grows and strengthens. Iran, a significant player on the “World-Island” knows it’s on the hitlist too. India is playing both sides. The endless American wars in the MENA do not strengthen Washington’s control of the “Eurasian landmass”. CAATSA will alienate everyone else. Even Zbigniew Brzezinski came to understand “[the US was] no longer the globally imperial power“.

I would argue that the American dominance of the Twentieth Century was principally due to four factors. A tremendous manufacturing capacity; great inventive ingenuity allied to the ability to exploit new inventions; a stable political system; the emotive reality of “the American Dream”. How much remains? A recent government report summarises the outsourcing of manufacturing. Is the inventive capacity more than just social media, pop music or a different iPhone button? Political stability wobbles. And as to the American Dream: will your children be better off than you are? One should not forget that Trump was elected on the slogan “Make America Great Again”.

Perhaps the Mackinder War has already been won by the “Heartland” powers.

* * *

Statement of A. Wess Mitchell

Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs

Senate Foreign Relations Committee

US Strategy Towards the Russian Federation

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Chairman Corker, Ranking Member Menendez, thank you for inviting me to testify today. I will use my prepared comments to outline in brief form the overarching strategy of the United States towards the Russian Federation. The foundation for this strategy is provided by three documents, as directed and approved by the President: the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy and the Russia Integrated Strategy.

The starting point of the National Security Strategy is the recognition that America has entered a period of big-power competition, and that past US policies have neither sufficiently grasped the scope of this emerging trend nor adequately equipped our nation to succeed in it. Contrary to the hopeful assumptions of previous administrations, Russia and China are serious competitors that are building up the material and ideological wherewithal to contest US primacy and leadership in the 21st Century. It continues to be among the foremost national security interests of the United States to prevent the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers. The central aim of the administration’s foreign policy is to prepare our nation to confront this challenge by systematically strengthening the military, economic and political fundaments of American power.

Our Russia policy proceeds from the recognition that, to be effective, US diplomacy toward Russia must be backed by “military power that is second to none and fully integrated with our allies and all of our instruments of power.” To this end, the administration has reversed years of cuts to the US defense budget, begun the process of recapitalizing the US nuclear arsenal, requested close to $11 billion to support the European Deterrence Initiative, and, in the past year and a half, worked with NATO Allies to bring about the largest European defense spending increase since the Cold War – a total of more than $40 billion to date. In addition to commitments from over half of the Alliance to meet NATO’s two-percent defense spending requirement by 2024, the United States achieved virtually all of our policy objectives at the NATO Summit, including the establishment of two new NATO Commands (including one here in the United States), the establishment of new counter-hybrid threat response teams, and major, multi-year initiatives to bolster the mobility, readiness, and capability of the Alliance.

In tandem, we have worked to degrade Russia’s ability to conduct aggression by imposing costs on the Russian state and the oligarchy that sustains it. Building on Secretary Pompeo’s recent testimony, I am submitting for the record a detailed list of actions this administration has taken. These include, to date: 217 individuals and entities sanctioned, 6 diplomatic and consular facilities closed or kept closed, and 60 spies removed from US soil. The State Department has played the lead role in ensuring that these efforts are closely and effectively coordinated with European allies through synchronized expulsions and the continued roll-over of sanctions related to Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine.

Our actions are having an impact. Research by the State Department’s Office of the Chief Economist shows that on average sanctioned Russian firms see their operating revenue fall by a quarter; their total asset valuation fall by half; and are forced to fire a third of their employees. We believe our sanctions, cumulatively, have cost the Russian government tens of billions of dollars on top of the broader impact on state-owned sectors and the chilling effect of US sanctions on the Russian economy. Following the announcement of sanctions in April, the Russian company Rusal lost about fifty percent of its market value. In the five days following our August 8 announcement of Chemical and Biological Weapons Act sanctions, the ruble depreciated to its lowest level against the dollar in two years.

Even as we have imposed unprecedented penalties for Russian aggression, we have been clear that the door to dialogue is open, should Putin choose to take credible steps toward a constructive path. In Syria, we created de-escalation channels to avoid collisions between our forces. In Ukraine, we have maintained an effort under Ambassador Kurt Volker to provide the means by which Russia can live up to its commitments under the Minsk Agreements. But in all of these areas, it is up to Russia, not America, to take the next step. Our policy remains unchanged: steady cost-imposition until Russia changes course.

As with the overall strategy, the premise of these efforts has been that our diplomacy is most effective when backed by positions of strength. We have placed particular emphasis on bolstering the states of frontline Europe that are most susceptible to Russian geopolitical pressure. In Ukraine and Georgia, we lifted the previous administration’s restrictions on the acquisition of defensive weapons for resisting Russian territorial aggression. In the Balkans, American diplomacy has played a lead role in resolving the Greece-Macedonia name dispute and is engaging with Serbia and Kosovo to propel the EU-led dialogue. In the Caucasus, Black Sea region, and Central Europe we are working to close the vacuums that invite Russian penetration by promoting energy diversification, fighting corruption, and competing for hearts and minds in the lead-up to the 30th anniversary of the end of Communism.

Our strategy is animated by the realization that the threat from Russia has evolved beyond being simply an external or military one; it includes unprecedentedly brazen influence operations orchestrated by the Kremlin on the soil of our allies and even here at home in the United States. These activities are, as FBI Director Wray recently stated, “wide and deep,” being both extensively resourced and directed from the highest levels of the Russian state. We work closely with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and, and the National Security Council to ensure that all relevant resources are being brought to bear to thwart and punish any Russian influence campaigns in the run-up to the elections.

It’s important to state clearly what these campaigns are and are not about.

What they’re not about is any particular attachment to specific US domestic political causes. They are not about right or left or American political philosophy. The threat from Russian influence operations existed long before our 2016 presidential election and will continue long after this election cycle, or the next, or the next. As the recent Facebook purges reveal, the Russian state has promoted fringe voices on the political left, not just the right, including groups who advocate violence, the storming of federal buildings and the overthrow of the US government. Russia foments and funds controversial causes – and then foments and funds the causes opposed to those causes. Putin’s thesis is that the American Constitution is an experiment that will fail if challenged in the right way from within. Putin wants to break apart the American Republic, not by influencing an election or two, but by systematically inflaming the perceived fault-lines that exist within our society. His is a strategy of chaos for strategic effect. Accepting this fact is absolutely essential for developing a long-term comprehensive response to the problem. The most dangerous thing we could do is to politicize the challenge, which in itself would be a gift to Putin.

What Russian efforts are about is geopolitics: the Putinist system’s permanent and self-justifying struggle for international dominance. As stated by a handbook of the Russian Armed Forces, the goal is “to carry out mass psychological campaigns against the population of a state in order to destabilize society and the government; as well as forcing a state to make decisions in the interests of their opponents.” Doing so involves an evolved toolkit of subversive statecraft first employed by the Bolshevik and later the Soviet state, which has been upgraded for the digital age. While these tools and technologies differ depending on the context, the key to their success is that the Kremlin employs them within a common strategic and operational framework aimed at leveraging all available means to achieve a decisive strategic effect.

The State Department takes this threat very seriously. From my first day on the job, I have established for our team that countering this threat, in both its overt and covert forms, will be among the highest priorities for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. As a co-chair of the Russia Influence Group, I work with General Scapparotti to bring the combined resources of EUR and EUCOM to bear against this problem. Under EUR’s leadership, all 50 US missions located in Europe and Eurasia are required to develop, coordinate and execute tailored action plans for rebuffing Russian influence operations in their host countries.

Within the Bureau, we recruited one of the architects of the Global Engagement Center legislation from the staff of a member of this committee; in addition, we formed a new position – the Senior Advisor for Russian Malign Activities and Trends (or, SARMAT) – to develop cross-regional strategies across offices. Early this year, EUR created a dedicated team within the Bureau to take the offensive and publicly expose Russian malign activities, which since January of this year has called out the Kremlin on 112 occasions. Together with the GEC, EUR is now working with our close ally the UK to form an international coalition for coordinating efforts in this field. The State Department requested over $380 million in security and economic assistance accounts in the President’s 2019 Budget for Europe and Eurasia that can be allocated toward combatting Russian malign influence.

In these efforts, we recognize that Congress has an important role to play in providing the tools and resources that will be needed to deal effectively with the combined Russian problem set. As Secretary Pompeo made clear in his recent testimony, we are committed to working with all of you to make headway against this problem and align our efforts in support of the President’s Russia strategy.

Mr. Chairman, thank you again for inviting me to speak today. I welcome your questions.