Remember the Maine: To Hell With Spain. My Lai. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Saddam Hussein will kill us all. Evil Assad. Gadaffi’s viagra. We came, we saw, he died. Abu Ghraib. We tortured some folks.

The USA and her closest allies have committed the most unspeakable war crimes in every corner of the earth, their own included. Don’t even get me going on the Philippines where the USMC hunted their quarry down like mountain rabbits, made necklaces of their ears and sang about it over half a century later during their Vietnamese extermination campaign.

But what about Bucha and media outlets like SCF, which are on the sanctions’ naughty list. Let’s take Bucha first. Atrocities were committed in Bucha; that much is clear and agreed upon, as too as are the only suspects, the Russian army and the Ukrainian militias allied against them; that too is clear. Let’s take both suspects in turn.

Retreating or frustrated armies sometimes massacre at will; the British Army have done so in Kenya, India and Ireland and the Americans have done it in Texas, Wounded Knee, Vietnam and Iraq. Therefore, using the British and American armies as our metrics, it is possible the Russians, rogue Russians, to use the Anglo-Americans’ get out of jail card, are the culprits.

The Russians, in their defense, would argue that theirs was an orderly and tactical retreat, that there are major time and other discrepancies with NATO’s accounts and there is evidence that those who were executed were Russian sympathizers.

For me, the jury is still out. I simply do not know because NATO and their Irish lapdogs deny me the means to know. They even want to shut me up, as evidenced by their sanctioning of this very outlet.

Though I cannot be called for a witness over Bucha, I could help appropriate authorities with their inquiries into similar atrocities in Syria, which were timed to allow NATO, to coin NATO’s own arch war criminal Curtis LeMay, bomb Syria back into the Stone Age.

In a previous article, I cited Robert Stuart’s forensic work about one such atrocity. Though I could cite many more, suffice to say that the Tlass family, who are central players in Stuart’s expose and who are also high priests in the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist network, were discovering evidence of Assad’s weapons of mass destruction wherever they looked. They and their NATO sponsors wanted an excuse to bomb Syria back to LeMay’s Stone Age and Assad’s alleged use of biological weapons, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, was the contrived excuse.

Cui bono? Who gains by the atrocities NATO uncovers? Not Gadaffi’s Libya, which was destroyed and its wealth stolen. Not Saddam’s Iraq, which was destroyed, its museums and gold vaults ransacked and its wealth stolen. And not the heroes of the Syrian Arab Army, who, at incalculable cost, have been resisting American occupation and American proxies for over a decade.

So, who benefits from Bucha? The usual suspects, who oppose Russian sovereignty, and mutually beneficial trading relations between Russia, Ukraine and Germany. That much is clear. As regards who pulled the Bucha triggers, we can never know until there is a full, independent inquiry, a process NATO have opposed in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Latin America and a host of African countries just as they now oppose it in Ukraine.

When all the evidence in Libya, in Syria, in Abu Ghraib or in Bucha point to the usual NATO suspects, we should arrest and imprison their political and military top brass as the serial war criminals that they are. But, as NATO confesses to nothing, we cannot arrest them; they’ve even promised a LeMay on the Netherlands if their puppets ever dare think of indicting one of their butchers. They just deny and lie, deny and lie, deny, deny, deny. Remember the Maine!

As my own gut feeling is that Ukrainian militias committed the Bucha atrocities, I am already being called a Chechen apologist, just as NATO’a media have previously labelled me a dangerous extremist (The Sunday Times), a controversial academic who writes for a think-tank run by a Vladimir Putin ally (Mail on Sunday), an Assad apologist… on an Interpol watchlist (Mail on Sunday), an Assad and Putin apologist (James Bickerton, political editor of Backbencher), an alleged member of a Putin-linked policy group (Daily Mail), a dangerous Assad apologist (Sunday Express), an apologist for tyrant Bashar Assad (Marco Giannangeli, Sunday Express), a dangerous extremist (Sunday Express), a notorious Assad apologist (Order-Order, a notorious far-right Tory website) and on and on.

British MP (and former SAS death squad officer) Crispin Blunt believes “Hayes’ views on the merits of NATO and Western values, and the democratic freedoms that NATO seeks to protect, will not give any comfort to those whose duty it is to protect the UK,” and NATO chemical and biological weapons’ apologist Colonel Hamish de Bretton Gordon has opined that “The fact that the leader of the (British) opposition was getting advice from someone (Hayes) who is peddling the Russian story is worrying and distressing.”

Clearly then, despite my experience and qualifications and despite the fact not an iota of my testimony can be credibly refuted, I am not a good egg. As I even write for this publication, which is under sanctions, I best say some words on this further evidence I am Putin’s puppet before a Ukrainian hangman comes knocking at my heavily fortified door.

I have written what I want to here and, though I have penned some explanatory notes to the editors, there has been no editorial interference and nor has there been any suggestions of topics to opine on. I have been a free agent, working to my own open and very transparent agendas, which I even adumbrated in prior articles.

Rap Sheet

As my NATO critics would then retort I am a useful idiot, let’s look at the rap sheet against this outlet.

1. SCF “engaged in foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election”.
2. SCF has “continued to make attempts to reach an audience.”
3. SCF posted content alleging that the United States was supporting Ukraine in order to “debilitate Russia.”
4. SCF media “spread many types of disinformation about international organizations, military conflicts, protests, and any divisive issues that they can exploit.”
5. One of the SCF’s main tactics is to publish Western fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists, giving them wider reach, while trying to obscure the Russian origins of the journal. This tactic helps the site appear to be an organic voice within its target audience of Westerners.

Count 1 alleges that SCF tried to influence the U.S. Presidential elections where the CIA cancelled incumbent President Donald Trump from social media and banned the massive criminal activity in Ukraine of the challenger, Irish Joe Biden from being exposed. Given SCF’s very modest reach, these Russophobic charges are ridiculous and part of a wider NATO campaign of controlling and manipulating their war narratives. I would, however, welcome an informed, independent debate on this.

Counts 2 alleges that SCF tries to reach audiences. As that is what all sites try to do, the charge is laughably pathetic, all the more so if, like all media purportedly try to do, SCF is trying, as the rap sheet alleges, to hold NATO to account.

Count 3 alleges that SCF see the USA’s Ukrainian campaign as an attempt to debilitate Russia. Though NATO’s eastwards expansion and a host of articles, often from their own mouths, cataloguing the USA’s complicity in the Maidan coup and its efforts to stop Germany’s oil and gas co-operation with Russia show U.S. culpability at every turn, the USA continues its long record of denying and lying. Charge dismissed.

Count 4 charges SCF with spreading misinformation, perhaps the same types of misinformation that the USA employed to kickstart its direct and proxy wars with Spain, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Libya, Syria and a host of Latin American countries. Although I would be happy to debate the USA anywhere on any of that, my own experience, as well as the evidence in front of all our eyes, is that the cancel culture of the USA and her proxies have closed down debate in all NATO’s media and university outlets. As the USA’s attacks on SCF and allied outlets follow that pattern, charge dismissed.

Though I earlier addressed count 5, a previous article of mine deliberately set out to destroy the oxymoronic conspiracy theory canard. Though there may be “fringe thinkers” writing for SCF, I am not aware of them, I am not one of them and it is not my role to identify, promote or defend them if they exist. My self-appointed role in all this is to put my own compasses in virtual print, my own small and almost insignificant contribution to building peace in our time and in times to come.

If I am involved in some perfidy here or elsewhere, then by all means debate me about it. If I have to be treated as a pariah, just as Jews objecting to joining Israel’s massively over-subscribed army are treated in Israel, that is ok as it would put me in good company.

The New Horizons group which, NATO’s Irish agents allege, got me to speak at one of their Tehran gatherings, might facilitate such a debate, even though, like so many others, they are under severe sanctions. Though I also allegedly conferred with some of Dugin’s Russian chums at that gathering, my main takeaway, which I relayed to the Iranian and Russian Ambassadors in Dublin, was of young Iranian women, who turned to me, imploring me to explain why everybody hates Iranians.

I certainly don’t hate Iranians because there is no mileage for me or interest in me in doing any such thing and, like many other visitors, I was struck by their friendliness (and good cooking). It is NATO, post Shah, that spreads that bile, the same hateful and bellicose bile it now spreads against Russia for the same sick reasons.

And then we have Putin and Asma Assad, today’s one dimensional James Bond villains. The caricature of Putin as an evil maniac who bathes in lambs’ blood and drinks all kinds of age-defying concoctions that would make Dracula wretch is funny, even though it is effective thanks to the West’s media, who feed unending streams of sport and porno to its docile men and whatever and whomsoever the British and American Royal Families are wearing or copulating with to their uncritical women.

And then we have the multicultural, multilingual cosmopolitan Asma Assad, Vogue Magazine’s Rose of the Desert before she went all Putin with baths in goats’ milk and new born babies’ blood. Give me a break.

Funny, ridiculous but very effective as these slurs are, outlets like SCF are needed to temper them and the deaths that emanate from them. That is my belief anyway. Here I stand. I cannot and will not do otherwise.

Not only do I share the controlled outrage of Russia’s former President Medvedev over how Russia’s Paralympians were treated but I would feel defiled if any of their tormentors came anywhere near me. However, I would relish the chance to debate them, preferably in Damascus, Moscow or Tehran.

But debate, which NATO’s censorship of SCF and hosts of other sites stifle, is not nearly enough. The graveyards of Damascus, Moscow and Tehran are full of those who were murdered as a result of the failure of NATO to choose war over dialogue and debate with those who represent their victims.

Because NATO’s shock and awe tactics, used so effectively to slaughter millions of Iraqis, has stalled in Ukraine, America is now tweaking its tactics for the same nefarious ends. Here in Ireland, as fully fledged Nazis continue to besiege their legation, four Russian diplomats are being expelled because Ireland’s secret service has recently determined they are spies.

Coincidentally, this is just when Germany, Lithuania and a host of America’s other European dependencies have discovered that vast numbers of Russian diplomats have also being spying on them and so they too are Moscow bound.

Dublin’s secret service should buy themselves a celebratory non-Russian vodka over that. This is the same secret service that was thoroughly infiltrated by the British Embassy as long ago in 1972 and that stands complicit in Dublin’s massive no-warning bombings, the biggest peace time bombings in either Britain or Ireland, that are still subject to government gagging orders, that occurred at that time and about which no debate is allowed, not even in the Irish Parliament, where Britain’s and now America’s secret service have long been represented.

This is the same Irish Parliament that the American funded Sinn Féin group want to make Russia’s Ambassador, before they ostentatiously expel him, listen to Ukraine’s president, a billionaire clown by profession, propound, for the umpteenth time, his scripted side of events.

Perhaps it is time to send in these NATO’s bankrolled clowns. After all, when George Galloway, a Scottish fox with a way with words, was let loose in Capitol Hill’s hen house, he had them all for breakfast when they tried to scapegoat him for their own war crimes in Iraq. Although Galloway indisputably won that round, NATO’s hucksters simply retreated and regrouped to fight anew in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine.

The simple truth of the matter is, whether Galloway says it, whether I say it, whether Southfront, New Horizons, SCF, the Queen of Sheba’s “Western fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists” or one of Russia’s sanctioned cats say it, NATO cannot debate their crimes with anyone possessing Galloway’s linguistic proficiency and they cannot tolerate anyone from the Pope on his throne in Rome to the lowliest SCF scribe saying otherwise.

One only has to consider the plight of political prisoner Julian Assange to see the veracity of all that. Although Wikileaks still exists, whatever Chelsea Mannings are lurking in NATO’s long grass are all too aware of the Chinese kill the chicken maxim to pass on information to them. To spill the beans on NATO’s crimes is to join Assange in jail for an effective eternity.

As against that, Irish Catholic Bishop Donal Lamont, when faced with imprisonment by NATO’s Rhodesian regime, affirmed Dostoevksy’s Siberian experience that there is much to be said for the life of contemplation a prison cell offers; Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory express similar sentiments. NATO can ban, bully and block SCF but they cannot kill its message. The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, the truth will out and the truth will set us free from NATO’s hellish forces.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who has gained international respect for his independence and integrity as a commentator on conflicts and foreign relations. This week, he was banned on the Twitter social media platform for challenging Western claims of a massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, allegedly carried out by Russian troops. Moscow denies the claims, as have other independent analysts who point to evidence that the incident was a false-flag provocation perpetrated by NATO-backed Ukrainian Nazi regiments to undermine Russia internationally and bolster Western objectives. It is a foreboding sign of the times that Ritter should be banned for daring to question dubious narratives. (He was later reinstated following a public outcry against censorship.)

In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, he makes the crucial point that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is exposing the involvement of the U.S. and NATO in the training and weaponizing of that country’s dominant Nazi regiments. That is why Western media have been so vehement in trying to distort the conflict and blame Russia. The truth about Western dirty involvement in Ukraine would be too much to bear for the Western public.

When Ritter served as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq during the 1990s he later challenged Western media and government claims that Iraq was harboring WMDs. Those claims were used as a pretext for the U.S.-British war on Iraq launched in 1993 that cost over one million lives, destroyed a nation, created millions of displaced and millions of casualties, as well as spawned international terrorism. It later turned out that the WMD claims were based on deliberate lies for which no Western leader has been held accountable. Scott Ritter was vindicated in his warnings against that war and it is one reason why he is widely respected among international public opinion.

Ritter is a critical commentator on U.S. conflicts and foreign relations. He is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the Soviet Union implementing nuclear arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and as a UN inspector in Iraq (1991-98) overseeing the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction. He is the author of Scorpion King: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump (Clarity Press, 2020).

Interview

Question: Do you think that Russia has a just cause in launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24?

Scott Ritter: I believe Russia has articulated a cognizable claim of preemptive collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. The threat posed by NATO expansion, and Ukraine’s eight-year bombardment of the civilians of the Donbass fall under this umbrella.

Question: Do you think Russia has legitimate concerns about the Pentagon sponsoring biological weapons programs in laboratories in Ukraine?

Scott Ritter: The Pentagon denies any biological weapons program, but admits biological research programs on Ukrainian soil. Documents captured by Russia have allegedly uncovered the existence of programs the components of which could be construed as having offensive biological warfare applications. The U.S. should be required to explain the purpose of these programs.

Question: What do you make of allegations in Western media that Russian troops committed war crimes in Bucha and other Ukrainian cities? It is claimed that Russian forces summarily executed civilians.

Scott Ritter: All claims of war crimes must be thoroughly investigated, including Ukrainian allegations that Russia killed Ukrainian civilians in Bucha. However, the data available about the Bucha incident does not sustain the Ukrainian claims, and as such, the media should refrain from echoing these claims as fact until a proper investigation of the evidence is conducted, either by the media, or unbiased authorities.

Question: Do you think the alleged Russian bombing of a hospital and an art theater in Mariupol were false-flag provocations?

Scott Ritter: Both locations are available for detailed forensic examination that would either confirm or refute Ukrainian allegations that these locations were struck by Russian aerial bombs. Other data, such as the existence of any NATO radar data that would put Russian aircraft over these two locations at the time of the alleged attack, should be collected. A detailed forensic examination of each site would go a long way in proving or disproving the Ukrainian claims through the collection of weapons fragments and the evaluation of environmental samples which would show the chemical composition of any explosive used, thereby allowing a better idea of what weapon or explosive was used to destroy the sites.

Question: Western governments and mainstream media have denigrated Russian objectives to “demilitarize and deNazify” Ukraine. The West says Russia has invented or grossly exaggerated these problems as a pretext for invasion. Do you think this Western denialism is because it doesn’t want to acknowledge that Russia may indeed have legitimate concerns, and secondly that to acknowledge would mean admitting that the West is part of the problem in the current war?

Scott Ritter: The irony is that the West had thoroughly documented the extent of the Nazi ideology in Ukraine’s civil, political, and military structures during and after the 2014 Maidan coup. This documented reality was deliberately obscured by the same sources that had previously documented its existence once the Russian invasion occurred. To acknowledge the existence of this odious ideology by NATO would require NATO to acknowledge the role it played in training and equipping Azov regiment personnel since 2015. The Russian documentation of its ongoing de-Nazification effort in Ukraine is a source of continual embarrassment to NATO, as it exposes the scope and scale of NATO’s role in empowering the militarization of Nazi ideology in Ukraine.

Question: For about four months before the Russian intervention in Ukraine, the Biden administration was asserting non-stop that Moscow was planning an invasion. Do you think this is a case of great intelligence on the part of Washington or the culmination of provocation by Washington resulting in Russian military action in Ukraine?

Scott Ritter: We now know that the U.S. intelligence community under the Biden administration is committed to a policy of haphazardly “declassifying” intelligence for the purpose of shaping public opinion (so-called “getting ahead of the story”). There is no evidence that the intelligence regarding potential Russian military action was based upon anything other than politicized speculation derived from a crude analysis of Russian military dispositions void of any context. Any genuine intelligence assessment regarding the timing of any Russian military action would have incorporated the domestic political imperative of getting Duma [Russian parliamentary] approval for the deployment of Russian forces outside the borders of Russia, which carries with it the requirement of a cognizable justification for this military action under the UN Charter. This required political steps such as Donetsk and Lugansk declaring independence, and then petitioning the Russian parliament to recognize this independence, so that Russia could legitimately invoke Article 51. None of these factors was knowable when the Biden administration was issuing its warnings of imminent attack, thereby certifying the “intelligence” as being derived from fact-free speculation, and not intelligence at all.

Question: The Western media are reporting that the Russian military operation in Ukraine is floundering because it has not over-run Ukraine entirely. As a military expert, how do you see the Russian operation proceeding?

Scott Ritter: Russia is fighting a very difficult campaign hampered by its own constraint designed to limit civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure and the fact that Ukraine possesses a very well-trained military that is well led and equipped. Russia deployed some 200,000 troops in support of this operation. They are facing some 600,000 Ukrainian forces. The first phase of the Russian operation was designed to shape the battlefield to Russia’s advantage while diminishing the size and capacity of the Ukrainian ability to wage large-scale conflict. The second phase is focused on destroying the main Ukrainian force concentration in eastern Ukraine. Russia is well on its way to accomplishing this task.

Question: Do you see danger from Ukraine being turned into a proxy war by the United States and NATO partners against Russia in a way that attempts to repeat the West’s covert war in Syria or the Afghanistan war (1979-89) with the Soviet Union? There are reports of foreign legions being sent to Ukraine via NATO countries. Do you think there is a Western plan to embroil Russia in a proxy war that is aimed at sapping Russia politically, economically, and militarily?

Scott Ritter: The Ukrainian conflict is a proxy war, but one which Russia is poised to win decisively. While there appears to be a NATO/western plan to embroil Russia in a “new Afghanistan”, I don’t see any risk of this conflict dragging on for more than a few more weeks at the most before Russia accomplishes a strategic victory over Ukraine.

Question: There is an arrogant assumption among Western governments that they can impose crippling economic sanctions on Russia in a similar way to what they did on Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea among others. But would you agree that if Russia begins to impose its own counter-sanctions by restricting oil and gas exports then the Western states may end up reaping a whirlwind that is devastating to their societies?

Scott Ritter: Russia was warned well in advance about the scope and scale of U.S.-led sanctions that would be imposed if Russia were to invade Ukraine. Russia has prepared its own counter-sanction strategy which will not only defeat the Western sanctions but further strengthen Russia’s economy by decoupling it from the West and Western control/influence. We see evidence of the effectiveness of this counter-campaign as the Russian ruble is strengthened, the Russian stock market enjoys positive traction, and Europe and the U.S. flounder economically. The West has sown the wind in sanctioning Russia; Russia will not reap the whirlwind.

By now it’s abundantly clear that the neo-Orwellian “Two Minute Hate” Russophobic campaign launched by the Empire of Lies after the start of Operation Z is actually “24/7 Hate”.

Vast swathes of NATOstan have been corralled into behaving like a Russophobic lynch mob. No dissent is tolerated. The full psyops has de facto upgraded the Empire of Lies to the status of Empire of Hate in a Total War – hybrid and otherwise – to cancel Russia.

Hate, after all, packs way more punch than mere lies, which are now veering into abject ridiculousness, as in U.S. “intelligence” resorting to – what else – lies to fight the info war against Russia.

If the propaganda overdrive has been lethally effective amidst the zombified Western masses – call it a “win” in the P.R. war – in the front where it really matters, inside Russia, it’s a major fail.

Public opinion support for both Operation Z and President Putin is unprecedented. After videos of torture of Russian POWs that caused widespread revulsion, Russian civil society is even bracing for a “Long War” lasting months, not weeks, as long as the targets of the Russian High Command – actually a military secret – are met.

The stated aims are “demilitarization” and “denazification” of a future neutral Ukraine – but geopolitically reach way beyond: the aim is to turn the post-1945 European collective security arrangement upside down, forcing NATO to understand and come to terms with the concept of “indivisible security”. This is an extremely complex process that will reach the next decade.

The NATOstan sphere simply cannot admit in public a series of facts that a military analyst of the caliber of Andrei Martyanov has been explaining for years. And that adds to their collective pain.

Russia can take on NATO and smash it to bits in 48 hours. It may employ advanced strategic deterrence systems unmatched across the West. Its southern axis – from the Caucasus and West Asia to Central Asia – is fully stabilized. And if the going gets really tough, Mr. Zircon can deliver his hypersonic nuclear business card with the other side not even knowing what hit it.

“Europe has chosen its fate”

It may be enlightening to see how these complex processes are interpreted by Russians – whose points of view are now completely blocked across NATOstan.

Let’s take two examples. The first is Lieutenant General L.P. Reshetnikov, in an analytical note examining facts of the ground war.

Some key takeaways:

– “Over Romania and Poland there are airborne early warning aircraft of NATO with experienced crews, there are U.S. intelligence satellites in the sky all the time. I remind you that just in terms of budgets for our Roscosmos we allocated $2.5 billion a year, the civil budget of NASA is $25 billion, the civil budget of SpaceX alone is equal to Roscosmos – and that is not counting the tens of billions of dollars annually for the entire U.S. feverishly unfolding the control system of the entire planet.”

– The war is unfolding according to “NATO’s eyes and brains. The Ukronazis are nothing but free controlled zombies. And the Ukrainian army is a remotely controlled zombie organism.”

– “The tactics and strategy of this war will be the subject of textbooks for military academies around the world. Once again: the Russian army is smashing a Nazi zombie organism, fully integrated with the eyes and brain of NATO.”

Now let’s switch to Oleg Makarenko, who focuses on the Big Picture.

– “The West considers itself ‘the whole world’ only because it has not yet received a sufficiently sensitive punch on the nose. It just so happened that Russia is now giving him this click: with the rear support of Asia, Africa and Latin America. And the West can do absolutely nothing with us, since it also lags behind us in terms of the number of nuclear warheads.”

– “Europe has chosen its fate. And chose fate for Russia. What you are seeing now is the death of Europe. Even if it does not come to nuclear strikes on industrial centers, Europe is doomed. In a situation where European industry is left without cheap Russian energy sources and raw materials – and China will begin to receive these same energy carriers and raw materials at a discount, there can be no talk of any real competition with China from Europe. As a result, literally everything will collapse there – after industry, agriculture will collapse, welfare and social security will collapse, hunger, banditry and chaos will begin.”

It’s fair to consider Reshetnikov and Makarenko as faithfully representing the overall Russian sentiment, which interprets the crude Bucha false flag as a cover to obscure the Ukrainian army torture of Russian POWs.

And, deeper still, Bucha allowed the disappearance of Pentagon bioweapon labs from the Western mediasphere, complete with its ramifications: evidence of a concerted American drive to ultimately deploy real weapons of mass destruction against Russia.

The multi-level Bucha hoax had to include the Brit presidency of the UN Security Council actually blocking a serious discussion, a day before the Russian Ministry of Defense struggled to present to the UN – predictably minus the U.S. and the UK – all the bioweapon facts they have unearthed in Ukraine. The Chinese were horrified by the findings.

The Russian Investigative Committee at least persists in its work, with 100 researchers unearthing evidence of war crimes across Donbass to be presented at a tribunal in the near future, most probably set up in Donetsk.

And that brings us back to the facts on the ground. There’s a lot of analytical discussion on the possible endgame of Operation Z. A fair assessment would include the liberation of all of Novorossiya and total control of the Black Sea coastline that currently is part of Ukraine.

“Ukraine” in fact was never a state; it was always an annex to another state or empire such as Poland, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and crucially Russia.

The landmark Russian state was Kievan Rus. “Ukraine”, in old Russian, means “border region”. In the past, it referred to the westernmost regions of the Russian Empire. When the Empire started expanding south, the new regions annexed mostly from Turkish rule were called Novorossiya (“New Russia”) and the northeastern regions, Malorossiya (“Little Russia”).

It was up to the USSR in the early 1920s to jumble it all together and name it “Ukraine” – adding Galicia in the west, which was historically non-Russian.

Yet the key development is when the USSR broke up in 1991. As the Empire of Lies de facto controlled post-Soviet Russia, they could never have possibly allowed the real Russian regions of the USSR – that is, Novorossiya and Malorossiya – to be again incorporated to the Russian Federation.

Russia is now re-incorporating them – in an “I Did It, My Way” manner.

Vamos a bailar in European Puerto Rico

By now it’s also quite clear to any serious geopolitical analysis that Operation Z opened a Pandora’s box. And the supreme historical victim of all the toxicity finally let loose is bound to be Europe.

The indispensable Michael Hudson, in a new essay on the U.S. dollar devouring the euro, argues half in jest that Europe might as well surrender its currency, and go on like “a somewhat larger version of Puerto Rico.”

After all, Europe “has pretty much ceased to be a politically independent state, it is beginning to look more like Panama and Liberia – ‘flag of convenience’ offshore banking centers that are not real ‘states’ because they don’t issue their own currency, but use the U.S. dollar.”

In synch with quite a few Russian, Chinese and Iranian analysts, Hudson advances that the war in Ukraine – actually in its “full-blown version as the New Cold War” – is likely to last “at least a decade, perhaps two as the U.S. extends the fight between neoliberalism and socialism [meaning the Chinese system] to encompass a worldwide conflict.”

What may be seriously in dispute is whether the U.S., after “the economic conquest of Europe”, will be able to “lock in African, South American and Asian countries”. The Eurasia integration process, rolling in earnest for 10 years now, conducted by the Russia-China strategic partnership and expanding to most of the Global South, will go no holds barred to prevent it.

There’s no question, as Hudson states, that “the world economy is being enflamed” – with the U.S. weaponizing trade. Yet on the Right Side of History we have the Rublegas, the petroyuan, the new monetary/financial system being designed in a partnership between the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China.

And that’s something no puny Cancel Culture War can erase.

By Ramzy BAROUD

Much has been said and written about media bias and double standards in the West’s response to the Russia-Ukraine war, when compared with other wars and military conflicts across the world, especially in the Middle East and the Global South. Less obvious is how such hypocrisy is a reflection of a much larger phenomenon which governs the West’s relationship to war and conflict zones.

Like every NATO-led war since the inception of the alliance in 1949, these wars resulted in widespread devastation and tragic death tolls.

On March 19, Iraq commemorated the 19th anniversary of the US invasion which killed, according to modest estimates, over a million Iraqis. The consequences of that war were equally devastating as it destabilized the entire Middle East region, leading to various civil and proxy wars. The Arab world is reeling under that horrific experience to this day.

Also, on March 19, the eleventh anniversary of the NATO war on Libya was commemorated and followed, five days later, by the 23rd anniversary of the NATO war on Yugoslavia. Like every NATO-led war since the inception of the alliance in 1949, these wars resulted in widespread devastation and tragic death tolls.

None of these wars, starting with the NATO intervention in the Korean Peninsula in 1950, have stabilized any of the warring regions. Iraq is still as vulnerable to terrorism and outside military interventions and, in many ways, remains an occupied country. Libya is divided among various warring camps, and a return to civil war remains a real possibility.

Yet, enthusiasm for war remains high, as if over seventy years of failed military interventions have not taught us any meaningful lessons. Daily, news headlines tell us that the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain or some other western power have decided to ship a new kind of ‘lethal weapons‘ to Ukraine. Billions of dollars have already been allocated by Western countries to contribute to the war in Ukraine.

In contrast, very little has been done to offer platforms for diplomatic, non-violent solutions. A handful of countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia have offered mediation or insisted on a diplomatic solution to the war, arguing, as China’s foreign ministry reiterated on March 18, that “all sides need to jointly support Russia and Ukraine in having dialogue and negotiation that will produce results and lead to peace.”

Though the violation of the sovereignty of any country is illegal under international law, and is a stark violation of the United Nations Charter, this does not mean that the only solution to violence is counter-violence. This cannot be truer in the case of Russia and Ukraine, as a state of civil war has existed in Eastern Ukraine for eight years, harvesting thousands of lives and depriving whole communities from any sense of peace or security. NATO’s weapons cannot possibly address the root causes of this communal struggle. On the contrary, they can only fuel it further.

If more weapons were the answer, the conflict would have been resolved years ago. According to the BBC, the US has already allocated $2.7bn to Ukraine over the last eight years, long before the current war. This massive arsenal included “anti-tank and anti-armor weapons … US-made sniper (rifles), ammunition and accessories.”

The speed with which additional military aid has poured into Ukraine following the Russian military operations on February 24 is unprecedented in modern history. This raises not only political or legal questions, but moral questions as well – the eagerness to fund war and the lack of enthusiasm to help countries rebuild.

After 21 years of US war and invasion of Afghanistan, resulting in a humanitarian and refugee crisis, Kabul is now largely left on its own. Last September, the UN refugee agency warned that “a major humanitarian crisis is looming in Afghanistan”, yet nothing has been done to address this ‘looming’ crisis, which has greatly worsened since then.

The amassing of NATO weapons in Ukraine, as was the case of Libya, will likely backfire. In Libya, NATO’s weapons fueled the country’s decade long civil war.

Afghani refugees are rarely welcomed in Europe. The same is true for refugees coming from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Mali and other conflicts that directly or indirectly involved NATO. This hypocrisy is accentuated when we consider international initiatives that aim to support war refugees, or rebuild the economies of war-torn nations.

Compare the lack of enthusiasm in supporting war-torn nations with the West’s unparalleled euphoria in providing weapons to Ukraine. Sadly, it will not be long before the millions of Ukrainian refugees who have left their country in recent weeks become a burden on Europe, thus subjected to the same kind of mainstream criticism and far-right attacks.

While it is true that the West’s attitude towards Ukraine is different from its attitude towards victims of western interventions, one has to be careful before supposing that the ‘privileged’ Ukrainains will ultimately be better off than the victims of war throughout the Middle East. As the war drags on, Ukraine will continue to suffer, either the direct impact of the war or the collective trauma that will surely follow. The amassing of NATO weapons in Ukraine, as was the case of Libya, will likely backfire. In Libya, NATO’s weapons fueled the country’s decade long civil war.

Ukraine needs peace and security, not perpetual war that is designed to serve the strategic interests of certain countries or military alliances. Though military invasions must be wholly rejected, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, turning Ukraine into another convenient zone of perpetual geopolitical struggle between NATO and Russia is not the answer.

commondreams.org

Though terrorizing Russian teenage figure skating sensation Kamila Valieva and cancelling Russian Paralympians from the international stage both spit in the face of the spirit of Greece’s original Olympics, they are in full harmony with how NATO’s Mafiosi and their political commissars regard their lucrative sports’ empire. To the Mafia, excluding the world’s largest country from all sports is strictly business.

Though Valieva might yet revolutionize figure skating the way Olga Korbut, the legendary Belarusian athlete, revolutionized gymnastics, she is instead being bullied out of contention, much the way Ronaldo was shell shocked in the 1998 World Cup by the same star-spangled fascists who despise youth’s starry-eyed idealism.

Russian weight lifter (and frequent Donbass visitor) Maryana Naumova best articulated this youthful idealism in this incredible video where, whilst wearing the jacket he signed for her years earlier, she explains how much Arnold The Terminator Schwarzenegger inspired her to greatness when she was an obviously starry-eyed and star-struck teenage weight lifting wonder.

Schwarzenegger, of course, was a notorious drug cheat, as were Lance Armstrong, Ben Johnson, Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, Tyson Gay and literally hundreds of other Americans and Canadians. As was Rambo, when he squared up to the unoriginally named Ivan in Rocky 1V.

Although The Onion sarcastically wrote that Rocky’s victories in all four movies should have been overturned because Sylvester Stallone was, like Arnie, just another proven serial American drug cheat, The Onion misses the key point that the spirit of Rambo epitomizes the fiction that is American Sporting Exceptionalism.

America’s Rambo spirit has nothing to do with sport as the ancient Olympians, Olga Korbut, Kamila Valieva, Maryana Naumova, Novak Djokovic, Max Schmeling, Teófilo Stevenson, Muhammad Ali, Peter Norman or those hundreds of anonymous heroes who put in tens of thousands of hours training Russia’s Paralympians understand it.

It is, unfortunately, how Qatar’s leaders and those Bojos they have cajoled to host the 2022 World Cup in the middle of a desert in the middle of Europe’s football season, understand it. Boris Johnson, who likes to flatten Japanese schoolchildren to relive his cringe-worthy Eton days, believes that Ukraine should get a bye into the World Cup at the expense of Wales and Scotland, where Johnson’s Tory Party are thoroughly loathed. Johnson’s vision of sport has nothing to do with the dreams of Japanese, Welsh, English, Scottish or Ukrainian children and everything to do with the Tories’ personal enrichment and advancement.

There are, in essence, two camps in sport. In Big Business’ corner lurk Boris Johnson, the USA, Qatar, and an army of corrupt sporting officials, who have been bribed, bullied and cajoled into instituting a Russophobic apartheid system more complete and systematic than that which pertained against apartheid era South Africa.

In the other corner, with Kamila Valieva and Russia’s Paralympians, tower true sporting legends like Peter Norman, the third athlete pictured in the famous 1968 Olympics Black Power salute photograph, which occurred during the medal ceremony for the 200-metre event. Not only did Norman wear the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights in support of fellow athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith but the idea for Carlos and Smith to each wear a glove was Norman’s. Not only was Norman never selected to represent Australia again but, portending today’s Russian athletes, he was the only Australian Olympic medal winner not invited to attend the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Chelsea Mitchell, “the fastest girl in Connecticut”, is one of legions of female American athletes, who can empathise with Kamila Valieva as she is being trampled under the same profit-driven jackboot that tried to squash Valieva’s spirit. Mitchell’s issue, that she must compete against and lose sporting scholarships to dudes who declare themselves to be women, is analogous to saying Mike Tyson should have fought the winner of the Ali-Fraser 1971 fight, the fight that paused the Vietnam war, when Tyson was only 4 years old.

Though it is an obvious nonsense, Bojo, Biden and their backroom boys in the Pentagon would be delighted with such a mismatch if it brought in the shekels, because blood, booty and self-adulation are their game. Their legacy is not that of the Greek Olympics but that of crudest Rome, of Gladiator where athletes exist only to boost Big Business’ bottom line and the egos of frauds like Bojo.

This is not about sport at all and it is not exclusively about Russia which will remain a sporting powerhouse forever. As this is, as always, about money, pure and simple, if Russia has to be sacrificed so be it, no biggie. And if wrestling and Naumova’s weight-lifting also have to make way for Hollywood’s more lucrative pseudo sports, then hasta la vista baby.

Expelling Russia from weight lifting and wrestling will do much more than give Russia’s Naumovas a bloodied nose. As those two sports trace their lineage right back to the original Olympics, they should have pride of place in today’s games. But, even though the USA excels in both, so too does Russia and, more importantly, so also do almost every single country from Bulgaria in the West to Korea in the East. Despite weight-lifting and wrestling being the pre-eminent sports in most Central Asian countries, Wall St’s agents, by secret ballot of course, want them banished with more photogenic games like Norwegian women playing sports in thongs and brassieres too small to do what they are designed to do replacing them for click bait, prime time ads and profits.

Valieva, Mitchell and today’s other sporting greats best fix up their spare bedrooms as plenty of redundant athletes are coming their way. Horse-racing, not athletics or figure-skating, now sets the surreal pace, where Rambo and Rocky once led. Virtual horses and virtual jockeys running in pretend races are making real horses and real jockeys redundant as Paddy Power, William Hill and similar companies have beguiled their customers into embracing Big Tech’s lifeless rabbit hole.

Roy Keane, himself a high profile victim of NATO’s sporting Mafia, gave perhaps the best advice when he addressed children in the North East of Ireland. When asked how to excel at sports, Keane told them to climb trees, as all children should, to enjoy all sports, as all children should, but also to first throw their X boxes and other electronic toys into the rubbish bin, as all children also should. Therein lies to key to sports’ future; a return to basics by Russia, Central Asians, Africans and other well-adjusted folk, and fruitless years wasted bribing Norwegian women and their American transsexual fellows into throwing beach balls at one another, whilst wearing skimpy thongs, betting on pretend horses, sporting Ukrainian flags and congratulating obese British Prime Ministers for pulverizing starry-eyed Japanese children.

On March 10 when CIA director Bill Burns addressed the U.S. Senate and declared “Russia is losing the information war over Ukraine”, he repeated a claim that had already been amplified by Anglo-American media since the start of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine. Though his statement is factually true, it doesn’t tell us why and mainly reflects the West’s perspective. As usual the reality is a lot more complicated.

The U.S. information warfare capability is unparalleled: when it comes to manipulating perceptions, producing an alternate reality and weaponizing minds, the U.S. has no rivals. The U.S. coercive deployment of non-military instruments of power to bolster its hegemony, and attack any state that challenges it, is also undeniable. And that’s precisely why Russia was left with no other option than the military one to defend its interests and national security.

Hybrid warfare, and information warfare as an integral part of it, evolved into standard U.S. and NATO doctrine, but it hasn’t made military force redundant, as proxy wars demonstrate. With more limited hybrid warfare capabilities, Russia has to rely on its army to influence the outcome of a confrontation with the West that Moscow regards as an existential one. And when your existence as a nation is at risk, winning or losing the information war in the Western metaverse becomes rather irrelevant. Winning it at home and ensuring that your partners and allies understand your position and the rationale behind your actions inevitably takes precedence.

Russia’s approach to the Ukraine question is remarkably different from the West’s. As far as Russia is concerned Ukraine is not a pawn on the chessboard but rather a member of the family with whom communication has become impossible due to protracted foreign interference and influence operations. According to Andrei Ilnitsky, an advisor to the Russian Ministry of Defence, Ukraine is the territory where the Russian world lost one of the strategic battles in the cognitive war. Having lost the battle, Russia feels all the more obliged to win the war – a war to undo the damage to a country that historically has always been part of the Russian world and to prevent the same damage at home. It is rather telling that what U.S.-NATO call an “information war” is referred to as “mental’naya voina”, that is a cognitive war, by this prominent Russian strategist. Being mainly on the receiving end of information/influence operations, Russia has been studying their deleterious effects.

While it is too early to predict the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and its political outcomes, one of the main takeaways is that the U.S. employment of all instruments of hybrid warfare to instigate and fuel this conflict, left Russia no alternative than the recourse to military power to solve it. You can’t win the battle for hearts and minds when your opponent controls them. You first need to restore the conditions that will make it possible to reach them and even then it will take years to heal wounds, undo the psychological conditioning.

Though disinformation and deception have always been a part of warfare, and information has long been used to support combat operations, within the framework of hybrid warfare information plays a central role, so much so that in the West combat is seen as taking place primarily through it and vast resources are assigned to influence operations both online and offline. In 2006 retired U.S. Maj. General Robert H. Scales explained a new combat philosophy that would later be enshrined in NATO’s doctrine: “Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground.”

In the U.S.-NATO lexicon, information and influence are interchangeable words. “Information comprises and aggregates numerous social, cultural, cognitive, technical, and physical attributes that act upon and impact knowledge, understanding, beliefs, world views, and, ultimately, actions of an individual, group, system, community, or organization.”

The U.S. information war arsenal is unmatched because it controls the Internet and its main gatekeepers of content such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia… It means the U.S. can exercise control over the noosphere, that “globe-spanning realm of the mind” that RAND in 1999 was already presenting as integral to the American information strategy. For this reason no government can ignore the profound impact of the Internet on public opinion, statecraft and national sovereignty. Because neither Russia nor China can beat the U.S. in a game where it holds all the cards, the smart thing to do is to leave the gaming table, which is exactly what both powers are doing, each drawing on its specific strengths.

The “information war over Ukraine” didn’t start in response to Russia’s military operations in 2022. It was initially unleashed in Ukraine. Since 1991 the U.S. spent billions of dollars, and the EU tens of millions, to tear this country apart from Russia, not to mention the money spent by Soros’ Open Society. No price was deemed too high due to the importance of Ukraine on the geopolitical chessboard. U.S. influence operations led to two colour revolutions, the Orange Revolution (2004-05) and EuroMaidan (2013-14). After the 2014 bloody coup, with the removal of any counterweight, U.S.-NATO influence turned into full control and violent repression of dissent: those who had opposed Maidan lived in fear – the Odessa massacre being a constant reminder of the fate that would befall anyone who dared to resist the new regime.

The promotion of Neo-Nazi tendencies intensified, together with the cult of Nazi collaborationist Stepan Bandera; members of terrorist organizations such as the Azov Battalion and other ultranationalist groups joined government and the Ukranian National Guard, the past was erased and history re-written, Soviet monuments were destroyed, Russian-speakers faced daily threats and discrimination, pro-Russian parties and information outlets were banned, Russophobia was inculcated in children starting from kindergarten. In 2020 alone ultranationalist projects, such as the “Young Banderite Course”, “Banderstadt Festival of Ukrainian Spirit”, etc. received almost half of all the funds allocated by the Ukrainian government for children’s and youth organisations.

Ukrainians who lived in the separatist People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk and couldn’t be targeted by influence operations were targeted by rockets, bombs and bullets: the former compatriots had been recast as enemies almost overnight. While all quality of life indicators revealed a marked decline, large segments of the population lived in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance: they were told that discriminating LGBT is wrong but discriminating Russian speakers is right, remembering Soviet soldiers who had fought Nazism in WW2 and liberated Auschwitz is wrong, remembering the Holocaust is right. Because cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling, people resorted to denial and self-deception, embraced whatever opinion was dominant in their social environment to seek relief.

Since the mindset of an entire population cannot be changed overnight, even with an army of cognitive behaviour specialists, the groundwork was laid in stages. The Orange Revolution helped foster Ukrainian national identity but precisely because it leveraged on existing cultural and linguistic differences it ended up being the most regionally divided of all colour revolutions: western Ukrainians dominated the protests and eastern Ukrainians largely opposed them. The Orange Revolution had a profound effect on the way Ukrainians perceived themselves and their national identity but it didn’t succeed in severing the political, cultural, social, and economic ties between Ukraine and Russia. Most people on both sides of the border continued to regard the two countries as inextricably intertwined.

A second revolution, Euromaidan, would finish the job started in 2004. This time the narrative had a wider appeal: its proponents identified corruption and lack of economic prospects as the main grievances of the population, indicated Ukraine’s leadership and its ties to Russia as the main cause of the country’s troubles and proposed integration into the EU as a cure-all solution.

Turning Russia into a scapegoat for all societal and economic problems, fuelling an anti-Russian sentiment was exactly what a myriad of U.S. and U.S.-funded players had been doing since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine, like the rest of post-Soviet countries, was teeming with media outlets, NGOs, educators, diaspora groups, political activists, business and community leaders whose status was artificially inflated by their access to foreign resources and international networks.

These “vectors of influence” introduced themselves as purveyors of “global standards and best practices”, “democratic rules”, “participatory development and accountability”, used marketing buzzwords for their work of demolition of existing practices, frames of reference and their sostitution with new ones, often of inferior quality. Under the guise of fighting corruption, offering a path to modernization and development these players became entrenched in Ukraine’s civil society, shaped its collective consciousness and demonized both Russia, local politicians and public figures who advocated closer relations with Moscow.

The work of these agents of influence was instrumental in demolishing worldviews, beliefs, values and perceptions that dated back to Soviet times, thus altering the population’s self-understanding. It ensured that younger generations would be ignorant about their country’s history and embrace a new fictional identity.

But colour revolutions require both brain and brawn to topple governments and defend the power of the new ruling class. The brute force that was necessary to intimidate and attack those who were impervious to influence operations could only be provided by fringe elements in society who had been seduced by the ultra-nationalist rhetoric.

These violent fringe groups were organized and empowered to exercise greater influence in Ukraine and thus attract more followers. A romanticized, imaginary identity was radicalized by absurd claims that Ukrainians and Russians cannot be called brotherly nations because Ukrainians are “pure-blood Slavs”, while Russians are “mixed-blood barbarians”. Nothing was beyond the pale: sleek re-enactments of Nazi propaganda tropes like torchlight parades that looked impressive on social media, speeches that echoed Hitler’s, xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric, the cult of Bandera and those who fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Army.

While foreign groups sharing the same ideological tool box were labelled extremist and terrorist organizations just across the border, in Ukraine they received advice, financial and military support by the U.S. military and the CIA. At the same time the CIA presentable spin-off, NED, was giving out funds, grants, scholarships and media awards to their globalist, politically-correct, “freedom, democracy and human rights” country fellows. The latter cohort would whitewash the crimes of the former. After all, if members of Al-Qaeda donning white helmets in Syria became the darlings of Western media and even won an Oscar, Neo-Nazis could be marketed as defenders of democracy just as easily.

Ukraine’s population was subjected to the sort of psychological operations that would make it want more of a medicine that not only didn’t cure the disease but could kill the patient. In order to turn the country into a beachhead from which to launch hostile operations aimed at weakening Russia and creating a rift between Moscow and Europe, Russophobia had to become a sort of state religion, anyone who didn’t practise it was to be marginalized and eventually excluded from public discourse. The pressure to conform was so strong that it impaired judgement.

The discursive construction of an enemy required the constant demonization of Russia (Mordor), Russians (uncivilized Eurasian barbarians) and Donbass separatists (savages, subhumans).

When neo-Nazi narratives and Russophobia are normalized and allowed to shape both policies and dominant discourse, when people are “weaned” from critical thinking, from their own history, and wage an 8-year long war against their fellow countrymen, that’s a sign people’s minds have been weaponized.

Public consciousness was actively manipulated both at the level of meaning and at the level of emotions. Selective perception and consolatory fantasies were some of the psychological mechanisms ensuring that the population would manage the stress of living in a state of cognitive dissonance where facts and fiction could no longer be separated. By offering cheap passage through a complex world, these narratives provided emotional certainty at the cost of rational understanding.

The emotionally satisfying decision to believe, to have faith, inoculated individuals against counter-arguments and inconvenient facts. The election of an actor on the basis of his convincing performance as a president in a TV series titled “Servant of the People” confirmed the successful substitution of politics with its spectacular simulation: it wasn’t simply the blurring of illusion and reality, but the authentication of illusion as more real than the real itself. The majority of Ukrainians voted for a brand new party that was named after the TV fiction and was the brainchild of the same people. A party that even used billboards advertising the series for Zelensky’s election campaign.

With the global streaming of the TV series by Netflix and its broadcasting by more than a dozen TV channels in Europe we see the marketing of Zelensky to foreign audiences as an image-object whose immediate reality is its symbolic function in a semiotic system of abstract signifiers that take on a life of their own and generate a parallel, virtual reality. This virtual reality in turn generates its own discourse.

For instance, to foreign audiences the 8-year long war in Donbass that caused 14,000 deaths is less real than images extrapolated from a videogame and passed off as “the bombing of Kiev.” That’s because the war in Donbass has been largely ignored by international media.

Images of atrocities, whether taken from other contexts or fabricated, have become free-floating signifiers that can be repurposed according to the needs of propagandists, while real atrocities must be hidden from view. After all it doesn’t matter whether the narrative is true or false, as long as it is convincing.

In post-Maidan Ukraine one could see an anticipation of the fate that awaited the rest of Europe, almost as if Ukraine had been not only a laboratory for colour revolutions, but also a testing ground for the kind of cognitive warfare operations that are leading to the rapid destruction of whatever vestige of civility, logic and rationality is left in the West.

Cognitive warfare integrates cyber, information, education, psychological, and social engineering capabilities to achieve its ends. Social media play a central role as a force multiplier and are a powerful tool for exploiting emotions and reinforcing cognitive biases. Unprecedented information volume and velocity overwhelms individual cognitive capabilities and encourages “thinking fast” (reflexively and emotionally) as opposed to “thinking slow” (rationally and judiciously). Social media also induce social proofing, wherein the individual mimics and affirms others’ actions and beliefs to fit in, thus creating echo chambers of conformism and groupthink. Shaping perceptions is all that matters; critical opinions, inconvenient truths, facts that contradict the dominant narrative can be cancelled with a click, or by tweaking the algorithm. NATO uses machine learning and pattern recognition to quickly identify the locations in which social media posts, messages, and news articles originate, the topics under discussion, sentiment and linguistic identifiers, pacing of releases, links between social media accounts etc.

Such system allows real-time monitoring and provides alerts to NATO and its social media partners, who invariably comply with its requests to remove or ‘shadow ban’ content and accounts deemed problematic.

A polarized, cognitively disoriented population is a ripe target for a type of emotional manipulation known as thought-scripting and mind-boxing. A person’s thinking comes to congeal around increasingly set scripts. And if the script is arguable, it is unlikely to be changed through argument. The well-boxed brain is impervious to information that doesn’t conform to the script and defenceless against powerful falsehoods or simplifications that it has been primed to believe. The more boxed a mind, the more polarized the political environment and public dialogue. This cognitive damage makes all efforts to promote balance and compromise unattractive, in the worst cases even impossible. The totalitarian turn of Western liberal regimes and the insular mentality of Western political elites seem to confirm this sad state of affairs.

With the ban on Russian information outlets, the exclusion and bullying of anyone who seeks to explain Russia’s position, the equivalent of ethnic cleansing of public discourse has been achieved and its cheerleaders have a mad grin on their face that doesn’t bode well.

Examples of irrational mob frenzy are too many to list, those who have fallen victims to this pseudo-religious fervour demand that Russia and Russians be cancelled. For that matter you don’t even need to be human or alive to become a target of mass hysteria: Russian cats and dogs have been banned from competitions, Russian classics banned from universities, Russian products taken off the shelves.

The relentless manipulation of people’s emotions has unleashed a dangerous whirlwind of mass insanity. As in Ukraine, so in Europe citizens are supporting decisions and calling for measures against their own interests, prosperity and future. “I’ll freeze for Ukraine!” is the new epitome of virtue-signalling among those who access only U.S.- approved information, the kind of script compatible with a frame of reference that excludes complexity. In this fictional, parallel universe, a sort of safe, reassuring, compensatory metaverse that has broken free from the messiness of reality, the West always occupies the moral high-ground.

By and large international media coverage of the war in Ukraine has been not only fictional but also completely aligned with narratives provided by Ukrainian propaganda units that were set up and funded by USAID, NED, Open Society, Pierre Omidyar Network, the European Endowment for Democracy et al.

Dan Cohen in an article published by Mint Press News described in detail how the system of Ukrainian strategic information works. Ukraine, with the help of foreign consultants and key media partners, built an effective network of PR-media agencies that actively churn out and promote fake news. In NATO countries whoever dares to question the correctness of this information is accused of being a “Putin’s agent”, attacked and excluded from public debate. The information space is so heavily guarded that it resembles an echo-chamber.

Ukrainian disinformation campaigns affect the judgment of both Western audiences and lawmakers. On March 8 when Ukrainian President Zelensky addressed the British House of Commons remotely, many members of parliament had no earphones to listen to the simultaneous translation of his speech. It didn’t matter. They liked the show and applauded enthusiastically. In their boxed-minds Zelensky had already been framed as “our good guy in Kiev”, and any script, even an incomprehensible one, would do. On March 1 diplomats from Western countries and their allies walked out during a video link address by Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov at the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Boxed-brains are cognitively incapable to engage in discussions with those who hold different views, making diplomacy impossible. That’s why in lieu of diplomatic skills we see theatrics and media stunts, empty suits who deliver script lines and project moral superiority.

The West has found refuge in this media-generated make-believe world because it can no longer solve its systemic problems: instead of development and progress we see economic, social, intellectual and political regression, anxiety, frustration, delusions of grandeur and irrationality. The West has become completely self-referential.

Dystopian ideological and social-engineering projects such as Trans-humanism and the Great Reset are the only solutions Western elites can offer to address the inevitable implosion of a system they contributed to wreck.

These “solutions” require the suppression of pluralism, the curtailing of freedom of information and expression, the widespread use of violence to intimidate critical thinkers, disinformation and emotional manipulation, in short, the destruction of the very foundations of modern democracy, public discourse, rational debate and informed participation in decision-making processes. The cherry on top is that it is cynically packaged and marketed as a “victory of democracy against authoritarianism.” To project democracy first they had to kill it and then replace it with its simulation.

But a global communication and information space that doesn’t respect the principle of pluralism and mutual respect inevitably produces its own gravediggers. We already see how this global space is fragmenting into heavily defended information spaces along the lines of geopolitical spheres of influence. The U.S.-led globalization project is unravelling and that’s mainly due to its overambition.

The U.S. might be winning the information war in the West but any victory in the parallel universe created by the media could easily turn into a Pyrrhic one when reality reasserts itself.

Recent history tells us that carefully crafted narratives, disinformation and demonization of the opponent radicalize and polarize public opinion, but victory in the information battlefield doesn’t necessarily translate into military or political victory, as we have seen in Syria and Afghanistan.

While the collective West revels in its success after the nuclear option of banning all Russian media from the global infosphere it controls, it’s too blinded by hubris to even notice the inevitable fallout. Total control over the narrative is achieved through authoritarian measures and the repression of dissenting voices, that is a reversal of those inclusive democracy and universalist values that the West hypocritically claims to defend and is actively projecting in the Global South. In the ideological confrontation with countries it defines “authoritarian” the West is losing the edge it claimed to possess.

The unipolar, U.S.-led world order is coming to an end and the West is fast losing its influence. Russia is paying attention and in the future it might invest more energy in reaching non-Western audiences instead, that is people who aren’t as indoctrinated and impervious to truth, facts and reason as their Western counterparts.

While at the beginning of the information revolution China took measures to protect its digital sovereignty, for many reasons it took Russia longer to recognize the danger posed by a communication and information system that despite initial claims of being an open, level playing field, was actually rigged in favour of those who controlled it.

Russia’s initiative in Ukraine is not only a response to attacks on the population of Donbass and a way to forestall Ukraine’s accession to NATO. Its avowed goal to denazify Ukraine is a defensive response to the intense cognitive war operations that the U.S. has been conducting both inside Russia and in neighbouring countries. NATO’s eastward expansion wasn’t simply a military expansion, it led to the occupation of the psycho-cultural, information and political space as well.

After losing a strategic battle in the cognitive war, watching the normalization of Neo-Nazi Russophobia and realizing that hostile forces, both domestic and foreign, have become entrenched in Ukraine, Russia feels all the more obliged to win the war, as Andrei Ilnitsky explained in an interview to Zvezda. Ilnitsky recognized that “The main danger of cognitive warfare is that its consequences are irreversible and can manifest themselves through generations. People who speak the same language as us, suddenly became our enemies.” The erection of monuments to Stepan Bandera while those of Soviet soldiers were being destroyed, was not only an intolerable provocation for Russia – a country that lost 26.6 million people fighting Nazism in WW2 – it was also a tangible expression of the kind of erasure and rewriting of history that is not limited to Ukraine.

The current conflict in Ukraine shows that restoring a sense of reality exacts a heavy and bloody toll. Unfortunately in matters of national security painful decisions cannot be postponed indefinitely.

NATO is ensuring that Irish neutrality is a very close second to truth in the Ukrainian war’s casualty list.

Ireland has witnessed nothing like this level of ignorant jingoism since the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland declared war on Germany, Austria and Hungary in summer, 1914 when Dublin’s thugs beat up German grocers and when Ireland’s barbarians blacklisted Kuno Meyer, the world’s leading Irish language scholar for being born German.

Although the horrors of the Somme, coupled with Dublin’s 1916 Easter Rising, muffled Ireland’s war dogs somewhat, they spent the next 100 years plotting their comeback, even as Ireland’s pro-active neutrality policy propelled Éamon de Valera to the front of the League of Nations and Frank Aiken, his foreign minister, to be the United Nations’ most respected advocate for peace, neutrality and non-alignment.

The Second World War was, the Irish always believed, De Valera’s finest hour as he kept us out of a war where our only contribution would have been a massive increase in the Irish body bag count. Not that Ireland got away scot free. De Valera, in his 1940 St Patrick’s Day address, explained that Ireland was more effectively blockaded than any country in history and one in five of Ireland’s merchant marine force made the ultimate sacrifice. De Valera and Aiken forged Ireland’s neutrality into an indelibly proud Irish hallmark, as demonstrated in this 1974 television debate when legendary Irish spy-master Dan Bryan spelled out the case for maintaining Irish neutrality.

Fast forward to Dublin’s 2022 St Patrick’s Day parade and, in a total break from long-established protocol, Ukrainian flags, not Irish tricolours, lined Dublin’s main streets, and Ukrainians, in their national colours, led the parade, smug in the knowledge that the Irish government will allow 200,000 more of them enter Ireland, a country where only four of its Southern 26 counties have populations larger than 200,000.

Although this is vastly more than either France or the USA are opening their borders to, it is not nearly enough for Ukraine’s Clown President, who is demanding Ireland abandon its neutrality and invade Russia, something Ireland’s Clown Prime Minister feels might cross a red line. Britain’s Clown Prince Charles, meanwhile, the future King who wants to be a used tampon is, in the most remarkable lapse of diplomatic protocol, castigating Russia as he tours neutral Ireland, a country he and his entire family have the most despicable track record in.

Although all refugees, Ukrainians included, deserve help and support, they are incidental to this open door policy, which is pivotal to the Irish regime’s deliberate collusion in destroying the very essence of Irish neutrality and nationhood and no less a person than current Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin has said exactly that.

And, even more incredibly, all major Irish political parties fundamentally agree with him and all are agreed on snuggling up to NATO, with the largely U.S. funded Sinn Féin joining Ireland’s other political leprechauns in calling for the expulsion of Russia’s entire diplomatic staff over matters Sinn Féin patently know nothing about the secret pact which gives the RAF unfettered access to Irish skies on the ludicrous pretext of defending Irish neutrality against Russia, whose nearest military base is thousands of kilometers away.

And what of the Russian delegation? Their Orwell Road premises have been under constant attack by mobs led by far right government minister Josepha Madigan and a very well organized and funded crew of Ukrainian, Polish and Hungarian fascists, who must be delighted that the Irish police allowed them free reign to unleash their terror on a peaceful, diplomatic mission.

And that Ireland’s Catholic priests are defacing the Embassy’s walls and Catholic Church suppliers are ramming the Embassy with trucks and being blessed by other dubious priests for their terrorism, whilst older Irish citizens live in fear Ireland’s Ukrainian imports will take a leaf from Kiev’s playbook and throw yellow and blue paint over them for having watched Yuri Gagarin orbit the earth in 1961.

But it is not just lilly lived Irish priests who are at fault. Ever since the Iraqi war, when NATO’s armies embedded journalists into their ranks, Irish hacks from Mary Fitzgerald cavorting with leading ISIS commanders to Orla Guerin lighting candles in churches with Nazis in Mariupol, have been widely deployed not only to pretend that NATO’s war coverage is somehow neutral and balanced but that “brave” Irish women, like “brave” Irishman Lord Haw Haw and other “brave” Irish Nazi collaborators before them, are showing the ignorant Irish the folly of their long-held neutrality.

But why should Irish neutrality matter at all, as the the damning February 2022 Commission on the Defence Forces shows the Irish could hardly carry the day against Iceland or Malta, never mind Russia or some other heavyweight, not least because the Irish naval services spend their time ferrying illegal aliens to Italy to soften up the Irish to abandon their neutrality heritage for a mess of NATO pottage?

Though joining NATO and PESCO will allow the Irish Army’s top brass and their political sponsors hob nob with the great and the good, it will more importantly deepen and widen NATO’s soft war options by extending the shelf life of the Good Friday Peace Agreement, which disgraced politicians Bertie Ahern, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and George Mitchell have been dining off for the last 24 years. Because this agreement’s pertinent international significance is that it allows its British and American architects pawn themselves off as peace-makers, not as the nation wreckers that they are, it is a valuable bauble, especially when coupled with the international standing joke of Ireland’s bloated NGO sector.

Then there is the strange case of Ireland’s Shannon Airport, which has been a major NATO hub for sending prisoners to be tortured and, in more recent years, as a stop-over refuelling and R&R hub for armed American troops heading off to pick up the white man’s burden in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

What is particularly noteworthy about those repeated American breaches of Irish neutrality is there is no need for them, as airports in Britain, Spain, Portugal, Germany or countless other NATO aligned countries would do equally well. However, making Shannon airport dependent upon servicing America’s war needs helps pull the greater Shannon airport area into the NATO orbit and that is its point. America abuses Shannon airport to subjugate Ireland’s economy.

Not only has NATO thoroughly penetrated Ireland’s military and political apparatus but she stands at the nerve centre of her economy. Most of Silicon Valley’s Fortune 500 companies have their European offices in Dublin and, to coin the old joke, Dublin’s rents keep doublin’ most years as a result. Not only do the workers these companies import pay over 50% of Ireland’s income taxes but NATO have impressed on Ireland, which has already surrendered its massive fisheries to her European “partners”, the need to radically cull its national herd and therefore to become even more dependent on these secretive companies and the retired NATO generals who sit on their boards.

Ireland, once synonymous with holy war, is being slowly ripped asunder forcing, as Zionist scholar Dr Rory Millers asserts at 12:23 in this instructive 2014 Tel Aviv talk, Jewish led sectarian alliances to square up against Ireland’s numerically insignificant but now very vulnerable Orthodox Christian communities, and Ireland’s Zionist apologists to defend themselves against Ireland’s Islamic war lords and NATO’s Antifa fifth columnists.

All these needlessly imported sectarian squabbles undermine Ireland’s home front, even as Ireland’s Foreign Minister chairs meetings of the UNSC to boost his CV while Ireland’s punch-drunk Prime Minister harrangues nuclear armed India that its neutrality is “unacceptable”, and Ireland’s UN Ambassador stupidly threatens to unleash further Irish hell on Afghanistan’s Taliban government to settle some grudges NATO still hold against the unfortunate survivors of NATO’s Afghan extermination campaign. Though these Irish jokers talk far too loudly and carry a tiny stick, the problem is that, as NATO controls their voice, their economy and their shillelaghs, what little remains of Ireland’s independence and neutrality will soon be sacrificed unless Ireland’s entire political apparatus is scrapped and time-honed and internationally honored values of neutrality, self awareness and self respect again become Ireland’s norm.

U.S. President Joe Biden came to Europe last week riding high on European deference towards America’s leadership. Then he went to Warsaw to make a victory lap speech at the weekend which was billed as marking the high point in galvanizing European and NATO unity towards Russia.

But the climax cratered like a house of cards. As the president was boarding Air Force One to take him home, the much-vaunted transatlantic unity was in disarray from Biden’s cack-handed big moment.

It reminds one of former President Barack Obama’s cautionary words in appraising Biden. “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” said Obama of his former vice president and his gaffe-prone big mouth.

Biden’s speech in Warsaw was a carefully crafted rousing one. It was of course littered with mangled words as is Biden’s rambling style, and laden with the usual banal American arrogance about leading the free world against evil dictators. Nevertheless, he also appeared to succeed in rallying the unity of the U.S. and its allies in facing down alleged Russian aggression. That unity certainly seemed remarkable with regard to NATO’s and the European Union’s response to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. The Europeans have ratcheted up economic sanctions against Russia at the behest of Washington; they are buying up U.S. weapons and set to import American energy instead of Russian.

It was all going swimmingly well until the very end of the speech when Biden suddenly went off script and, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, declared: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

There it is. Regime change, according to Biden. European allies have recoiled in embarrassment over the clumsy admission. Britain, France, Germany and the European Union have all said they repudiate the objective. The distancing from Washington is not so much out of principle but rather out of the bad political look.

After weeks of an intense Western media campaign projecting the policy as supposedly defending Ukraine (and European democracy), the U.S. president was letting it be known that the real endgame is regime change in Moscow.

Just like the Biden order to pull out from Afghanistan last year, the European leaders are left looking like bystanders at a bus stop. Washington calls the shots without even the pretense of consulting its vassals.

At the end of a European tour deemed up to that point to be a stunning success for the American president owing to the fawning deference he was shown days before, and just at the very end of a set-piece address choreographed for the history books, Joe Biden blew it.

The White House immediately swung into damage-limitation mode, urgently clarifying that the president did not actually mean regime change. Biden himself denied that he was referring to regime change when he got back to the U.S. But even sycophantic news outlets admitted the difficulty in trying to spin any other literal meaning.

Biden’s knack for putting his foot in his mouth has been around for a long time during 50 years as a politician. It can’t be simply explained as a sign of senility although the recent frequency of gaffes suggests his mental acuity is waning with his 79-year-old age. During his first year-and-half as 46th president, administration aides have countless times had to clean up sloppy remarks. In one notorious clanger, he appeared to repudiate Washington’s decades-old One China Policy, saying the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion from the mainland.

The laugh is Biden touts himself as a “foreign policy expert” from his many years as a Senator and roving ambassador before he entered the White House, first as vice president under Obama and now as the president.

If this is American expertise, then what does incompetence look like? At a time of extremely sensitive U.S.-Russian relations, Biden has called Putin “a killer” and “war criminal”. On the weekend before his regime-change manifesto was announced, he labeled the Russian president a “butcher” and compared the Kremlin with the Third Reich.

The hypocrisy of Biden is bad enough. He has endorsed endless criminal U.S. wars and regime-change operations that have resulted in millions of deaths and whole nations destroyed. For Biden to call anyone a war criminal and butcher is too nauseating for irony.

But it is contemptible that the Ukraine conflict is reduced by Biden to simplistic caricatures in total denial of how the U.S.-led NATO alliance has largely created the confrontation with Russia.

Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among the damage-limitation squad over the weekend’s incendiary remarks. Blinken had the temerity to say: “We don’t have a strategy of regime change in Russia or anywhere else.” That’s from Blinken who helped engineer the regime-change wars in Libya and Syria while Biden was vice president.

The Ukraine conflict is only a part of a bigger picture of U.S. hostility towards Russia. Washington and its European minions have tried to portray NATO’s eastward expansion over the years as an innocent development of a defensive nature.

Moscow has repeatedly denounced NATO’s stance as aggressive and an existential threat to Russian national security. When the Kremlin proposed a security treaty at the end of last year, it was rebuffed by Washington and NATO. That inevitably led to the war in Ukraine as a defensive counter-measure by Russia.

Biden just ripped off the wrapping on the policy. In one fell swoop, he just proved what Russia has been saying. His admission of regime change against Russia is an admission of violating the UN Charter and international law. The European leaders are aghast not because they are against such criminality. Their concern is that they too are exposed as being complicit in a criminal conspiracy. They fear how their public will react to that imperial agenda. Is this what economic sanctions and resulting energy price inflation are for?

Good old Joe, screwing it up – again. Just when Uncle Sam had the Europeans corralled under supposed American leadership, the imperial agenda blows up in their face.

This also explains why the Zelensky regime in Kiev is procrastinating and avoiding political settlement of the conflict. Settlement is not in Washington’s interest. It wants the proxy war to continue because the real aim is to use Ukraine as a cat’s paw to destabilize Russia. Zelensky and Kiev can’t make the peace because that’s not what their handlers in Washington are after. Washington wants and needs permanent tensions and conflict (short of all-out war) with Russia.

After Biden’s charade-busting admission, however, it will be difficult politically to maintain US-European “unity” over such a flagrant imperial agenda.

Given claims that the West’s dissidents are slaves to crackpot conspiracies, the oxymoron of conspiracy theories needs examining by first stating what a theory is, by then going on to say what a conspiracy is and by examining how such name-calling is central to NATO’s dark agenda.

With that in mind, Steven Weinberg’s The Revolution That Didn’t Happen, his primer on what constitutes a theory, should be required reading for all those university professors, who teach their nonsense subjects to prospective journalists and social media influencers. (They know who they are, even if they are unsure of their pronouns).

As well as castigating Thomas Kuhn who, Weinberg asserts, should have known better than to spread his paradigm shift nonsense to the four winds, Weinberg tells us that there are two basic classes of theories, the deterministic and the stochastic, each of which remains important to this day.

Deterministic theories include Newtonian and Christian pre-determination theories, as well as Malthusian fatalism and similar off-shoots. In such worlds, the end result can never be in doubt: drop the apple, it falls to the ground; be a good Calvinist, go to Calvinist heaven.

Speckled about them, as the ether is to Maxwell’s equations, were Catholic notions of legions of angels and demons jousting with each other to win our souls. Kings, queens and other monarchs blended neatly into this over-identified model and folk knew on which rung of Jacob’s stairway to heaven they stood both in regard to God and to the King, God’s earthly representative and enforcer.

Greek philosophers like Aristotle helped solidify this hierarchy, where women essentially got the short straw partly because, as Aristotle explained, women have less teeth than men. It was not until Spenser came along some 2000 years later that folk got the novel notion of counting how many teeth men and women actually had to determine if Aristotle’s hypothesis was correct or not. Suffice to say that Weinberg says the only use a philosopher has is to protect us from other philosophers.

There arose then a gradual trend not to accept theologies, no matter how complete, beautiful or over-identified they seemed. Folk started measuring things and, in the process, they noted anomalies, exceptions to pre-conceived notions which would eventually cause the underlying theories to be modified, if not scrapped altogether and it was confusion on this point that dragged Kuhn and oodles of Gender Studies cretins into their self-made abyss; Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers makes some important remarks on Galileo and other frauds in this regard.

It was, for example, such calculations that got most of us to accept the world is not flat and that Newtonian physics works perfectly, but only in a Newtonian world where gravity is king. Thus, although we no longer believe in Maxwell’s ether, and we now know that there is more to nature than Newton’s particles, no future discovery can ever hope to alter the fundamental logic of their work. Both Maxwellian electrodynamics and Newtonian mechanics will remain integral parts of human knowledge until the end of time.

Branching far out from physics, we can have deterministic and/or stochastic theories on just about anything tangible and measurable. Measurement through appropriate models allows us to set insurance premiums as women, on average, live longer than men, men are more risk prone, and so-called Acts of God, though rare, can be devastating and so should be insured against at an appropriate premium that can be measured. But conspiracies?

Conspiracies are a legal fact and one can hardly have a theory about a fact. Prior to the 1906 Trade Disputes Act, trade unions were regarded as criminal conspiracies and the Tolpuddle Martyrs ended up being transported as convicted felons because they were part of a conspiracy, of a trade union, in other words. Guy Fawkes and his pals suffered terrible deaths because they were captured conspirators. Elements of the Catholic hierarchy condemned the Irish-American Fenian conspiracy and likewise condemned Freemasonry as a conspiracy. And then we have the persons unknown trial where Irishmen were convicted of conspiring with persons unknown at times unknown to commit crimes unknown. Though those conspiracies were all legal, historical facts, they in no way constitute building blocks for a theory on conspiracies or on anything else.

Canada’s truckers are not conspiracy theorists. They are blue collar workers, who want government conspirators to get off their backs and out of their bank accounts. French citizens protesting in solidarity with them are not conspiracy theorists, even though the French educational system devotes far too much time to philosophy. They are simply French citizens, who are carrying on the proud French tradition of protesting for their own notions of liberty, equality and fraternity. Kiwi protesters simply object to a pampered World Economic Forum fascist being foisted upon them.

As regards the Masons, though an endless number of allegations have been made against them, those allegations do not make a theory. They are observations, real or imagined, on how Freemasons work and they lead to hypotheses, which must be tested. Now, those who say the Masons, the Jesuits, the Jews or any broadly similar group control world affairs fall down at this very important hurdle: because theories or hypotheses such as theirs, which purport to explain everything, actually explain nothing, they are stilted theologies that get us absolutely nowhere.

One either accepts their theology and joins their cult or one continues to question and test and to ultimately reject all such cults, including those with massive marketing budgets, the biggest of which is that, which empowers and enriches our regional, national and trans-national overlords. And, although their marketeers seem to be all froth and no substance, they have been very successful froth peddlers ever since Edward Bernays first pulled the wool over governments and women more than 100 years ago. To believe that our political overlords have been on the level with us all that time is to display an innocence that belongs only in a cloistered convent and that is a destination the Gender Studies legions would object to, just as they object to much else.

What these strange folk are doing is hijacking the received narrative to shape today. Gone, for example, is the Bradleyist interpretation of the Shakespearian tragedy and even JK Rowling is being exiled from her own Harry Potter franchise because she won’t accept Alice in Wonderland’s Humpty Dumpty logic regarding the definition of womanhood.

The Bradleyist interpretation of Shakespeare is relevant as unorthodox, unpopular or downright stupid interpretations of history are held up as symptoms of these so-called conspiracy theorists. But historians do not work to theories; they consult, as far as is practicable, primary sources and draw conclusions, hopefully bias-free, therefrom for others to build upon. Because these soft sciences have no hard component equivalent to Maxwell’s equations, their ether lends itself to manipulation by the gullible, as well as those with sinister agendas.

That much should be obvious and, although this cancer is bad enough in literature and history, its toxins are now seeping into the hard sciences, exposures like that of the Sokal hoax notwithstanding.

Sokal noticed Jacques Derrida claiming to understand Einstein’s constant and proving he didn’t. Sokal wondered how abstruse mathematical topics not used in chemistry or biology and only very rarely in physics could possibly become relevant in the humanities or social sciences. Sokal showed these hucksters were using all the well established tricks of the intellectual charlatan and he exposed Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze as the self-serving frauds that they were.

Postmodernism and similar schools are, Sokal shows, the software through which the hardware of ineffective, reactionary remedies enter the socio political system. To be blunt about it, French philosophers like Jacques Derrida have even less to offer than does Aristotle and that also applies to the university departments they continue to poison. They are far worse than any conspiracy minded barfly.

Although conspiracy theory canards should be debated and then dismissed as the red herrings that they are, we cannot debate The World Economic Forum’s Humpty Dumptys where words means precisely what they want them to mean. If we are ever to break free from their shackles, we must first articulate a platform that resonates with society’s real stakeholders. But, as Sokal asserts, we will not do that with the narcissistic sophistry of Derrida and his chums. Rather, we must instead challenge those like Trudeau, Macron and Ardern, who mask their virtue signalling fascism in the honeyed maze of Derrida and the reactionary Gender Studies tripe he spawned.

The case against Covid mandates, as articulated by Joe Rogan, Jimmy Dore and Robert Kennedy Jnr, exemplifies. These three, amongst others, have not only shredded the accepted Covid narrative but, irrespective of whether they are “right” or “wrong” or whether they adhere to some conspiracy worshipping coven or other, they have given us cause to question and debate that narrative.

But debate is the very last thing the World Economic Forum’s Young Leaders want or can handle. Debate is bad for business, debate slows down decision-making and debate is, in any case, redundant as those who profit from Covid have, so they proclaim, settled the science once and forever.

And that is the key and cardinal point. The World Economic Forum’s consuls declare that those they oppose are conspiracy cultists, who should be cancelled, much like Rome cancelled the Catacomb dwellers. JK Rowling? A TERF, so persecute her. Canadian truckers? Theoretical heretics, so rob $10 million from them. Dostoevsky? Russian, so off with his head and kick his cat.

How, why and to what benefit ? The how has been a gradual ongoing and well funded war of attrition where these subversives took an inch on academia’s lowest rung and, with massive funding and targeted intimidation, expanded to where they have even expelled JK Rowling from her own franchise. The why has been to emasculate us all and, as the Harry Potter saga shows, to even cancel the imaginations of children. The benefit to the World Economic Forum and their NATO enforcers is to allow us collude in them cancelling Russia, the world’s biggest country, from our intellectual, economic, cultural, historical and even geographical space. Not even Harry Potter or Humpty Dumpty could conceptualize that degree of nihilistic madness.

For all their philosophical flaws, the French have the right idea when they kick against these pricks and strive, however imperfectly, for liberté, égalité, fraternité, for grounded ideals which are infinitely nobler than those who rule over them and over us. We, on the other hand, have fallen so far from grace one doubts we will ever rise again. And somewhat like how Delilah emasculated Samson, so also have we been seduced not with a bang from a gendarme’s truncheon but by the Gender Studies whimperings of insipid politicians. The price for our submission can be seen not only in our crumbling cities but in the endless wars NATO pretends to be fighting on our behalf.

If we look at it all through a stochastic rather than a deterministic lens, then things may not be that grim. The coming economic turbulence may be a blessing as well as the curse it will undoubtedly be, if we reject Foucault’s pretentiousness and shift our efforts back towards criticizing our failing economies, our corrupt states and our compromized leaders, whilst also improving our daily lives, reading Dostoevsky, adhering to grounded ideologies, and promoting sober social relations and community-rooted cultures. Striving, in short, for a life worth living, free from the petty chicanery of those who benefit from parroting NATO’s conspiracy theory slurs to deflect from their own vile conspiracies and viler intrigues.

U.S. President Joe Biden flew to Europe this week with the presidential nuclear codes on display by his entourage. Among the fleet of presidential aircraft was the “doomsday plane” – a specially fitted-out Boeing 747 capable of withstanding nuclear radiation and serving, if-needs-be, as a “Pentagon in the sky”.

Biden attended three back-to-back emergency summits of the G7, NATO and the European Union leaders in Brussels. It was reportedly the first time an American president has ever been invited to attend such an EU leaders’ summit.

There was a palpable sense of over-the-top contrived drama regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine. Russia’s military intervention in that country is now in its fourth week. Moscow has claimed reasons of self-defense and protection of Russian-speaking people in Donbass from a NATO-backed Nazi regime in Kiev.

The Western media and their governments, on the other hand, have claimed Russia’s actions are unprovoked aggression and the worst episode of barbarism since the Second World War. There is feverish Western media fears of Russia deploying chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. There are also hysterical fears of Russia next attacking Poland, the Baltics, and the rest of Europe.

Western media are portraying Biden’s visit to Europe as a replay of the supposed American defense of Europe from Nazism and Communism.

This is an incredible distortion by the Western media. The whole background of the conflict in Ukraine fomented by the U.S. and NATO over the past three decades has been scrubbed into a memory hole. So too scrubbed is the U.S. and NATO blitzkrieg on Yugoslavia whose 23rd anniversary occurred this week. The aggressive expansionism of NATO and hostility towards Russia have culminated in the present war in Ukraine. Yet Western media present this as due to alleged one-sided Russian aggression and maniacal tyranny in Moscow.

During his half-century career as a politician, Joe Biden fervently backed the U.S. and NATO war in Yugoslavia, as well as countless other criminal imperialist wars and regime-change operations. He is personally responsible for fomenting the coup regime in Kiev from 2014 onwards. The U.S. and NATO weaponization of Ukraine, including the functioning of Pentagon-sponsored biowarfare laboratories, is associated with Biden’s direct involvement in supporting the anti-Russian Kiev regime and its Nazi paramilitaries.

The irony of Biden warning about Russia using WMDs in Ukraine is sickening beyond words. The jihadist terrorists whom the US backed in Syria were responsible for atrocities with chemical weapons as provocations for NATO bombing of Syria. Biden’s son, Hunter, is implicated in funding bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine through his Pentagon-connected capital investment firm, Seneca.

And yet despite this flagrant imperial corruption and criminality, Biden was welcomed this week by European leaders who are demonstrating beyond doubt that they are nothing but an embarrassing collection of vassals.

The upshot is that Biden is selling massively more American weapons to Europe than ever before. He is sending more U.S. troops to European bases. The EU has imposed way more sanctions on Russia than the United States has, thus inflicting much more damage on European economies than the American one. Biden is to sign new deals with Europe on supplying American gas exports that are more expensive than Russian gas. The killing off of European-Russian energy trade is the crowning achievement for American imperialist interests.

Across the European Union, draconian media censorship has blacked out entirely the Russian news outlets Sputnik and RT. European citizens are being denied any alternative information or analysis. What the EU is doing is far more repressive than what the U.S. is even doing in terms of censoring media. European so-called democracy is coming out of the closet as proto-fascism.

It is a pathetic spectacle. European governments are prostrated before the American empire.

It is blatant what President Biden is asserting. A new Cold War that is reshaping Europe under American hegemony, selling weapons and expensive gas to Europe while excluding Russia from developing any normal relations with its continental neighbors. The war in Ukraine has been a long time coming because of U.S. policies facilitated by politicians like Joe Biden and Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State who led the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, who died this week.

It is incredible that not one of the incumbent European Union leaders has voiced criticism or dissent from the U.S.-contrived new Cold War. Of course not. They are bought and paid for like the whores they are, while their populations suffer from poverty, militarism, and the shadow of nuclear war.

The European leaders are like quislings licking the boot of their master. Their abject subjugation is emboldening American imperial warmongering against Russia. They seem willing to let their own people suffer the consequences of U.S.-led conflict, even to the point of facilitating a Third World War in Europe.

There is a misconception that fascism in Europe was somehow a unique development in Nazi Germany. The Third Reich had many European collaborators in Poland, the Baltics, Italy, France, Spain, and other covert sources like the British establishment during the 1930s.

U.S. and Western media present Biden and the European so-called leaders as a model of democracy and righteousness. The truth is we are seeing the return to fascism in Europe under the leadership of U.S. hegemony. When Biden took up office in the White House in January 2021, he declared, “America is back”. For anyone paying attention to history and U.S. power ambitions that kind of jingoistic bragging was seen as ominous. It’s becoming more ominous from every step the U.S. takes to wind up reckless tensions with Russia and indeed China.

America is back all right, and the European vassals are on their backs, and also their fronts… because, you know, we have to be gender pluralist in our new touchy-feely fascist era.

What’s even more shameful is the European political class is acting as a doormat for American imperialism against the urgent interests of European citizens. The ultimate interest is one of having peace. That contradiction is a harbinger of massive social upheaval across Europe in revolt against their treacherous leaders.