If you can't trust liars about a war on a virus, how can you trust them about a war with Russia?
What do the liars understand and what are they telling you to understand?
The United States is the world’s only superpower… Moreover, America stands at the head of a system of alliances which includes the world’s other leading democratic powers. At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible… potentially powerful states dissatisfied with the current situation… have been deterred from doing so by the capability and global presence of American military power. But, as that power declines, relatively and absolutely, the happy conditions that follow from it will be inevitably undermined.
Preserving the desirable strategic situation in which the United States now finds itself requires a globally preeminent military capability both today and in the future. But years of cuts in defense spending have eroded the American military’s combat readiness, and put in jeopardy the Pentagon’s plans for maintaining military superiority in the years ahead…Without a well-conceived defense policy and an appropriate increase in defense spending, the United States has been letting its ability to take full advantage of the remarkable strategic opportunity at hand slip away.
Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century
A Report of The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), September 2000
Hegemony is expensive even for vassals
While US declared military expenditure exceeds the next 11 nations, 8 of those nations are either allies or vassal states of the US, bound in military, economic and intelligence operations. Combine those 8 vassal budgets with their master’s against Russia and China and you pit $1.1tn against $320bn per year while nuclear capable India stands on the sidelines.
Since the full scale adoption of NeoCon political policy in 2000, as detailed in Rebuilding America’s Defenses, US military spending has climbed along with the number of overt and covert invasive wars it has undertaken. Spending has climbed in Russia and China since that time. US warfare techniques now routinely include outsourcing to Private Military Companies (PMCs), increasing classification of operations to enable SpecOps and the deniability that comes with it, and its global, extra-judicial drone assassination program.
The US has a massive amount of foreign military bases globally and the ability to project power straight off its many aircraft carriers. Russia has a handful of bases in nations on its borders. China has one in Djibouti.
Under George W. Bush, America’s policy on the use of nuclear weapons and their development essentially switched into greater open aggression and reignited the global arms race. “First Use” has been the policy of the US since Hiroshima that assumes that nuclear war is winnable and that what results from it is worth winning. It may be argued that it is the policy stance itself that is the key to any power that might stem from having the weapons.
In order to win a nuclear war from one’s First Use policy, how many nuclear weapons of what size would have to be launched and at what, for an effective and decisive first strike that prevented and/or deterred a return of fire (see MAD etc.)?
Despite the maintenance of a US global hegemony, there are competitors to its power that PNAC acknowledged in its 2000 strategy publication and those competitors are integrated into the global power structure of the US hegemony to the point that it is common knowledge that essential and also undesirable financial and political dependencies now exist and are openly visible.
It should not be a surprise that those competitors a) object to ABM networks that threaten their borders; b) maintain parity or superiority as best they can with the US hegemony’s open pursuit of increasing arsenals. Hypersonic transpolar missiles are simply an efficient counter by less networked Russia and China to the geographic deployment of weapons platforms by the US, which also require the diplomatic energy needed to co-opt and maintain a vassal network.
Covid exposes the stranglehold of mainstream information that delivers lies to citizens
The world is at a point where the outright lies of the Covid narrative are laid bare on the political, financial, legal, economic and internal security fronts. The integration of the Global Public Private Partnership (G3P) players and their Policy Propagandists in the media are obvious. Despite this, the prevailing power structure of the West has not entered retreat but simply shifted tactics.
The UK Government has engaged in a totally false narrative and the corporatocratic pursuit of neofeudalism at an accelerated rate. Money has been given directly to the upper layers of the G3P and The Public has been made poorer.
Any expenditure on Non Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) is now proven to be a total waste in at least four ways:
Increasing research shows no effect of NPIs or Shelter In Place Orders (SIPOs).
Gene therapies are ineffective against a disease of so little consequence that the UK government removed Covid-19 from its Hight Consequence Infectious Disease list in March 2020, just two months after SARS-CoV-2 was admitted to be on the loose.
Comparison of outcomes between nations across the globe run totally counter to the claim that any forced policy options had meaningful positive effect.
The opportunity cost of the public money wasted is huge. Never mind extra hospitals. It could literally have been used to support a plethora of entrepreneurial development, new socioeconomic entities and the positive re-engineering of communities to increase resilience, harmony and sustainability. On top of that is all the lost private money that lockdown deprived citizens of. That represents a permanent, compounding pay cut of huge proportions that is simply unrecoverable.
Combine these four points with the fact that pre-existing scientific knowledge about respiratory disease transmission (we don’t understand or control it) has simply been proven true by Covid-19 and the disease’s extremely low IFR. There is zero rationale for two years of lockstep policies imprinted on citizen’s minds by centralized lies.
If they lied about that and got caught, what else are they lying about right now?
Consider the following journalistic analyses of the Ukraine situation since 2015, in relation to:
The PNAC strategy of ongoing US global dominance as the world’s sole superpower.
The difference in military expenditure by Russia and China compared to the US hegemony.
The notion of any sovereign state wishing to maintain its sovereignty through multiple means.
Thus, it is a safe bet that when the current ceasefire breaks down and the killing resumes, all the American people will hear is that it was Putin’s fault, that he conspired to destroy the peace as part of his grand scheme of “aggression.” And, the Nuland-Yatsenyuk sabotage of Minsk-2 will be the next part of this troubling story to disappear into the memory hole.
I think the difference between myself and many of my readers is that while we both recognize “western” government as plunder by the capitalist elite exploiting the working class and a fake democracy controlled by a media serving the elite, you and others seem to think that governments are a lot better just because they are anti-Western. Whereas I believe that many anti-Western governments – Lukashenko, Assad and yes Putin – are also plunder by the capitalist elite exploiting the working class and a fake democracy controlled by a media serving the elite. Just organized a bit differently. And with a still worse approach to civil liberties.
My expectation is that Lukashenko will hang on, reorienting the economy back towards Russia. Putin’s long-term policy goal has always been the reintegration into Russia of majority Russophone areas of the old U.S.S.R. That has been his policy in Ukraine and Georgia. Belarus is a major prize. He will seek to bind Belarus in tighter, probably through increased energy subsidy (Putin’s economic arsenal is very limited). Getting rid of Lukashenko is going to move up Putin’s to do list; I give it three years. The current demonstrations in Minsk have no major economic or social effect, and will pass.
The current U.S. $1.7 trillion plan for a whole range of new nuclear weapons therefore seems to be a response to the reality that the United States cannot expect to defeat Russia and China in conventional wars on their own borders.
But the paradox of nuclear weapons is that the most powerful weapons ever created have no practical value as actual weapons of war, since there can be no winner in a war that kills everybody. Any use of nuclear weapons would quickly trigger a massive use of them by one side or the other, and the war would soon be over for all of us. The only winners would be a few species of radiation-resistant insects and other very small creatures.
Neither Obama, Trump nor Biden has dared to present their reasons for risking World War III over Ukraine or Taiwan to the American public, because there is no good reason. Risking a nuclear holocaust to appease the military-industrial complex is as insane as destroying the climate and the natural world to appease the fossil fuel industry.
So we had better hope that CIA Director Burns not only came back from Moscow with a clear picture of Russia’s “red lines,” but that President Biden and his colleagues understand what Burns told them and what is at stake in Ukraine. They must step back from the brink of a U.S.-Russia war, and then from the larger Cold War with China and Russia that they have so blindly and foolishly stumbled into.
Benjamin Norton in Consortium News, 2022, China & Russia Declare New Era of Multipolarity:
Emphasizing the importance of “upholding sovereignty” and “defending sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Beijing added that the Eurasian powers must “effectively counter external interference” — an obvious reference to U.S. meddling and regime-change operations.
The message of the statements published by Beijing and Moscow could not have been clearer: the era of U.S. unipolar hegemony is dead, and the world is now in a “new era” with an international order based on multipolarity and principles of non-interference.
In making these declarations, the Eurasian powers were drawing an ideological line in the sand. The world already knew what political and economic model Washington, Brussels, and NATO are offering, but now it can clearly see what China and Russia are posing as an alternative.
How does the above compare to statements issued by the UK Government and its leader, who has a provable track record in flat out lying?
PM statement on Ukraine: 25 January 2022:
Ukrainians have every moral and legal right to defend their country and I believe their resistance would be dogged and tenacious, and the bloodshed comparable to the first war in Chechnya, or Bosnia, Mr Speaker, or any other conflict that Europe has endured since 1945.
For months, Britain has worked in lockstep with the United States and our allies across Europe to avoid such a disaster.
…I stressed that NATO had no thought of encircling or otherwise threatening his country and that Russia enjoyed as much right as any other state to live in peace and security. But as I said to him, Ukraine of course enjoys an equal and symmetrical right to that of Russia. And I said any attack on his neighbor would be followed by tougher sanctions against Russia, further steps to help Ukraine defend herself, and by an increased NATO presence to protect our allies on NATOs eastern flank.
We agreed that we would respond in unison to any Russian attack on Ukraine, in unison, by imposing coordinated and severe sanctions, heavier than anything we have done before against Russia.
…we will continue to disclose any Russian use of cyber-attacks, false flag operations or disinformation.
Nor can we accept the doctrine - implicit in Russian proposals - that all states are sovereign, but some are more sovereign than others.
The only reason why both our countries are permanent members of the UN Security Council is because of the heroism of Soviet soldiers in the struggle against fascism, side-by-side with ourselves.
NATO already partially encircles Russia and its eastward expansion since 1999 has taken it to the landlocked border of Russia, despite the disputed agreement that it would expand “not one inch”. The US has openly pursued ABM expansion into Central Europe since 2006 and efforts have continued in 2014 and 2016 with Romania and Poland. These ABMs are touted to defend against North Korea and Iran, but questions would have to be asked about those nations’ intent to launch a nuclear attack on anyone that would trigger MAD conditions and see them lose on size of arsenal alone. Their pursuit of nuclear deterrence is obviously a means by which a ruling elite remain in power by putting off an external invasion. ABMs aren’t aimed at specific countries so they are as much as counter of Russian power as of any other threat.
The UK is putting some weapons and personnel into Ukraine and threatens sanctions as the major retaliation to a Russian invasion of Ukraine that Johnson says would devastate the country.
So what is the likely effect of the toughest sanctions the UK has ever placed on Russia? Well, let’s see what previous sanctions have achieved.
Robert L. Williams III, ACSS, 2021, An Analysis of the Effects US Sanctions Have Had on Russia:
Daniel Drezner takes the view that the sanctions are simply ineffective. “The reliance on economic sanctions would be natural if they were especially effective at getting other countries to do what Washington wants, but they’re not,” he wrote in the September-October 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. “The most generous academic estimate of sanctions efficacy – a 2014 study relying on data set maintained by the University of North Carolina – found that, at best, sanctions lead to concessions between one-third and one-half of the time.”
A 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office concluded that not even the federal government was necessarily aware when sanctions work. The report noted that officials at the Treasury, State, and Commerce departments “do not conduct agency assessments of the effectiveness of sanctions in achieving broader US policy goals.”
Surely, the US government can publish assessments to show the effectiveness of its sanctions objectives. What works with one sanctioned country invariably does not work with another.
Sanctioned countries such as Russia have extensive resources and can withstand acts intended as punitive by the US and other nations. The sanctions imposed on Russia after annexing Crimea might have deterred Moscow from more aggressive actions on its periphery, but the bar was set low to gauge their effectiveness.
Will sanctions remove Russian money from London? Will it stop the flow of Russian money through London? London is a major global money laundering centre because it is allowed to be by government.
The supposed “declassified military intelligence” that Russia is going to attack doesn’t come across too well in writing (see below). Maybe it is more impressive when shared at a press conference? Also, Russia made this claim first about the Ukraine and its backers i.e. video false flags were being made to lure in Russia.
It is essential to watch this video from the start for as long as you can. What you are witnessing is not the “declassification” of intelligence. It is the US State Department caught in a loop of literal propagandistic insanity that Matt Lee and then others challenge over and over.
The madman on camera states (paraphrasing):
We think Russia might release a fake attack video as a false flag pretext to invade Ukraine.
We don’t know if they have or will do this, but it’s possible.
We aren’t going to tell you what we possess (intel material) that backs this statement, we will leave it to journalists’ “imagination”.
That the US State is willing to say this constitutes “evidence”. As Matt Lee put it, “the proof is I just said it.”.
If this is the declassified intelligence that the UK is claiming is its own, then there’s no basis of fact in the claim of the Prime Minister. If however, he is referring to something else, it could be this statement by Foreign Secretary Liz Truss:
We have information that indicates the Russian Government is looking to install a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv as it considers whether to invade and occupy Ukraine. The former Ukrainian MP Yevhen Murayev is being considered as a potential candidate.
We have information that the Russian intelligence services maintain links with numerous former Ukrainian politicians… Some of these have contact with Russian intelligence officers currently involved in the planning for an attack on Ukraine.
That statement does not provide any evidence. It is a pure assertion that states that Russian intelligence services have connections and networks that include former Ukrainian politicians. That should not come as a revelation. It’s likely a safe bet that SIS maintains links with numerous former and current Ukrainian politicians. The US State Department was directly involved in the installation of the Ukrainian government and selected Yatsenyuk as the Prime Minister. Ron Paul literally called it a “US-backed coup” of a country that comprised Russia’s only deep warm water naval base, which Russia would never give up.
Where is the declassified intelligence material from either the US or UK?
“we will continue to disclose any Russian use of cyber-attacks, false flag operations or disinformation.”
These are techniques that the US hegemony constantly employs globally, so it should be expert in detecting their use by others. So, we should just trust that Johnson, Truss and the US State Department know what they’re talking about and are definitely telling the truth for reasons that are in citizens’ interests.
Stuxnet was a US Israeli cyber-attack against the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, which was an act of war that may have worsened Iranian relations and accelerated it along whatever path it might be on (reports from the IAEA stated it found no evidence of a weapons program just before Stuxnet).
False flags are baked into US history as a way of “doing Empire”. It presented a massive false flag to the entire UN in claiming, falsely, that Iraq had WMD. This was later openly decried by the UN as an event that had undermined the legitimacy of the UN itself. The CIA invented disinformation to enable the illegal invasion, as per its job description. The US was also caught up in lies when two anthrax-containing packages were sent to government personnel. The anthrax was US weapons grade, which revealed that the US was in possession of an anthrax bioweapon that it had made.
Nor can we accept the doctrine - implicit in Russian proposals - that all states are sovereign, but some are more sovereign than others.
Boris Johnson
This doctrine underpins the entire basis of the US hegemony, of which the UK and Europe are a part. William Binney and Ed Snowden showed the extent of the intelligence hegemony.
Liz Truss, UK-Russia press conference, 10 February 2022: Foreign Secretary's opening remarks
Russia’s actions in attempting to destabilise Ukrainian democracy and the ability of Ukrainians to determine their own future, including through hybrid warfare and amassing over 100,000 troops on the border in a threatening manner, have actually had the effect of strengthening NATO’s resolve and turning the Ukrainian people further away from Russia. There are also serious implications for energy supplies at a time of rising gas prices.
We believe fundamentally in the self-determination of the Ukrainian people. If there were to be a Russian incursion into Ukraine, the Ukrainians will fight. This would be a prolonged and drawn-out conflict. The UK and our allies would put in place severe sanctions targeting individuals and institutions. The United States has been clear that Nord Stream 2 would not go ahead.
The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline built from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea will supply more Russian gas to Europe. For the US to state that the project will not go ahead suggests that it can somehow veto the actions of at least Germany and possibly Europe at large. If that is the case then Germany is not a sovereign state at the very least. Compare the above with Pepe Escobar’s recent take following President Emmanuel Macron’s meeting with Putin.
Pepe Escobar, journalist and geopolitical analyst:
After [Macron’s] strenuous six hours of discussions Putin, predictably, monopolized the eminently quotable department, starting with one that will be reverberating all across the Global South for a long time: “Citizens of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia have seen how peaceful is NATO.”
There’s more. The already iconic Do you want a war between Russia and NATO? – followed by the ominous “there will be no winners”. Or take this one, on Maidan: “Since February 2014, Russia has considered a coup d’état to be the source of power in Ukraine. This is a bad sandbox, we don’t like this kind of game.”
On the Minsk agreements, the message was blunt: “The President of Ukraine has said that he does not like any of the clauses of the Minsk agreements. Like it, or not – be patient, my beauty. They must be fulfilled.”
The Kremlin has been stressing for months that Russia has no interest whatsoever in invading de facto black hole Ukraine. And Russian troops will return to their bases after exercises are over. None of this has anything to do with “concessions” by Putin.
And then came the bombshell: French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said that the launch of Nord Stream 2 “is one of the main components of de-escalating tensions on the Russian-Ukrainian border.” Gallic flair formulated out loud what no German had the balls to say.
Way back in August 2020, I was already pointing to which way we were heading in the master chessboard… “the goal of Russian and Chinese policy is to recruit Germany into a triple alliance locking together the Eurasian land mass a la Mackinder into the greatest geopolitical alliance in history, switching world power in favor of these three great powers against Anglo-Saxon sea power.”
Macron doesn’t seem to agree with either the UK or the US when it comes to Nord Stream 2.
Boris Johnson doesn’t seem to be able to properly organize an after work drinks gathering. Nor can he check whether data and modelling that he used to shut down the UK was reliable. Nor did he have the power or the ability to stop or reverse a shut down of the UK that was triggered by a press leak. He also defers to the US when it comes to a gas pipeline that the UK would buy gas from, that enters Europe via another sovereign nation. Johnson might have the power to instigate sanctions on Russia, but those sanctions have no power and he probably wouldn’t be able to detect any effect of such sanctions anyway.
But Johnson does have the power to tell you and most of the UK population what to think, and the majority believe him. Why?
Which liar amongst all these liars is telling the or any truth?
You haven’t got long to work it out because it’s only 100 seconds to midnight.