The Russian minority in the Baltics live under ‘apartheid’ states

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

It has been nearly three decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Despite Russia’s reemergence on the world stage as a respected power after market-oriented ‘reforms’ destroyed its economy for the duration of the nineties, the breakup of the USSR is an event regarded by an increasing amount of Russians as a catastrophic tragedy rather than a triumph of ‘freedom and democracy.’ In recent years, there have been numerous polls showing that more than half of Russians not only regret the collapse of the Soviet Union but would even prefer for its return. However, the nostalgia only comes as a surprise to those who have forgotten that not long before the failed August Coup that led to its demise, the first and only referendum in its history was held in March of 1991 which polled citizens if they wished to preserve the Soviet system.

The results were more than three quarters of the population in the entire socialist federation (including Russia) voting a resounding yes with a turnout of 80% in the participating republics. In Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan the outcome was more than 90% voting for renewal. Even the country with the lowest amount of support, the Ukraine, was still 70% in favor. While the measure was officially banned in six republics— Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and the three Baltic states— despite being unrecognized by their local governments the vote was still organized and the outcomes were all over 90%. Ironically, the union dissolved five months later under the pretext of establishing ‘democracy’ in Eastern Europe just as it ignored the very wishes of Soviet citizens. After more than 25 years of suffering at the hands of economic and trade liberalization, gutting of state subsidies and mass privatization of the former state-run industry, is it any wonder that Russians are yearning for a return to socialism?

The consequences of the disintegration are still felt in the relations with the United States today. It planted the seeds for the carefully arranged revival of the Cold War that was hiding in plain sight until it surfaced with ‘color revolutions’, proxy wars and dubious spy poisonings. One source of the strained relations between the West and Russia has been the Baltic states, which burgeoned following their integration into the European Union and enrollment in NATO membership in 2004 during its enlargement. NATO continues its provocations with massive war games bordering Kaliningrad, while Moscow is painted as the aggressor even though the U.S. defense spending increase this year alone surpasses Russia’s entire military budget.

The antagonism between Latvia, Estonia and (to a lesser degree) Lithuania with Moscow stems partly from from the cessation of the USSR itself. The conclusion of the Cold War resulted in more than 25 million Russians instantly discovering themselves living abroad in foreign countries. For seventy years, fifteen nations had been fully integrated while Russians migrated and lived within the other republics. The Soviet collapse immediately reignited national conflicts, from the Caucasus to the Baltics. While the majority of the ethnic Russian diaspora live in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, nearly 1 million reside in the post-Soviet Baltics and since 1991 they have been subjected to a campaign of forced assimilation, discrimination and exclusion.

The Baltic republics made nationalism their official state policy while moving away from Russia’s sphere of influence into a closer relationship with the West. Boris Yeltsin’s subservience to Washington eclipsed any concern for the fate of captive Russians as the Soviet Bloc was herded into the EU, but his administration did quarrel with the new Baltic authorities and accused them of creating an anti-Russian ‘apartheid.’ As geopolitical tensions have increased under his successor, Vladimir V. Putin, who has embarrassed Western imperialism in the international arena, so has Moscow’s disapproval of the treatment of its minority held hostage in the Baltic Rim. Is a comparison to South Africa warranted? Even if the similarities are only partial, the three states show evidence of deep ethnocracy.

While less than 10% of Lithuania is ethnically Russian, in Latvia and Estonia the number is much higher at a quarter of their entire populations. The three governments have passed laws promoting their official languages and restored citizenship requirements that existed up until 1940, demanding that their Russian minorities apply or risk losing basic rights and guarantees. Russia has interpreted these measures as a form of slow-motion ethnic cleansing intended to coerce Russians to immigrate elsewhere. When the three states first became independent, in an act of systematic discrimination they distributed non-citizen ‘alien’ passports to ethnic Russians and excluded them from obtaining citizenship automatically, even if they had lived and worked in a Baltic state for their entire life. In fact, citizenship was not immediately granted to anyone whose ancestry arrived after 1940, a policy that specifically targeted ethnic Russians who without naturalization are left stateless.

For example, when Estonia first declared its independence more than 30% of its population (or every third person) did not have citizenship of the country of residence. This inscribed ethnic division into their society and although many Russians have become naturalized over the last two decades, there are still more than 80,000 in Estonia without determined status who are mostly former Soviet citizens and their descendants. In Latvia, segregation runs even deeper where more than 250,000 Russians (15% of the population) remain stateless. Even when they do become citizens, the parliaments have attempted to pass laws banning non-EU immigrants (predominantly Russians) from possessing voting rights on several occasions. Polls also show the prejudice within their societies, with many Balts indicating they would prefer their Russian-speaking neighbors to repatriate. Meanwhile, the Russian population has expressed concern about the reemergence of neo-Nazism. The authorities have nurtured holocaust denial, such as the Latvian government objecting to an UNESCO Holocaust exhibition of the Salaspils concentration camp on the basis it would ‘tarnish the country’s image.’ No kidding.

One criteria for the naturalization exams is based on language where in order to become citizens Russians must become fluent in Latvian and Estonian, even though they are such a large minority that in larger cities they often constitute 50% of the population and Russian may be the most spoken language. Simultaneously, any attempt to make Russian a second official language have been struck down. It is a deliberate effort to assimilate the Russian-speaking minority and erase remnants of Soviet culture. In order to obtain basic entitlements, Russians have to pass the tough naturalization tests which many fail several times (especially the elderly), facing fines and risking losing their employment in the process. The tests are notoriously difficult as Latvian and Estonian languages bear little resemblance to Slavic Russian and are much closer to Finnish. Apart from ethnicity, 40% of Latvia as a whole identifies as Russian-speaking and have been accustomed to schooling in their native tongue where they already have low career prospects and income rates. Rather than inclusion, they have been mandated to adopt the Baltic languages. Beginning in 2019, the Russian language education options in Latvia will be discontinued altogether in higher education at colleges and universities as well as many secondary schools, which has sparked demonstrations in protest.

It should be made clear that what ethnic Russians experience in the Baltics has its own particularities that make it significantly different from the institutionalized racism and violently enforced segregation that existed in South Africa (or what many believe is applicable to the Palestinians under Israeli occupation). The word apartheid itself originates from the Afrikaans word for ‘separateness’ (or apart-hood), but an exact comparison is not the real issue. There are many overlapping characteristics that make an analogy arguable. For instance, the use of an ID system denoting ethnicity and alien status with the inability of Russians to participate in the democratic process or politics. Their reduced standing contributes to a society where ethnic groups often do not intermingle and are concentrated in particular areas with Russians mostly residing in urban cities. Yet even Israel recognized Arabic as a second official language (until 2018), while none of three Baltic states do so for Russian. When referendums have been held on whether to adopt Russian as a second language, the non-citizen communities are excluded from voting, ensuring its inability to pass.

The exams also coerce Russians to accept a nationalist and historically revisionist account of the last century where the Soviet Union is said to have “occupied” the Baltics. A history lesson is needed to understand how this is untrue and based on pure Nazi mythology. During the Romanov dynasty, the Baltic states had been part of the Russian Empire but became independent for the first time in centuries following the February Revolution in 1917. Along with Belarus and Finland, the Bolsheviks were unable to regain the three republics during the Russian Civil War. During the 1930s, the three nations were officially sovereign states but under their own brutal nationalist regimes. The Soviet liberation of the Baltics can hardly be seen as a ‘forceful incorporation’ considering what they replaced were not democracies themselves and they were absorbed in order to block Hitlerite expansionism.

Since the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe, the Baltic states have waged a campaign of diminishing and obscuring the Holocaust into a ‘double genocide’ of equal proportions , conflating the Nazis and the Soviets as twin evils. Western ‘democracies’ have helped obfuscate the truth about the widely misunderstood Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the treaty of non-belligerence between Germany and the USSR. The 1939 non-aggression pact has been painted as a ‘secret alliance’ between the Nazis and the Soviets, disregarding that France and Great Britain had done the same with the Germans the previous year with the Munich Agreement. Only the Soviets are said to have ‘conspired’ with Hitler, just as when the West fought the Germans it was for ‘liberal values’ but when the USSR did so it was for competing ‘dominion’ over Europe. In order to mask their own fascist sympathies, the West has falsified the historical reasons for the accord. In reality, there were measures incorporating the Baltic states into the USSR as part of a mutual defense and assistance against German imperialism and their ‘master plan’ for the East.

The truth is that the ruling class in the West feared the spread of communism much more than fascism, and actually viewed the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe as an opportunity to crush the Soviet Union. Leading up to WWII, not only was it Western capital investment which financed the rapid buildup of Germany’s armed forces, but the U.S., Britain and France did everything within their power to encourage Hitler’s aggression toward the USSR. More than once they collectively refused to sign any mutual security alliance with Moscow while appeasing Hitler’s expansionism in Czechoslovakia, with the British in particular guilty of sabotaging negotiations to isolate the Soviets and pit them into a war against Germany.

Stalin was well aware the Nazis planned to expand the Lebensraum further East, but the Soviets were in the midst of a rapid industrialization process that accomplished in a single decade what took the British more than a century. They needed time to guarantee they could defeat an offensive by the Wehrmacht, the most powerful and developed military force in the world at the time. It provided an additional year and ten months of further buildup of Soviet armaments — if not for this move, it is possible the Germans would never have been stopped twenty kilometers short of Moscow and turned the outcome of the war in their favor. The real reason the pact infuriated the West was because it obligated them into having to fight the Germans, something the imperial powers had hoped to avoid altogether.

More disturbingly, the Baltic governments have drawn from the traditions of the far right by whitewashing the local nationalists that sided with Germany during their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 which broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The Nazi collaborators have been restored and normalized as ‘freedom fighters’ who fought solely for Baltic independence. The Estonian parliament has even adopted resolutions honoring the Estonian Legion and 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) without any such equivalent measure for the more than 30,000 Estonians who courageously fought in the Red Army. To most Russians, it is an absolute insult to the 27 million Soviets who died defeating the Nazis, including the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians who did so as well. Today, if they wish to become citizens they must swear an oath of allegiance to this rewriting of history which has been made a precondition for obtaining citizenship. The three states also do not recognize the May 9th Victory Day as a holiday, forcing the Russian minority to celebrate it informally.

The rehabilitation of the local nationalists who fought alongside the Germans has been done under the false premise that the collaboration was a purely strategic alliance. The Soviets are portrayed as equal to or worse than Nazi Germany, a false equivalency between fascism and communism that is a ubiquitous trait among ultra-rightists today. Tens of thousands of Latvians and Estonians volunteered and were conscripted into legions of the SS which participated in the Holocaust, as did Lithuanians in the Nazi-created Territorial Defense Force and their Security Police. They did not simply coordinate on the battlefield with the Germans, but directly participated in the methodical slaughter of Jews, Roma and others because they shared their racism. In Lithuania, for example, quislings welcomed the Wehrmacht as liberators and for the next three years under Nazi occupation helped murder 200,000 Jews, nearly 95% of the country’s Jewish population, a total which exceeded every other European country in terms of percentage of extermination. It is certain that the only thing that prevented Lithuania’s Jews from extinction was the heroism and sacrifice of the Red Army.

During the Cold War, the US and NATO sought to whitewash certain Nazi war criminals when it suited its strategic interests against the Soviets. This went beyond the Germans themselves, whether it was recruiting their spies for espionage, atomic scientists in Operation Paperclip, or making Hans Speidel the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Central Europe. The Nuremberg Trials had ruled the entire Waffen SS as an organization to be guilty of war crimes during the holocaust, but the US chose to make a distinction between the 15th and 19th SS divisions in Latvia (Latvian Legion) and 20th division in Estonia from the German divisions of the SS. In 1950, the US Displaced Persons Commission determined:

“The Baltic Waffen SS Units are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities, and qualifications for membership from the German SS, and therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the Government of the United States under Section 13 of the Displaced Persons Act, as amended.”

While the displaced persons laws let Jewish refugees into the United States, it also provided cover for the reserved spaces for thousands of Nazi collaborators in an open-door policy providing them safe harbor. Following the end of WWII, many of the former members of the Baltic SS units became anti-Soviet partisans known as the Forest Brothers who carried on a guerilla campaign against the Soviets with the assistance of the CIA and MI6 until it was defeated in mid-50s. Unfortunately, Nikita Khruschev then made one of a series of colossal mistakes by permitting the exiled Baltic nationals to return as part of the de-Stalinisation thaw.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he idea that regiments of the Schutzstaffel were fighting purely for Estonian and Latvian independence is a horrifying fabrication in defiance of the overwhelming evidence documented by holocaust historians. The West has exploited this sanitizing of history that reappeared following the reinstatement of free enterprise in eastern Europe which has proliferated the far right in the EU as a whole. Why? It serves their cynical immediate interests in undermining Moscow. The same manipulations are occurring in the Cold War’s sequel. Last year, NATO even produced a short film and a-historical reenactment entitled Forest Brothers: Fight for the Baltics, glorifying the anti-Soviet partisans as part of its propaganda effort against Russia.

Any crimes that were committed by the Soviet NKVD during the war are dwarfed by the tens of thousands of Jews and Roma which were exterminated on an industrial level by the Nazis and their co-conspirators using the race theory — there is no comparison. Not to mention that the reintroduction of the free market to Eastern Europe killed more people than any period in Soviet history, reducing life expectancy by a decade and undoing seventy years worth of progress. We only ever hear of the faults of socialism and the inflated numbers of losses of life attributed to its failure, never the daily crimes of capitalism or the tens of millions lost in the wars it produces. The Soviet brand of socialism was far from perfect, but nevertheless a model for what humanity can achieve in the face of tremendous adversity without being shackled by the contradictions of capitalism — an industrial society with relative equality in education, wealth, employment and basic necessities. Now that Western capitalism is once again collapsing, it is making friends with nationalists to revise its ugly history and the Russian minority in the Baltics are suffering the consequence. It will continue to apportion blame on the up-and-coming power in Moscow, no longer the quasi-colony of the Yeltsin era, for its soon-to-be expiration. Let us hope it does not start another World War in the midst of it — for all our sake.

Institute of European Studies

Published on 27 Apr 2014

Documentary film director Alexander Gaponenko «Aliens» tells about the fate of nearly three hundred thousand Russian Latvia having the status of non-citizens. Nine people talks about how a quarter century they live in the heart of Europe, not having basic civil rights. Recommended for viewing to all those who think the question is why beginning of the "Russian Spring". Institute of European Studies, Riga, 2014. 26 minutes.

Aliens (2014, d. Alexander Gaponenko)

About the Author

MAX PARRY, Contributing Editor • Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing is committed to an anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspective in the tradition of Michael Parenti. He is originally from San Diego, CA and resides in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in the Greanville Post, InSerbia Today and The Global Politics. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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XI JINPING SUPPORTS COLLECTIVIZING RURAL LAND. FARMERS ARE DEMANDING THAT IT HAPPEN.

XI JINPING SUPPORTS COLLECTIVIZING RURAL LAND. FARMERS ARE DEMANDING THAT IT HAPPEN. CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND 180908

Pictured above: schematic to show how much land each rural China citizen has to grow food, crops, make a living and provide for themselves: only 45 meters by 45 meters. You try it.

On December 12^th, 2014, just after being elected China’s new president, Xi Jinping made a bold declaration that almost nobody outside China heard (https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2014_12_02_302253.shtml). It was at a small meeting, called the Seventh CPC Central Committee Meeting on Deepening Reform. This is where the top 300 leaders get together to strategize and plan for the future. During his presentation, Xi put forward the “three bottom lines” of,

Adhering to not changing collective ownership of land.
Adhering to the red line of 1. 8 billion mu of (120 million hectares = three billion acres) of collectively owned farmland to not be privatized
Protecting farmers’ interests.

Lots of people outside China don’t know that there are still thousands of villages that rejected the 1980s’ dismantling of the collective ownership of farms. One-hundred-twenty million hectares is only one-percent of the national total farmland, but they are powerful symbols of what life was like for the 750 million farmers during the Mao Era. As described by real Chinese who actually lived in rural China in the 1950s-1970s, people like Mobo Gao (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/03/30/from-poor-peasant-to-phd-professor-mobo-gaos-revolutionary-upbringing-during-chinas-mao-era/) and Dongping Han (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/11/09/son-of-the-revolution-dongping-han-on-growing-up-during-chinas-great-leap-forward-and-cultural-revolution-china-rising-radio-sinoland-161110/) show that collective farming was a very popular, productive economic system and way of life. I interviewed both of them on my China Rising Radio Sinoland show and read their books. They talked about how devasting the transition was in the early 1980s, from collectivized farming to essentially “private” contract farms, where the state kept and still keeps ownership of all real estate in China, but signed contracts with the farmers to individually utilize plots of land as they each saw fit.

What happened was chaos for China’s rural people. Tens of thousands of local elementary, middle and high schools were shut down for a lack of funds. These institutions of learning were opened during the Cultural Revolution, the first time in 5,000 years that peasants had access to K-12 education and chance to go to university. Hundreds of millions of farm folk fled their ancestral lands in search of work, since they could no longer feed and clothe themselves without the collectivized web of support provided during the Mao Era. This is the famous floating (migrant) population that is still in existence today.

All over China, crime became epidemic, including murders, robberies, burglaries, petty theft, domestic and public violence – the usual tableau of social degeneration found in capitalist, dog-eat-dog economies. Suddenly, China’s cities were no longer safe. They were full of mean streets and menace, just like in the West. To quote Morris Berman (http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/tag/morris-berman/), China, like the United States, had turned into a nation of hustlers. This is what my family moved into, when we first arrived in China in 1990.

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]y biggest regret in writing Book #1 of The China Trilogy (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/05/19/the-china-trilogy/), 44 Days (https://ganxy.com/i/88276/), was misdiagnosing the reason why Chinese society was so hardened, cynical and lawless back in the 1990s, when we lived here for seven years. Still being brainwashed by Big Lie Western Propaganda, I blamed it on being a hangover from the Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1976. At that time, all I knew was what Eurangloland’s media spit out by the boatload: capitalist reforms during the 1980s saved China’s rural folk and made them all rich, fat and happy. Ditto the urbanites. It was all these peachy-peachy, hunky-dory market economy miracles that were making China and its people more and more Western by the day. Why, it would only be a few years, bloviated Western mainstream media, and the Chinese would be having pluralistic democracy and “real” freedoms. Before you knew it, China would have its actor leaders like Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Bono, Al Franken and Donald Trump. Oh, joy! Back then, that’s what I called progress.

But now I realize that the dysfunctional society we lived in 25 years ago was not due to after-effects of the Cultural Revolution. The real reason was that all the reforms in the 1980s-1990s completely disrupted China’s millennial communist-socialist way of life, causing socioeconomic paroxysms in both the countryside and cities. People became meaner, greedier, more selfish, cutthroat, self-centered, less cooperative and trusting because China adopted so many capitalist trappings after the Cultural Revolution.

I kind of sort of got it when I was researching and writing Book #2 of The China Trilogy, China Rising – Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (https://ganxy.com/i/113798/) and it finally sunk into my thick, brainwashed head for Book #3, China Is Communist Dammit – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (https://www.amazon.com/China-Communist-Dammit-Dawn-Dynasty/dp/6027354380/). It goes to show you that even after living in China for many years and traveling all over the world since 1980, just how thorough and efficient is the West’s Big Lie Propaganda Machine. It was in my mother’s milk and it was force fed to me from birth.

Millions of Chinese farmers figured this out long before I did, and more and more rural areas are taking up President Xi’s promise that collectivized land ownership, stewardship and production must be maintained and hopefully expanded. China has 200 million farm households with an average of 0.65 hectares per rural family, not per rural person. At three persons per family, that is only about 2,000 square meters per person, or a patch of land that is about 45 meters by 45 meters each. That’s it, to grow high volume commercial crops like wheat, corn, soybeans and rice.

Given this reality, it turns logic on its head to expect rural Chinese families to compete against each other and not work collectively. Actually, many are already semi-collectivized, where the farmers share tools, machinery and make cooperative decisions about what to grow each season, for increased productivity. But, publicly owned, collectivized agriculture is more in line with global, historical socioeconomic traditions, from Ancient Egypt, African kingdoms and Pre-Columbian America, to modern day China.

Below is an article about 18 rural cadres (elected and/or respected village leaders), whose farmers have decided that collectivization is more profitable, more productive and more modern, than privatized farms. It’s worth reading, as they speak with envy of the always-collectivized, nearby villages, that are much more prosperous and have better public services than their privately-owned ones. It explains, farm boots on the ground, how the 1980s reforms were not the panacea that Western propaganda promoted, and it frankly discusses the disappointments and problems they caused.

President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China (CPC) leadership are obviously aware of this situation around the country. This is why they gave a green light to the rural masses to go back to future of Mao Era collectivization. Baba Beijing clearly sees this as one more avenue to eliminate, by the year 2020, the last vestiges of extreme poverty in the countryside.

To wit, the article, whose machine translation I cleaned up a little, since I don’t have time to really make it something Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence would be proud of, but you’ll get the picture…

18 rural cadres in Zhejiang have signed a petition calling for the country to restore public ownership (https: //mp. weixin. qq. com/s/YaVHxukmOPw_POZ8OJX6kA)

Food Sovereignty Press: more than 30 years ago, 18 villagers in Xiaogang Village, Anhui Province, pressed red fingerprints and jointly asked for farmland to be divided into households. Today, 18 rural cadres in Zhejiang Province jointly issued an initiative to strengthen collective ownership, innovate the land management systems, and put forward the road initiated by Huaxi Village, Nanjie Village, Zhoujiazhuang Rural Agricultural and Commercial Cooperative, and Zhejiang Hangmin, Tengtoudeng Collectivized Village.

The two totally different voices are from the rural front-line practitioners. What is different is that the former becomes the benchmark of land subcontracting to households, while the latter is a reflection on the practice of this system for more than 30 years. In the past 30 years, due to the severe weakening of the collective economy, the village collective has been unable to provide public goods and services and cannot establish credibility. Farmers are scattered, agriculture is fragmented, the rural economy is unable to develop, and rural society tends to disintegrate. Xiaogang Village, a typical village of private property, has not yet become rich. On the contrary, Huaxi Village, Nanjie Village and Liuzhuang Village, which adhere to the collective economic road, have achieved economic development and social harmony. Practice has proved that small-scale agriculture based on land resource marketization and privatization is not a sustainable path for China’s three rural areas.

Today, 18 new and old rural grassroots cadres in Jinyun County, Zhejiang, have jointly proposed strengthening the collective ownership of land and innovating the agricultural management system. This voice from the grassroots cadres who have been working on the frontline for a long time has broken the mainstream media’s consistent view of the collective economy. Under the background that the problems of agriculture, rural areas and farmers have accumulated, they are working hard to find a bright way out for China’s rural areas, agriculture and farmers. We hope that this initiative will draw the attention of all sectors of society and lead to a wider discussion of the collective economy and the future path of rural areas.

The body of the 18 rural cadres from Zhejiang Province jointly sent the proposal to the whole country’s rural cadres and masses, entitled,

We will strengthen the collective ownership of land and innovate the land management system for rural grassroots cadres

(My notes: “three rurals” means agricultural villages, rural manufacturing and farmers. “Three-rights division” means the post-1980s reforms that spell out land ownership rights, contractual rights and management rights. “Enclosure movement” is when the government buys farmland from rural owners to develop modern real estate, so of which are good, like low income housing and public services, but some which are commercial, like selling million-dollar villas and building shopping centers. This is what President Xi means about protecting farmers’ interests.)

We are Zhejiang Jinyun County rural grassroots cadres, in view of the plight of subcontracting in the home land management system, as current agriculture and “enclosure movement” has become more and more disadvantaged. We are pushing for truly certified rights to the home policy that may cure the subcontract contradictions, to bring capital back to the countryside, since right now, the open-door policy is deeply worrying. To this end, we have put forward the initiative of strengthening the collective ownership of land and innovating the land management system to the masses of rural grassroots cadres across the country. The land system is not only the basic system of the country, but also the root of the problem of agriculture, rural areas and farmers. At present, China’s agriculture is becoming more and more weak and the countryside is becoming more and more decaying. This is neither the result of the incomplete implementation of the policy of subcontracting to households, nor the unsmooth transfer of land, nor the solution that can be solved by the confirmation and certification of land use rights to households. The crux of the issue is that the land system of “one size fits all” subcontracting to households and the unified contract period of the whole country is not only inconsistent with the reality that China’s geographical environment and cultural conditions vary greatly, but also goes against the principle of democratic centralism in rural areas in accordance with the wishes of the majority of the people to independently choose the way of operation. In fact, from the implementation of the land subcontract to the household policy, there exists land circulation, there is no land circulation problem of adverse impact on “three rurals”.

Moreover, in the process of subcontracting the land to households in 1982 and extending the land contract period in 2008, farmers’ land management rights have been confirmed according to the population at that time, and there is no need to be confirmed again. What is worrying is that the registration and certification of contracted management rights are raised in the debate over whether to privatize land and promote capital going to the countryside. We think, as it is necessary to implement land privatization doesn’t compromise that this debate, the right to the contracted management of land approval registration agencies will solidify and intensify the land after the subcontract to the home of all sorts of contradictions and problems, will certainly lower capital sooner or later to the countryside and even national funds for supporting agriculture opens the door, will make the land circulation farmers farming once can’t go back to the home of the new “enclosure movement”. The ministry of agriculture stated in the pilot notice on the confirmation, registration and certification of land contract and management rights that the most practical and important significance of carrying out this work is to “increase farmers’ property income”. But common sense tells us, land use authority card is impossible to increase farmer production to manage income, also impossible to increase farmer subcontract land (rent) income. However, from the leadership of the ministry of agriculture about the right to contract the use of land to farmers is “real right, award iron evidence”, eat permanent and unchanging expectations “calm heart”, we recognize that, in this way, the collective ownership of land has become “virtual right”, the collective ownership of land has become “clay certificate”. Only in this way can farmers’ real property income be increased. It seems that the modern theory of property rights, based on privatization, has begun to mislead the reform of rural land system after the reform of state-owned enterprises. When the leadership of ministry of agriculture is answering “three-rights division”, already used the concept of “use real right” in modern property right theory, believe to will introduce more concept later, till make rural cadre masses confused.

In fact, if the purpose is to increase farmers’ access to funds, relevant departments can fully formulate policies such as rural farmers’ house mortgage, project appraisal special loan and farmer credit guarantee loan, why should they use land use warrant mortgage loan that may endanger collective ownership? We are worried that the confirmation and registration of land use rights will lead the reform of “three-rights division” of land to the wrong direction, and weaken and dilute the already fragile collective ownership of land. The material foundation and system guarantee of developing collective economy will be lost, and the function of rural grass-roots organizations will be weakened or even disintegrated. To meet the objective requirements of agricultural production, new obstacles will be created for the moderate scale intensive operation of agricultural land. Will certainly induce the rural society new ethnic contradictions, return to the general scattered sand pattern. In a word, the confirmation of land use rights to the households will eventually destroy the collective ownership of land. General secretary about land system in order to implement the fall internship series speech spirit, combined with the village, village and township Zhouguzhuang cooperatives and the successful experience of our province Hangmin Village, Tengtoudeng Village, is also given in guiding farmers around the scale and intensive production and business operation not only appeared in a variety of types and properties of different family farms, agricultural leading enterprises and joint stock cooperative (nongyeshe) system, and will be back to the village collective business contracted land circulation of the actual situation, we sent the broad masses of rural grassroots cadres to strengthen the collective land ownership, land management system innovation initiative:

First, firmly hold the right direction of innovating rural land management system. At the Seventh CPC Central Committee Meeting on Deepening Reform, General Secretary Xi put forward the “three bottom lines” of “adhering to the unchanged collective ownership of land, adhering to the red line of 1. 8 billion mu of farmland (120 million hectares = three billion acres) and protecting farmers’ interests”. When investigating Xiaogang Village, he stressed that “no matter how it is changed, the rural collective ownership cannot be destroyed”. Investigation in Heilongjiang pointed out that “agricultural cooperatives are the development direction”. These speech spirits pointed out the right direction for us to innovate the rural land management system, and required us to always give prominence to developing the collective economy and adhering to the road of cooperation and collectivization.

Second, uphold the principle of democratic centralism in which the minority is subordinate to the majority. To play to the role of the rural grassroots autonomous organizations and adhere to the organic unity of democratic centralism, the implementation of ownership, consulting and management policy of “separation of division” and develop collective economy, cooperative and collectivization road and a series of rural policy process, in the full discussion and adhere to the principle of the minority is subordinate to the majority, based on the independent choice in accordance with their respective actual specific land management mode, make the effective and rational allocation of limited land resources, to solve the problem of land pastureland.

Third, implement the policy of member rights under the collective ownership of land. When rural land is subcontracted to households, the practice of contracting rights (actually granting income distribution rights) remains unchanged. This leads to the awkward situation that the natural population changes and the land contract right cannot be adjusted accordingly: some people still have the contract right as enterprise workers and civil servants because of the promotion to higher education, while the reasonable appeal of farmers who should gain the contract right will not be solved. In view of this problem, in the process of innovating the land management system, we should conscientiously implement the relevant policies of the member right under the collective ownership of land (the actual right to distribute income), and promote the effective and reasonable allocation of land resources to farmers. This is not only the expectation of the rural cadres and masses over the years, but also a realistic problem that should be solved seriously. Hereby initiative, the sponsors’ signatures are as follows: ##### (signatures)

ABOUT JEFF BROWN

Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).

The Greanville Post, where he keeps a column, Dispatch from Beijing. He also writes a column for The Saker, called the Moscow-Beijing Express. Jeff interviews and podcasts on his own program, China Rising Radio Sinoland, which is also available on SoundCloud, YouTube, Stitcher Radio and iTunes.
In China, he has been a speaker at TEDx, the Bookworm and Capital M Literary Festivals, the Hutong, as well as being featured in an 18-part series of interviews on Radio Beijing AM774, with former BBC journalist, Bruce Connolly. He has guest lectured at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences and various international schools and universities. Jeff grew up in the heartland of the United States, Oklahoma, much of it on a family farm, and graduated from Oklahoma State University. He went to Brazil while in graduate school at Purdue University, to seek his fortune, which whetted his appetite for traveling the globe. This helped inspire him to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia in 1980 and he lived and worked in Africa, the Middle East, China and Europe for the next 21 years. All the while, he mastered Portuguese, Arabic, French and Mandarin, while traveling to over 85 countries. He then returned to America for nine years, whereupon he moved back to China in 2010. He lives in China with his wife. Jeff is a dual national French-American, being a member of the Communist Party of France (PCF) and the International Workers of the World (IWW).

Deep State Refines Hit Job on Trump

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM / STRATEGIC CULTURE

Journalists Bob Woodward (left) and Carl Bernstein at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Their reporting about the scandal later known as "Watergate" won a Pulitzer Prize, but the fame and the accomplishment were certainly overblown.

07.09.2018 | WORLD / Americas | FEATURED STORY

If this week’s media broadside on Trump were a Deep State hit job, then this is how it would proceed. First, an award-winning journalist of Bob Woodward’s august reputation publishes a searing book seemingly substantiating long-held accusations of “dysfunction” in the White House.

Then the next day to consolidate the book’s lurid claims, the New York Times, America’s so-called “paper of record” publishes an oped allegedly by an administration insider essentially “confirming” Woodward’s tell-all account.

What’s more, the sense of paranoia within the Trump administration will now be ratcheted up to levels which make normal staff working and communications almost paralyzed. It’s a perfect psy-ops to explode chaos and mistrust among Trump’s inner circle.

But who really is Bob Woodward? He is famed as one of the Washington Post reporters who exposed the Watergate affair in 1974 which forced then President Richard Nixon to quit office in ignominy. The exposé of Nixon’s wiretapping on Democrat rivals is commonly seen as the high-point of American journalism, and thus Woodward as a paragon of journalistic integrity.

But as Russ Baker contends in his groundbreaking book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Watergate and Nixon affair is not all that it seems. And neither is Woodward. There is credible evidence that the American Deep State of the military-intelligence apparatus used the Watergate scandal as a way to get rid of Nixon whose febrile mental state was becoming a concern to them. Woodward, who had a background in Navy intelligence was suspiciously a prodigy journalist who rapidly rose to cover what became the scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency.

Woodward’s newly published book on the Trump White House makes a damning case of a president who is allegedly despised and feared by his inner circle. It claims that staff have engineered an “administrative coup” against Trump, preventing him from taking key decisions, and generally portraying him as a farcical figure. The book seeds the concept among the public of a necessary coup against Trump.

This is where Woodward’s prestigious Watergate reputation comes into play. His role in that affair as a supposed champion of truth and of holding power to account is then invoked to give the seal of accuracy to his book on Trump. If Woodward says the president is a basket case, then it must be so, so goes the anticipated general public reaction.

In order to drive the message home, the New York Times follows up with an oped claiming to be written by an anonymous official within the Trump administration who “confirms” what Woodward’s book is claiming.

When the Woodward book came out, there were staunch rebuttals of its claims from senior White House officials. In particular the Defense Secretary James Mattis, who was supposedly one of Woodward’s main sources, saying that Trump was an idiot who wanted to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Mattis dismissed the book and its author as having a “rich imagination”. There were also similar putdowns from Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly and his ambassador the United Nations Nikki Haley.

Trump himself scorned Woodward’s book, ‘Fear’, as a shoddy “work of fiction”. Thanks to the publicity, the title has become a “best-seller” within days of being published.

The pushback from the Trump White House was of course to be expected, given the claims from such an imminent journalist. That’s why the New York Times oped is a crucial capping on the claims, especially since the oped is supposedly written by a senior administration official.

The New York Times says it knows the name of the official who wrote the piece. But it is not disclosing his or her identity, as the supposed author requests.

The public therefore can’t know the authenticity of the oped. Was it really written by a Trump administration senior official? Or some low-level staff? Or maybe not even an actual member of staff? The author of the oped claims: “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

But the main purpose is the sowing of grave doubt in the public mind and among Trump’s senior staff at the White House. The oped appears to confirm the claims made by Woodward about a dysfunctional president who is being handled by staff working in “resistance” to his “impetuousness” for the “safety of America”. It also goes further by saying that the dysfunction ultimately stems from Trump’s “immorality”.

Ultimately, it is virtually impossible to prove the veracity of Woodward’s book and the subsequent “confirmatory” article in the New York Times. Woodward’s book has been denied by supposedly “key sources”. The authenticity of the author of the New York Times oped is a matter of trust in that newspaper’s editors. The so-called paper of record has lately been a massive purveyor of baseless scare stories slandering Russia. For many critics it is not a reliable nor ethical source, as is claimed.

But the point is that a gravely damaging impact has been inflicted on the Trump presidency. His ability to rebuff critics with his customary braggadocio of slamming “fake news” appears this time to be mortally wounded.

This is not meant to be a defense of the Trump administration nor of this president. Trump’s White House certainly appears to be an unorthodox place, as indicated by the high turnover of senior staff over the past two years since his election.

Trump’s personality certainly comes across as impetuous and petty. His personal life also seems tainted with deceit and lewd scandals.

Nevertheless he is the president that Americans voted for. And so far, he has not done anything out of the ordinary for American presidents. He is the usual run-of-the-mill guardian of big business and the oligarch system of enriching the super wealthy. Trump, like most of his predecessors, should also be prosecuted for war crimes over his bombing of Syria and Yemen. But all those misdemeanors and crimes are par for the course for US presidents.

The one thing that Trump has done out of the ordinary, as far as the Deep State opponents are concerned, is his refusal so far to ramp up aggression with Russia. That has always been the unacceptable problem with Trump as president for the unelected imperial planners of the Deep State.

The so-called “Russiagate” charade has failed to oust Trump due to its embarrassing dearth of evidence on alleged collusion with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The wider American public have simply not bought into that drama which has been concocted by political and media elites to nix Trump.

Given the futility of those efforts, the Deep State may have now found at last the effective instrument with which to eliminate Trump from the White House. You enlist a “star journalist” with yesteryear’s Deep State operative experience, get the supposed paper of record to quickly “confirm” the salacious details, and then wait for the desired “administrative coup” to become a popularly demanded reality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Finian Cunningham is a former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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An editorial we endorse: Britain Should Be in the Dock Over Skripal Saga, Not Russia

BE SURE TO CIRCULATE OUR ARTICLES. HELP NEUTRALIZE THE CORPORATE MEDIA LIES.

Fraternal site Strategic Culture has just run an editorial that pretty much sums up our feelings about this topic. Perfidious Britain—a degenerate, onetime great imperial nation in its own right, but now a second-rate player shamelessly shuffling to get the prime crumbs from Washington's table—has broken all norms of international conduct in its quest to ingratiate itself with its masters and participate in the garroting of Russia. London's actions under Theresa May's regime are repulsive, servile, terribly dangerous, reckless in fact, and a stain on the honor of the British people, who remain as unwilling or incapable of getting rid of this plague as their counterparts across the Atlantic.—PG

British Prime Minister Theresa May has been the most visible cog in a reckless and gigantic machine of Western disinformation pushing the world to a probable nuclear war.

| 07.09.2018 | WORLD / EUROPE

Britain Should Be in the Dock Over Skripal Saga, Not Russia

The latest announcement by British authorities of two named Russian suspects in connection with the alleged poison assassination of a former Russian spy and his daughter is more absurd drama in a long-running tawdry saga.

No verifiable evidence is ever presented, just more lurid innuendo and more refusal by the British authorities to abide by any due process and international norms of diplomacy. It is all scurrilous sound and fury aimed at smearing Russia.

This week, Britain’s Metropolitan Police released video shots of two alleged Russian men purporting to show them arriving at London’s Gatwick airport on March 2. Other video shots purport to show the same men walking the streets of Salisbury on March 3, the day before former Russian Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were apparently stricken with a powerful nerve agent. The two would-be assassins then allegedly flew back to Moscow from London late on March 4.

One preposterous claim, among several by the British authorities, is that traces of the putative nerve poison Novichok were found in the London hotel room where the alleged Kremlin agents stayed. The incompetence of the two supposed super assassins beggars belief. More realistically clumsy, however, is the attempt by the British to lay an incriminating trail.

The day after the Met police announcement implicating the two Russian culprits, Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May stood up in front of her parliament and claimed that the two individuals were members of Russian military intelligence, the GRU. Another British minister, Ben Wallace, accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of having personal responsibility for ordering the alleged assassination plot.

Then on Thursday Britain summoned the United Nations Security Council to hash over the lurid claims against Russia without providing any further substantiating details to back up the sensational accusations.

This is nothing other than more trial-by-media, a process of railroading allegations against Russia, not on any basis of legal due process, but simply by bluster and prejudice. The credulous British news media play a dutiful secondary role in giving the claims a semblance of credibility, instead of asking the gaping questions that are warranted.

As Vasily Nebenzia, Russia’s envoy to the UN, remarked, the whole aim of the British claims is to whip up more international anti-Russia frenzy and hysteria. No sooner had Britain unleashed its latest allegations, a joint statement was released by the United States, Canada, Germany and France supporting the British claims.

Britain is now calling for more punitive sanctions against Moscow just as it had triggered earlier this year when the Skripals apparently fell ill on a park bench in the southern English town of Salisbury. Some 28 countries have expelled Russian diplomats over those earlier and as-yet unfounded claims. More expulsions can thus be expected, with the intended effect of framing Russia as a pariah state.

The timing of this week’s twist in the Skripal saga seems pertinent. The US, Britain and France are threatening to launch military strikes on Syria just as the Syrian army and its Russian ally move to defeat the last-remaining stronghold of NATO-backed terror groups in that country, potentially bringing an end to the Western-backed criminal war for regime change against the Assad government in Damascus.

Last month, too, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel held a productive, cordial summit with President Putin near Berlin, where the two leaders appeared to solidify a rapprochement over a crucial energy project between Russia and the European Union.

The British government is also teetering on political implosion from the Brexit debacle and growing public contempt.

As Russia’s UN envoy Nebenzia further pointed out, how is it possible that the British prime minister can make the categorical claim that the two alleged Russian men in the video shots released this week are members of the GRU? Typically, she made the claim without providing any substantiating information.

This was the same kind of plucking from thin air that Theresa May performed only days after the Skripals were apparently poisoned in Salisbury on March 4. Again, back then, May stood in front of parliament and dramatically accused Russia of a state-sponsored assassination attempt. The British authorities have cast, and continue to cast, a verdict without any legal case. That verdict relies entirely on Russophobia and prejudice of Russian malfeasance.

Former British ambassador Craig Murray and other astute observers have noted that the latest video shots released by Britain’s counter-terrorism police are highly questionable. The images could have been easily fabricated with modern digital methods. They are not evidence of anything. Yet, suspiciously, the British authorities are in unseemly haste to make their sensational charges of Russian state culpability.

Moscow has condemned the reprehensible rhetoric used by the British prime minister and senior members of her cabinet in throwing grave allegations against the Russian leadership. Britain’s trashing of diplomatic norms is deplorable, befitting a rogue state that is itching for conflict.

The fact is that the British have spurned any normal legal attempt by Russia to access the supposed investigation in order to ascertain the nature of the alleged information incriminating Moscow. If Britain had a case, then why doesn’t it permit an independent assessment? Russia is being denigrated with foul accusations, and yet Moscow is denied the right to defend itself by being able to ascertain the information. The British technique is that of an inquisition making a mockery of legal standards.

Another salient fact is that the whereabouts of the Skripals is not known – six months after the alleged poisoning incident. Russia has been repeatedly denied consular contact with one of its citizens, Yulia Skripal, whose bizarre one-off appearance in a video, released by the British authorities three months ago, conveyed her wish to return to her homeland of Russia. Britain is violating the legal principle of habeas corpus.

Far from any evidence implicating Russia in a crime, the evidence so far points to the British authorities illegally detaining the Skripals for propaganda purpose. That nefarious purpose is clear: to demonize and delegitimize Russia as a sovereign state.

The Skripal saga and official British clowning around would be laughable if the consequences for international relations were not so dire.

The British authorities should be the ones in the dock, not Russia, to answer a case of forced abduction and incitement of international conflict.

About the author

Patrice Greanville is editor in chief and founding editor of The Greanville Post. Publisher of the first US radical media review, Cyrano's Journal, he has been fighting corporate lies and confusion for almost five decades, and the job keeps getting worse.

is one of the best edited political blogs in the anglophone world. No one surpasses our standards.

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BREAKING: LIBERATION OF IDLIB HAS BEGUN

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

A SyAAF (Syrian Air Force) jet in action. They're generally older and more beat up than their Russian counterparts, due to constant use, but the heroism of Syrian pilots is already legendary, and new aircraft is quietly entering service, thanks to Russian aid.

MENA HEADLINE NEWS IRAN

BREAKING: LIBERATION OF IDLIB HAS BEGUN

By Joaquin Flores On Sep 9, 2018 // A Fort Russ Dispatch

The liberation of Idlib from US backed terrorists, has now begun. With weeks of preparation, on the tactical, strategic, infowar, and diplomatic fronts, the Russian and Syrian air forces launched their first sorties tonight, with bombers and assault planes attacking terrorist held positions between Hama and Idlib. So far there have been over 70 airstrikes recorded above several jihadist sites in northwest Syria in just the last several hours alone.

Previously the Syrian government confirmed that Russian and Syrian air forces successfully launched over 100 airstrikes in the last since yesterday, softening up peripheral targets and making impossible the possibility of any break-through or counter-attack, or other maneuver on the part of the terrorists.

It is expected, barring a major U.S counter-attack to protect their own assets, that the Syrian and Russian forces will heavily bombardment specific targets throughout the night, and into the early morning ours of September 9th.

SAA and allied forces have been making simultaneous preparations for the ground assault which will likely commence tomorrow. Syrian and Iranian intelligence operatives inside of Idlib had been successful, over the last few weeks, in documenting and noting the location of targets where terrorists had made their HQ. One such was a former hospital, fortunately that this premises was being used as a base of operations by terrorist groups was recorded on video, and presented to the international community via information war channels.

In the weeks leading up to today, both the US and Russia scrambled massive naval fleets into the Mediterranean, as a means to deter each other from any successful action. However, given the outcome of diplomatic efforts, in particular the events at the UN, it became apparent that the US’s plan to use a false flag or hoax attack as a pretext to attack Syria with a UN mandate-of-sorts (statements from the UN envoy to Syria, that is – there would never be a UNSC resolution to that effect).

After securing an international coalition to support the final liberation of Idlib, and after having fought with some success in the UN to preclude any prejudgment to the effect that only Syria could be capable of pulling off a chemical attack, Syria said it was committed to ‘liberate’ Idlib. Jafari said “those who facilitated the entry of foreign terrorist fighters into my country, especially the Turkish government, still have a chance to remove them from Idlib province.”

With the United States, Britain and France all reportedly making final preparations on September 8th to launch a major offensive against Syria, and threatening use of force on a scale far larger than that of the attack carried out in April 2018, Russia has notably responded by moving naval assets to the Mediterranean and deploying its warships in defensive positions to deter a potential second Western attack.

Russian media said officially, on September 8th, that they were fully expecting a false flag or hoax chemical weapons attack to take place in Idlib, carried out by the US and MI6 primarily, in order to use this as a pretext to take military action against Syria.

While Russia has previously tolerated Western interventions against Damascus on a small scale, namely token missile strikes initiated with prior warning and with apparent coordination with Syria and Russia, which were further blunted by Syria’s own air defences, a larger strike which could have a significant impact on the outcome of the war – at a time when Damascus’ forces and those of its allies prepare for a major ground offensive against the Jihadist held province of Idlib – could well cross a red line which would lead to Russian intervention on the side of its Middle Eastern ally. To be able to deter a Western attack however, Russia will need to demonstrate that it has a credible chance of protecting Syria against the combined firepower of its adversaries despite the far smaller size of its forces in the country – which pale in comparison to the massive Western military forces deployed throughout the Middle East and the U.S. and possibly French carrier strike groups which are likely to participate in an attack.

As the US prepares its last ditch effort to derail the final destruction of Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, in their hopes to stop the liberation of Idlib, the Atlantic Council – the media wing of NATO – has instructed YouTube to shut-down the news channels of Syrian agencies.

In the lead-up, two days ago, Russian, Turkish, and Iranian leadership met to discuss an agreement to see this operation carried out with as few problems as possible. “Damascus has every right to take back all its territory,” Russian president Vladimir Putin told a summit on Friday the 7th, which decided how these countries would relate to the Syrian government during the last major terrorist stronghold, Idlib.

“The legitimate Syrian government has a right and must eventually take under control all of its national territories,” Putin told Iran’s Hassan Rouhani and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the summit.

The Russian leader said it was important to begin work on a political settlement in Syria “as soon as possible” and urged Iran and Turkey to ramp up their coordination with Russia of their countries’ foreign and defence ministries and security services. Now the world waits in anticipation, whether the U.S will work with the UK as planned, to carry out a false flag or hoax ‘chemical attack’, which the U.S officials have already said in advance they would blame on the Syrian government.

Putin said “terrorist elements” continued to “stage provocations” and use drones in Idlib. “We cannot ignore this,” the Russian president said. “We should solve this problem together.”

The three leaders determined the future of Idlib amid growing fears of a humanitarian disaster. The three countries are guarantors of the Astana process, a track of talks launched after Russia’s game-changing 2015 military intervention which has eclipsed the failed Western-backed Geneva negotiations led by the United Nations.

The only real foreseeable problem now is the US finding some last minute pretext to bring this final operation to a halt. While the US appears to have exhausted all options, the desperation may lead to a rash decision. It was previously reported that the US asked for Turkish assistance in removing some 200 US and UK military personnel that were in Idlib.

To connect the dots here clearly, it has been generally and publicly understood for some time that the US and its coalition, have been actively backing the ISIS and Al Qaeda efforts in Syria. This is despite the US’s intervention in the country being initially based on fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda, even though the intervention was started without the consent of the Syrian government, making the moves in fact an invasion against the sovereignty of the Syrian state and people.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joaquin Flores is Editor-in-Chief of Fort Russ News, as well as the Director of the Belgrade based think-tank, the Center for Syncretic Studies. Educated at California State University, Los Angeles, in the field of International Relations, he previously served as Chief Negotiator and Internal Organizer in several jurisdictions for the SEIU labor union in California. Flores has twenty years experience in community, labor, and anti-war organizing. Flores has appeared regularly on Iran’s ‘PressTV’ and Russia’s ‘RT’ news to share his expert opinion and analysis on current geopolitical matters.

AMERICAN MEDIA SURE TO OBFUSCATE MATTERS PRESENTING REALITY UPSIDE DOWN—
While Washington Warns to Strike Syria, the Russian & Syrian Warplanes Start Pounding Terrorists’ Positions in Idlib, Hama

FNA on 2018-09-05 / 21cir.com
TEHRAN (FNA)-Russian and Syrian fighter jets carried out massive bombing raids on terrorists’ positions in Northwestern Hama and Western Idlib, inflicting major losses on the terrorists.

The Arabic-language Moraseloun news website reported that the fighter jets conducted a heavy bombing on terrorists’ positions in a large region stretching from Southern Idlib to the al-Ghaab Plain in an introduction to the upcoming ground assault.

In the meantime, the warplanes struck terrorists’ strongholds in Jisr al-Shughour, Jabal al-Zawiyeh, Marowaj, al-Shaqar, Harash Basnaqoul, Anab, al-Janoudiyeh, Qani, al-Sarmaniyeh and Zeizoun, inflicting major casualties on the terrorists.

Earlier reports said that the army sent twenty tanks and BMP vehicles, floating bridges and tens of personnel carriers to the battlefields in Northwestern Syria.

In the meantime, the army’s artillery and missile units pounded the positions and movements of Tahrir al-Sham Hay’at (the Levant Liberation Board or the Al-Nusra Front) in the village of al-Jabeiryeh and in the town of al-Latamina in Northern Hama, inflicting major losses on the terrorists.

Other artillery units opened heavy fire at the movements of al-Turkistani Islamic Party in the small towns of al-Ziyara, al-Mashit, al-Zi’yadiyeh and al-Qarqour in Western al-Ghaab Plain and in the town of Badama in Jisr al-Shughour region in Western Idlib, killing and wounding a number of terrorists.

About the Author

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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