Moti Nissani, PhD
No Planet – No People

Combined flag of Anglosphere nations.

Part IV of: Why does the Invisible Government Continue to Grow in Strength?

We must admit to ourselves that there are truly evil geniuses out there, and in most cases these characters have taken control of the power structure. — Mike Krieger

The Controllers

Juan O’Gorman, Enemies of the Mexican People

This article takes if for granted that the five major countries of the Anglosphere—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US—are governed behind the scenes by a small group of people.

This group in turn shapes historical events, accounts for the near-uniformity of these five countries’ political developments, and enjoys partial or full control of most countries of the world. As far as we can guess, this group is comprised of a few banking families and their allies in the information, corporate, military, intelligence, and “religious” worlds. This group goes by such names as the deep state, invisible government, bankers, oligarchy, Bilderbergers, and Directors. In this posting, following Aldous Huxley, I shall refer to the members of this group as the Controllers.

What is it that the Controllers are after? Why aren’t they content with what they already have? The best guess is that they are just as sick as the fictional Eddorians:

While not essentially bloodthirsty—that is, not loving bloodshed for its own sweet sake—they were no more averse to blood-letting than they were in favor of it. Any amount of killing which would or which might advance an Eddorian toward his goal was commendable; useless slaughter was frowned upon, not because it was slaughter, but because it was useless—and hence inefficient. And, instead of the multiplicity of goals sought by the various entities of any race of Civilization, each and every Eddorian had only one. The same one: power. Power! P-O-W-E-R!! (Doc Smith, Interplanetary, 1948)

David Rockefeller

The Mush-for-Brains Misconception

Most independent analysts take a dim view of the Controllers’ intelligence. Mao Zedong, for instance, referred to the USA as a paper tiger.

In a recent speech—one of his most outspoken yet—President Putin said:

“I am under the impression that our counterparts [read: America’s Controllers] have mush [porridge] for brains. They really have no idea what is going on in Syria and what they are trying to achieve.”

In other words, the people controlling the USA are poor strategists: They are stupid, do not understand what’s going on, and don’t have clear goals.

In his wonderful China Rising, Jeff Brown writes:

“Baba Beijing and the Chinese think in terms of decades and centuries. Americans can’t think past the 24-hour propaganda spin and quarterly stock reports.”

Likewise, A. Raevsky (“Saker”) believes that the Western leadership is clueless, lacking political vision and professionalism. The American empire is weak and delusional. Echoing Khruschev’s famous reply to Mao, “yes, a paper tiger, but with nuclear teeth,” Raevsky feels that the Russians are only worried about the West because it “does not take a great deal of intelligence to trigger a nuclear war.”

Dmitri Orlov et al. likewise talk about “a string of foreign policy and military disasters such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the Ukraine.”

A few more examples of this fundamental misperception appear below, in the Middle East section.

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Origins of the Mush-for-Brains Misconception

Alexander Zinoviev’s Self-Portrait: Thinking is Painful.

We shall shortly see that the Controllers have, over the past three centuries or so, made enormous strides: they have accumulated power and riches at a steady pace. This is nothing new. Taylor Caldwell, a novelist, saw this worrisome and astounding progress already in 1972:

“[The men of the Invisible Government] would continue to grow in strength, until they had the whole silly world, the whole credulous world, the whole ingenuous world, in their hands. Anyone who would challenge them, attempt to expose them, show them unconcealed and naked, would be murdered, laughed at, called mad, ignored, or denounced as a fantasy-weaver.”

Why would so many knowledgeable people ignore such a striking and obvious historical record? Let me offer two overlapping speculations.

One possibility involves a failure to appreciate the difference between wisdom and cleverness. The Controllers are indeed utterly clueless about the true meaning of our brief journey on earth. Anton Chekhov said:

“In reality, everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.”

The Controllers are manifestly oblivious to these higher aims. Subscribers to the mush-for-brains view confuse this profound lack of wisdom with stupidity.

This confusion is aided in turn by the seeming contradiction between the Controllers’ avowed and real goals. If you take them at their word, they are indeed idiots. If, on the other hand, you judge the success of their actions by their hidden agenda, they are evil geniuses.

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Why is this Mush-for-Brains Controversy Important?

Sun Tzu famously said, “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” To retain their independence, Russians, Chinese, and revolutionaries the world over must indeed know their enemy. And they certainly must know whether they are confronting imbeciles or Machiavellians.

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The Historical Record

The key to the proper assessment of the Controllers is their achievements. Are they steadily nearing the goal they set for themselves (enslaving humanity)? Who is gaining ground, the Controllers or the rest of us?

The historical record, as Caldwell so clearly saw, is unequivocally in favor of the evil geniuses view. One could fill an entire Kindle with examples, but here a few scattered fragments should be enough to drive the point home.

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The Domination of Europe

The vicious brilliance of the Controllers at times defies belief. Thanks to bribes, assassinations, the recent variation of the Gladio conspiracy, extensive wiretapping and blackmail of who’s who in Europe, economic warfare (e.g., the FIFA “scandal,” the VW “scandal”), and control of the banks, corporations, media, and intelligence services of Western and central Europe, this continent is now a submissive colony of the USA. In the words of one historian, “the level of abjection passes belief.”

Likewise, the level of strategic planning needed to bring this abjection about, to force once-independent countries like Germany and France to betray the interests of their people in the service of the Controllers’ agenda, also defies belief.

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Latin America

As we speak, the Controllers are brilliantly undermining the progressive governments of Latin America, once more turning this entire area into their back yard. Thus, “a new gang of vassal regimes has taken-over Latin America. The new rulers are strictly recruited as the protégés of US financial and banking institutions. Hence the financial press refers to them as the ‘new managers’ – of Wall Street.”

The most brilliant move involves Argentina and Brazil, countries who maintained friendly relations with Russia and China and pursued, now and then, independent policies that served the interests of their own people. In Brazil, especially,

“A phony political power grab by Congressional opportunists ousted elected President Dilma Rousseff. She was replaced by a Washington approved serial swindler and notorious bribe taker, Michel Temer.

“The new economic managers were predictably controlled by Wall Street, World Bank and IMF bankers. They rushed measures to slash wages, pensions and other social expenditures, to lower business taxes and privatize the most lucrative public enterprises in transport, infrastructure, landholdings , oil and scores of other activities.

“Even as the prostitute press lauded Brazil’s new managers’, prosecutors and judges arrested three newly appointed cabinet ministers for fraud and money laundering. ‘President’ Temer is next in line for prosecution for his role in the mega Petrobras oil contracts scandal for bribes and payola.

“The economic agenda by the new managers are not designed to attract new productive investments. Most inflows are short-term speculative ventures. Markets, especially, in commodities, show no upward growth, much to the chagrin of the free market technocrats. Industry and commerce are depressed as a result of the decline in consumer credit, employment and public spending induced by ‘the managers’ austerity policies.

“Even as the US and Europe embrace free market austerity, it evokes a continent wide revolt. Nevertheless Latin America’s wave of vassal regimes, remain deeply embedded in decimating the welfare state and pillaging public treasuries led by a narrow elite of bankers and serial swindlers.”

The remaining bastions of semi-independence—Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba—are obviously being targeted now by the “witless” Controllers—while the Russians and Chinese are standing by, doing next to nothing.

China in particular, offers a puzzling example of shortsightedness. China is sitting on trillions of digital dollars that it is surely going to lose. Yet, it doesn’t occur to Xi and his colleagues to counter American aggression by creating their own version of the CIA, NGOs, and regime change outfits. It doesn’t even occur to them to give Venezuela an outright gift of at least $50,000,000,000, to help it ride the current American-engineered maneuvers and especially the masterstroke of manipulating the price of petrol downwards. China faces a far greater peril now than the Controllers-imposed opium addiction, and yet it nickel-and-dimes its few remaining potential allies.

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The Middle East

From its inception, America’s modeled itself after the vicious Roman Empire, not the far more civilized Democratic Athens or the Iroquois Confederation. Like the Americans, the Romans endlessly bragged about bringing peace to the world. The reality was diametrically opposite, as one eloquent victim explained: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

In the Middle East, one independent, secular, country after another has come under American control. The countries whose leaders sought an independent path suffered genocide, neo-colonialism, devastating wars, sectarian and ethnic conflicts where hardly any existed before, millions of refugees, fragmentation, environmental contamination, and as a consequence, higher cancer, mutation, and birth malformation rates.

Most independent analysts feel that America (the Controllers’ chief enforcer of military and economic conquests) is failing in the Middle East. These analysts seem to believe American politicians and presstitutes when they say that their main goal is to bring peace and democracy to Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Yemen (the Americans of course prefer to keep silent about the vicious dictatorships of their Wahhabi friends). These analysts, as we have seen, believe the politicians when they say that their hearts go out to the long-suffering Arabs, that they really care about the ongoing genocides of Christians and everyone else.

In a typical naïve outburst, for instance, a Georgetown University professor asks: “Why did the United States fail in its war on Iraq?”Eric Margolis calls the Iraq War “the worst disaster for the United States since Vietnam.” Paul Craig Roberts sees America’s policies in the Middle East as a failure.

These astute commentators see the American-created desert, the devastation, the hate that America incurred in the Middle East and elsewhere, and they conclude that these policies have been a failure. But the consistent pattern of “failures” suggests that these “failures” are not an unintended consequence caused by the pursuit of other, loftier, goals. Rather, the “failures,” future conflicts, and chaos themselves are the goal.

Sharmine Narwani describes the real goals of the Controllers:

“A 2006 State Department cable that bemoans Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s strengthened position in Syria outlines actionable plans to sow discord within the state, with the goal of disrupting Syrian ties with Iran. The theme? ‘Exploiting’ all ‘vulnerabilities’ [and suggesting, among other things, playing] ‘on Sunni fears of Iranian influence.

“In 2013, influential former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger openly advocated redrawn borders along sectarian, ethnic, tribal or national lines that will shrink the political/military reach of key Arab states and enable the west to reassert its rapidly-diminishing control over the region.”

As usual, Israeli strategists are more outspoken than their American counterparts. By 1982, they had already spelled out its goal of redrawing

“the Mideast into small warring cantons that would never again be able to threaten the Jewish state’s regional primacy. Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan.”

Thirty years later, that nightmare describes the world. Narawani warns:

“Arabs and Muslims need to start becoming keenly aware of this ‘small state’ third option, else they will fall into the dangerous trap of being distracted by detail while larger games carve up their nations and plunge them into perpetual conflict.”

Similarly, Russia, China, and humanitarians everywhere must become keenly aware that the Controllers are international grandmasters. Given the comparative naiveté of the people who oppose them, they almost always win.

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Former Members of the Warsaw Pact 

The “featherheaded” Controllers now manage, impoverish, and run roughshod over many former countries that had been part of the Russian alliance. Who would have thought, just 30 years ago, that the Americans would one day find a peaceful way of placing nuclear delivery vehicles in countries like Romania and Poland? Who would have predicted that they would ever again place German soldiers 100 miles from St. Petersburg?

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Other Nations

The Controllers manage most of the world’s countries. Their armies conquered Japan, Germany, and Italy—and never left. They stole parts of Mexico and Colombia, and turned most of Latin America into subservient, violence-ridden, colonies. Again and again, they assassinated patriotic leaders and replaced them with quislings willing to enrich themselves by serving their foreign masters. No people is safe from their regime change operations (including the American people), and no country—even traditional safe haven Switzerland—is safe from their financial blackmail.

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The Controllers’ Brilliant War on their Own People

Sadly, owing in part to the 1990s manufactured collapse of the USSR, America’s Controllers have acquired vastly more power and riches, while gradually relegating the American Constitution to a meaningless piece of paper (see Part I of this series). They, assassinated or brutally tortured their real and imaginary opponents, stole so much from so many to the point that America’s 20 wealthiest people now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, neglected America’s infrastructure, elevated self-serving mendacity to an art form, conducted a phony war on drugs, used these very drugs and an utterly broken justice system to turn the USA into an incarceration nation in which jailers enjoy a de facto license to kill, destroyed American industry, and converted a once-rich country to the “most bankrupt nation in history.”

Take as just one example the so-called bailout of Western banks. In reality, that was the biggest transfers of money (and hence power) in history—from the vast majority of the peoples of these countries to the Controllers.

The criminals who planned the 2008 crisis, the criminals who are deliberately undermining the world’s economies, were paid handsomely for their misdeeds. 

The money the bankers got, had Western governments chose to nationalize these banks instead of giving them the people’s money, could have worked miracles in improving the economic situation of the world’s people.

I must confess that I wouldn’t have thought it possible that anyone could perform such astounding hat tricks as “bailouts” and not have to contend with a revolution the following day. The Controllers had a deeper understanding of the power of propaganda and human nature.

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The 1990s Neo-Colonization of Russia and Its Aftermath: Four Trojan Horses

Throughout the 1980s, I studied the Russian-American standoff. And yet I failed to predict Russian naiveté, decency, inferiority complex, and the enormous damage inflicted on the Russian psyche by Stalin. I still find it hard to believe that the “dumb” Controllers were able, in the 1990s, to achieve the de facto occupation of Russia, sinking that once-powerful country into chaos, poverty, criminality, corruption, assassinations, organized crime activities, and social discord. Washington and its quislings were running—and deliberately ruining—the country.

Gratefully, the Americans eventually left—but only after leaving four Trojan horses behind.

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Trojan Horse #1: Western-Style “Democracy”

Instead of establishing real democracy, the controllers re-created Russia in their “democratic” image. Even at the best of times, such “democracies” do not represent the interests of ordinary people. Sooner or later, they are doomed to be taken over by psychopaths.

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Trojan Horse #2: Oligarchs and the Russian Economy

Another brilliant move on the part of the Controllers was the patronage and creation—from thin air—of the scourge of the Russian oligarchs. These “shysters basically stole Russia’s most valuable companies in the 90s, minting a small handful of mega-billionaires, while the rest of the country ate”—and is still eating—dirt. Very little has so far been done “to strip said shysters of their ill-gotten gains, and redistribute shares to the people.” As a result, unlike the much-maligned Soviet Union, Russia is plagued by vast income inequalities, poverty for the majority, inequality before the law, and unaffordable housing.

These oligarchs, “are still in full control of the Russian financial and banking sector, of all the key economic ministries and government positions, they control the Russian Central Bank and they are, by far, the single biggest threat to the rule of Putin and . . . to the Russian people and Russia as a whole.” Moreover, these oligarchs “connive to make Russia join the West as a junior partner.

Besides controlling the economy, the oligarchs corrupt everything they touch and provide a demoralizing proof that in Russia—as in the West—crime pays.

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Trojan Horse #3: Russia’s Central Bank and Constitution

It is impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the following question to the wealth and liberty of a nation: Is its central bank private or public?

Here are two quotes (many more are available here), both underscoring the import of this question.

“The issue which has swept down the centuries, and which will have to be fought sooner or later, is the people versus the banks.”—John Acton (1834-1902)

The second quote provided a dire warning to the American people from the very start. William Pitt, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, said of the inauguration of the first privately-owned central bank of the United States under Alexander Hamilton:

“Let the American people go into their debt-funding schemes and banking systems, and from that hour their boasted independence will be a mere phantom.”

This is exactly what the Controllers accomplished, taking control of Russia’s Central bank. From that point to the present day, Russia’s boasted independence has been a mere phantom.

Controllers bearing gifts: The Central Bank of Russia

The most meticulous documentation of this paradoxical reality known to me comes from historian Nikolay Starikov’s Rouble Nationalization (you can read a book review here or freely download the entire English translation of the book here):

“The structure of today’s world is a financial one par excellence. Today’s chains consist not of iron and shackles, but of figures, currencies and debts. That’s why the road to freedom for Russia, as strange as it may seem, lies in the financial sphere. Today we are being held back from the progress at our most painful point—our rouble… Our rouble, the Russian currency unit, is—to put it delicately—in a way, not quite ours. And this situ­ation is the most serious obstacle to our country’s development. . . .

“Let us start with the simplest question—who issues roubles? This is easy—the Central Bank of Russia, also known as the Bank of Russia, has the monopoly on issuing the Russian national currency.

“‘Article 6. The Bank of Russia is authorized to file suits in courts in ac­cordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation. The Bank of Russia is entitled to appeal to international courts, courts of foreign countries and courts of arbitration for protection of its rights. . . .

“The Russian economy does not have as much money as required for its proper operation but equal to the amount of dollars in the reserves of the Central Bank. The amount of roubles that can be issued depends of the amount of dollars Russia received for its oil and gas. That means that the whole Russian economy is artificially put in direct correlation with the export of natural resources. This is why a drop in oil prices causes a collapse of everything and everywhere. . . .

“An idea of a bank independent from the state was brought into the Soviet Union as a Trojan horse—through ‘advisors’, through those who had practical trainings at Columbia University, those who were recruited or simply betrayed their country . . .

“Among other things, it contains such amusing details as article 7: ‘Drafts of federal law and regulatory documents of the federal bodies of executive power concerning duties of the Bank of Russia and its performance shall be submitted to the Bank of Russia for approval.’ If you want to dismiss bankers through making amendments to the legislation—kindly submit the draft of the bill to them in advance. Otherwise, they might as well sue you for your legal mayhem in a court of Delaware . . .

“The second security level is the Constitution, as the ‘reformers’ shoved some words on the Central Bank and its status even into the Constitution. Article 75 (points 1 and 2) says that ‘the currency of the Russian Federation is the rouble’, and ‘issuing of money shall only be done by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation’, that ‘it performs independently from any other governing bodies.’ If you want to be surprised—have a look at Soviet Constitutions. Read the Constitution of the USA. You will find no mention of a bank that issues money independently anywhere, because such articles should not be a part of the main law of the country. What body issues the currency is a technical question, it is not fundamental for the country and its people. For the people it is not very significant, but it is a key issue for enslaving the country. That is why it was hastily dragged into the Constitution. And now this technical detail is there next to the fundamental rights of Russian citizens.”

Western control by proxy of Russian banking, finance, and the economy as a whole, has yet another sinister aspect. Prof. Michael Hudson and others underscore the fact that the USA has consistent, massive, balance of payment deficits with such countries as Russia, China, and Japan. Financialized and deindustrialized America buys real goods abroad and pays by running its printing press. Consequently, such countries accumulate the digital equivalents of billions or trillions of dollars.

They then use a good part of this money to buy U.S. treasury bonds. The net result of this convoluted, scarcely credible, process is straightforward: By financing the U.S. military and economy, these countries empower their own oppressors.

That is then one other legacy of the Controllers: They created a situation whereby Russia, while fighting for its very survival, finances its own military encirclement and the ongoing attacks on its economy and currency. Thanks to the powerful fifth column and alien constitution the Controllers bequeathed, Russia is “economically enslaved to the United States.”

Can witless people plan and execute such a coup?

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Trojan Horse #4: Information

Inside Russia too, the Controllers left behind another curious legacy: Hostile foreigners and their agents indirectly own some mainstream Russian media. And state-owned, independent, and private media are still afraid to tell the people of Russia and the world ugly truths about the West, still trying to curry favor with Washington and its Controllers, still often take the Controllers and their vassals at Langley and Washington at their word.

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Parting Words

The Controllers have been trying to subjugate Russia, its vast resources, and educated and creative people, for centuries. They tried direct or proxy wars, and so far failed. They tried nuclear brinkmanship, and they failed. They tried sleight of hand in the 1990s—and almost succeeded. They are resorting to blood-curdling brinkmanship now, and it remains to be seen whether this will lead to the conquest of Russia, its annihilation, or the destruction of humanity.

They are now resorting to military intimidation and economic warfare. They came close several times to turning Russia and China into vassal states, and they are now pursuing that goal, full steam.

They hope that one day soon they will have reached at long last their vision of the future: “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

The Controllers are engaged in a cross-generational undertaking. They are closest now to achieving their dream than any other empire in history has ever been. They could be the brightest bunch of psychopaths that ever lorded over humanity. If Russia, China, and revolutionaries everywhere wish to prevail, they must never underestimate their opponents. As well, they must level the intellectual playing field.

Moti Nissani

is an organic farmer (in Argentina), a former university professor (in the USA), a jack of many trades, and the compiler of  “ A Revolutionary’s Toolkit.”.

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By ANDRE VLTCHEK

And so, no one writes to the colonel. No letters, no envelopes with his pension are arriving. The old man and his wife are living alone. Their son had died a few years earlier. Their savings are gone. There seems to be no hope.

The colonel has a rooster. It is a mighty fighting cock. He trains it; the bird is his only chance of survival, it is all that he has left, as well as his pride. At the end of the story, he is approached and offered money for the rooster. He turns the offer down. He would rather go hungry, but he will not be humiliated!

His wife approaches him, asking whether he sold the rooster. He tells her that he did not.

Horrified, she asks: “But what are we going to eat?”

He replies to her, slowly and honestly: “We will eat shit!”

The Western mass media is now overflowing with stories about the people of Venezuela, collecting rotten fruit, even garbage, in order to fill their stomachs.

Many of these stories are grossly exaggerated, but it is true that millions in Venezuela are suffering.

Once again, the country has been betrayed by its elites. As Chile was before the 1973 coup, as Brazil was just a short while ago. The elites in Latin America are only loyal to their Western handlers, never to their own people.

There is capital flight, and there is an artificially created deficit of many basic commodities; medicines and food products. The goal of the ‘opposition’ backed by the United States and Europe is simple, and clear: to choke the revolutionary process, to discredit the legacy of Hugo Chavez, and to grab power again, while re-introducing neo-liberal dogma.

But the majority of Venezuelan people do not support the ‘opposition’. Of course, not everyone is in agreement with the policies of President Maduro, but a return to the capitalist past is not what the nation desires.

And that is why Venezuelans are forced to eat shit!

ABOVE: One of the many articles on the Western media, this one distributed by NBC News, sowing confusion and ignorance about events in Venezuela. As usual, the media coverage avoids any type of contextual reporting, let alone honest political analysis of what forces have precipitated this crisis, nor the fact that Washington and the local upper class are essentially manufacturing the revolts and essential goods scarcity. This de-stabilization model has been used all over the world by the CIA, the most notable example the overthrow of the Allende presidency in 1973, which resulted in the brutal Pinochet dictatorship lasting for almost 20 years. 

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] am not sure what the maternal side of my family ate during WWII, during the 900 days of the Siege of Leningrad.

My grandmother and my mom survived, while almost all of our other relatives vanished.

Resupply convoy, over frozen Lake Ladoga.

The city was surrounded by German troops. It was bombed day and night, savagely. And the only food supply route was open during the winters, over the thin ice covering the Ladoga Lake.

There was mass starvation in the city (over one million died). But against all the odds, Leningrad stubbornly refused to surrender.

The pride of Leningrad and symbol of the city’s heroic refusal to yield to Nazi pressure, beloved Belle, the Hippo, was kept alive in the midst of enormous hardships. She was killed by a German bomb in 1944. This picture was taken in 1943.

People died in the streets continually, from starvation, disease and air and artillery bombardment.

Constant battles in the outskirts.

Image shows the same street then and now, thanks to photographer/artist Sergey Larenkov.

Everyday, my grandmother went to the frontline, to fight the Germans, and to dig trenches. The Nazis dropped millions of leaflets spiced with disgusting humor: “Dear damsels, stop digging your little holes. Over your holes, our tanks will soon be passing.”

They did not pass! The ‘damsels’, including my grandma, were gentle-looking, opera and ballet going, poetry reading romantics, but in their core, actually, extremely tough and determined Russian women. And they were not going to surrender, until the final victory – after all, they were defending their beloved city, their motherland and humanity.

Almost half of the population of the city was killed, or starved to death. People were collapsing in the middle of the streets. But Leningrad stood tall, defiant and proud. A city of countless theaters and museums, one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, a refined metropolis, suddenly hardened itself and prevented the Nazi hordes from entering its streets and embankments.

The complacent consumerist fog and the awful ignorance injected daily by the American media keep the population in a state of passivity in the face of huge crimes committed by their government.—Editors

“People were forced to eat corpses, grandma?” I asked once, when she was still alive.

“Yes,” she replied. “Your mother and I never did, but some people… yes; they had no choice. We ate plywood and glue, if we were lucky to find some. Or we ate nothing…”

My grandmother was decorated twice, for her extraordinary courage at the front. She was decorated as a soldier, as a Soviet soldier (although she had absolutely no military training), not as a ‘damsel’.

Finally, the blockade, the siege was broken. A few weeks before, my grandmother and my tiny mom were evacuated over the Ladoga Lake. My mother looked like a skeleton, with an enormous belly of a child suffering from malnutrition sticking out. I was told that when she was brought to a first aid center that was full of medicine and food, she began moving, as if possessed, trying to grab and stuff into her mouth all she could put her hands on. Three adults had to hold her and drag her away. Her food intake had to be increased gradually, or otherwise she would have died.

Once, my grandmother told me: “It is no shame to eat shit! It is much better than to betray… But it is a terrible crime to force people to eat it!”

During that same war, in approximately the same period of time, my paternal, the Czech side of the family had full access to sausages, tenderloins and other foodstuffs. The Czechs had been collaborating with the Nazis, and they were generously rewarded for their efforts.

From my early age I was absolutely clear where my allegiances lay!

Leningrad and Russia have always been my love, my identity, and my motherland. Often remote, often hidden far away, over the horizon, but Motherland nevertheless! Just as my Russian, maternal grandmother was perhaps the most important woman in my life.

And whatever I later became, whatever I am now, was formed during those days of determined fight against the evil, during the Siege of Leningrad, which took place decades before I was even born.

***

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast week I was working in the Russian Far East, in Kamchatka, Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. I flew there from Tokyo, and stayed longer than I originally planned. I was trying to document the tremendous progress that this part of the country has registered during the last decade.

Just as during my lengthy visit to Brazil in 2015, I refused to meet intellectuals and ‘elites’. I spent time discussing Russia and the world with sailors, fishermen, and truck drivers – the most common folks.

Venezuela was bleeding. Every day, I read the news, and searched for the latest developments in Latin America.

I kept stumbling over the most cynical reports coming from the Western mass media outlets.

They were celebrating! They were openly calling for an invasion to depose the government. They were getting hyperbolic about ‘absolute chaos’ in Caracas.

It was extremely sad reading. It was actually disgusting. These scribes had no higher principles, no understanding of duty or of sacrifice. They were getting paid well and, intuitively, they simply knew what they were expected to write. Their ‘culture’ was extremely low.

They had absolutely no clue that it is much more glorious to eat shit than caviar, if you are doing it in order to defend your ideals and your beloved country.

Because these men and women from the Western mainstream have no ideals left, as they hardly understand the meaning of “love” or pride, anymore.

But those Russian workers I spoke to, they understood perfectly well what was going on more than 10,000 kilometers away, in Venezuela, as the colonel from the novel of Garcia Marquez would understand, and as my grandmother most definitely would.

It is actually all very simple: you stick to your principles, no matter how tough such decisions might be. Or if you don’t, your life is finished, thoroughly meaningless: your life as a person, or the life of the entire society.

In the West, in the epicenter of imperialism, a colonialist mentality and savage consumerism has made all basic ideals of humanism thoroughly irrelevant. Ethical principles have become the laughing stock of the official propagandists who are busy spreading nihilism all over the planet. That is why people are so confused and that is why life is so empty. It is empty in the Empire itself, and in its ‘client’ states that are shamelessly whoring, betraying and selling their own people and all that is above and under the surface of the Earth.

That is why re-visiting the great books written by people like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Maxim Gorki, is so essential, in this dark time and age.

No one wants to eat shit. Nobody wants the people of Venezuela to eat shit!

But if the choice is between tenderloin as a reward for betrayal, and rotten vegetables to sustain you while fighting your treasonous elites and an indirect foreign invasion, in a ‘normal’ society the choice is obvious!

And then, after victory is finally achieved, for those who are forcing their own proud patriots to eat shit, there should be no clemency, and no forgiveness.

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Alessandro Bianchi interviews Andre Vltchek

Andre Vltchek in the Beijing Art District with the dragons.

Andre Vltchek has become renowned in Italy for being the co-author, along with Noam Chomsky, of the famous book “Western Terrorism” (Ponte alle Grazie).

A documentary filmmaker, novelist, essayist, philosopher and intellectual, multi-faceted Vltchek is the cosmopolitan man par excellence, a “true revolutionary” as he likes to call himself. In recent years with his camera and his extraordinary commitment against injustice on this planet he has explored every corner of the Earth and taken over the length and breadth of Western terrorism, one that our media likes to censor and hide from our consciences.

After the interviews with the great Australian journalist John Pilger and the famous American playwright John Steppling, we have the honor and privilege of speaking to our great friend of l’AntiDiplomatico, asking some questions on burning current international issues.
*

This interview first appeared in the Italian language, published by ‘L’AntiDiplomatico’

*

Alessandro Bianchi, nato a Roma, dirige il sito di politica internazionale “L’Antidiplomatico”

Andre Vltchek

Philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

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THE WEST’S GREAT WAR AGAINST RUSSIA
Syria, the Ukraine, and other battlefields are just proxy conflicts. The object is the defeat and destruction of Russia as an independent world power.

For political, tactical and strategic reasons, Russia has fiercely sought parity with the West in terms of weaponry, and her triumph in this regard now serves as a deterrent against Washington’s criminal proclivities which even today could easily plunge the world into a nuclear Armageddon. It’s a sad and dangerous fact that most intelligent and decent people around the world recognize this, but most Americans do not, thanks to the thick curtain of lies enveloping their minds at all times. 

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THE WEST’S GREAT WAR AGAINST RUSSIA
Syria, the Ukraine, and other battlefields are just proxy conflicts. The object is the defeat and destruction of Russia as an independent world power.

Remarks on Interview of Professor Stephen Cohen on RT.COM on November 1, 2015

By Grover Furr

On November 1, 2015 Stephen F. Cohen was interviewed by Oksana Boyko, a journalist for RT.COM.

Cohen is a retired professor of Soviet history at Columbia University and New York University, a longtime columnist for The Nation magazine, and expert on Nikolai Bukharin.

Russia’s RT.com by most standards is a damn sight better at reporting international news than its Western counterparts, most of which are constantly engaged in campaigns of blatant disinformation on behalf of the US empire, a task which makes them accomplices in war promotions, a crime for which people received capital sentences at Nuremberg. Yet, perhaps due to the fact that Russia—while slowly evolving toward a more socialist posture —is still very much dominated in some sectors by big oligarchs, some of its media, including RT.com, continue to show moments of questionable programming. In our view this is one such instance, and the proof is that the host conducting the interview—Oksana Boyko— is almost indistinguishable in her animosity toward Stalin and by implication all things socialist from the multitude of Western disinformers that pass every day for professional journalists. Maybe she’s thinking of moving to the States and getting a big ticket job with Faux News, or CNN. Who knows? A career seems to beckon.

The truth and image of Stalin and the USSR itself is by now buried under numerous layers of distortions and falsifications with one unifying thread: whatever is said about them is normally said maliciously out of context, or in the absence of any historical context. In an introduction to a similar piece combating the web of hypocritical demonization of Stalin in 2o14 I said:

We have long maintained that the truth about the USSR, in general, and particularly the Stalin period, has long been the object of the most cynical, mean-spirited, and comprehensive propaganda effort ever seen in the annals of history.

For reasons of sheer class interest among the plutocrats of the West, the business elites that still rule most of the so-called “capitalist democracies,” the demonization of Stalin was a necessity, a campaign only briefly interrupted by World War Two and quickly resumed literally a few hours after its ending.

The Western elites —with the American ruling circles in the lead—correctly saw an enemy in Stalin. They could not bribe him and they could not intimidate him. Nor could they easily topple him, as they had done (and still do) countless times with weaker, “inconvenient leaders.” What’s more, Stalin was at the helm of a powerful nation and titular leader of an ideology directly opposed to their indispensable economic system. Occasional diplomacy aside, they hated him. He and his nation stood in the way of their plans for global hegemony. So the venom had to flow and did—abundantly. And in that sordid enterprise the capitalist elites found countless allies, countess intellectual whores, not to mention the usual battalions of ignorant, useful idiots. [See Historian: Stalin Not Guilty of Major War Crime Blamed on Him (Katyn)]

Nothing since has made me change my opinion on this matter.
—PG

In the late 1970s Cohen’s 1973 book Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution was translated secretly into Russian and smuggled into the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev said that it helped convince him of the evil of the Stalin years. It was the first book by a Western “Sovietologist” to be officially published in Russian, in the USSR, by a Soviet publisher.

Cohen has some credibility among leftists because he is a liberal among the scholars on the USSR. He has said that he was sorry to see the demise of the USSR and felt terrible about the suffering of the (former) Soviet working class during the Yeltsin years, when living standards and life expectancy went into a free fall. Cohen has opposed US policy on Ukraine and is much more supportive of the Putin policy than virtually any other mainstream scholar of Russia or the USSR.

It’s all the more important, therefore, to understand that on the subject of Stalin Cohen is more similar to than he is different from the Cold War anticommunist and anti-Stalin ideologues who are the main “expert” voices about Soviet history. Cohen shares with them what I have called the “anti-Stalin paradigm” of history. This is a version of Soviet history of the Stalin period entirely built on lies, fabrications, and forgeries. Cohen repeats some of them here.

In 2012 my Moscow colleague Vladimir L. Bobrov and I published a lengthy article titled “Stephen Cohen’s Biography of Bukharin: A Study in the Falsehood of Khrushchev-Era ‘Revelations’.” (Cultural Logic for 2010) In it we show that virtually every fact-claim Cohen makes in Chapter 10 of his Bukharin biography is false. This is the chapter that takes Bukharin’s life from 1930 to his trial and execution in 1938.

We begin that article by showing that Cohen deliberately lies in this book. Cohen quotes from the memoirs of one of Bukharin’s close friends and colleagues of the 1920s, the Swiss communist Jules Humbert-Droz. Humbert-Droz revealed that Bukharin told him in 1928 that he and his supporters were plotting to assassinate Stalin. Cohen never mentions this passage, concealing it from his readers. When confronted about this omission in 2014 Cohen claimed: “I knew nothing about his subsequent remark until well after my book was published.” This cannot possibly be true since Cohen quotes from the very same memoir in his book.

(I would like to note here that I was directed to Humbert-Droz’ memoir some years ago by a review by Vijay Singh, founder and editor of the fine journal Revolutionary Democracy.)

Therefore Cohen is not above lying about Soviet history of the Stalin period. But I think the main issue here is not Cohen’s personal dishonesty. Rather, it is the “anti-Stalin paradigm” which is required, is the only “politically correct” version of Soviet history allowed. And it is built on lies.

In this talk I will just outline the lies that Cohen tells in this RT.COM interview.

• Cohen refers to “20 million victims of Stalin.” This is a big lie. No anticommunist scholar has come anywhere close to such a number. Timothy Snyder, in Bloodlands, gets a figure of 6-8 million only by including 5 million who died in the 1932-33 famine as “Stalin’s victims.” The best estimates are that the real number of those who died as a result of the famine is about 2.9 million.
• “Collectivization led to the famine.” The opposite is true. Collectivization was a true reform, as Mark Tauger, the foremost expert on Russian famines, has written. As a result of the modernization and mechanization of agriculture, the cycle of famines every 2-3 years in Russia and Ukraine was stopped for good. I discuss this in detail in Blood Lies, where I state that the collectivization of agriculture should have been awarded a Nobel Prize as the greatest feat of social engineering of the 20th century.

We should never concede that there were any “victims of Stalin” other than the exploiters, the capitalists and their supporters, whose “victims” the Russian peasants and working class had been for centuries. Nor should we ever concede that “Stalin killed” anyone – not even one person. Stalin did not “kill” people at all.

• Cohen claims that “the terror continued till Stalin dies in 1953.” Even the most anticommunist researchers acknowledge that the so-called “terror” – mass executions – stopped when Lavrentii Beria took over as head of the NKVD from Nikolai Ezhov in late 1938.

Lenin, kittens, and Stalin, no less.

Likewise, we should never concede that there was ANY “terror.” In a 1986 article in Slavic Review, “Fear and Belief in the USSR’s ‘Great Terror’: Response to Arrest, 1935-1939” Robert Thurston argued that there was no “terror” because people were not “terrorized.”

The best term for this period is the Ezhovshchina, or “bad time of Ezhov.”

• Cohen claims that Stalin wrote “arrest family,” “arrest and shoot” on “lists.” This is false. I discuss this in my book Khrushchev Lied.
  These lists were sent to the Secretariat, including Stalin, “for review.” Many people on them were not executed, or received lesser punishments, or were released.
• Cohen claims that “the NKVD was given quotas by Stalin’s office.” A lie!
  Arch Getty discusses this in his latest book Practicing Stalinism. These were not quotas but limits – not minimum, but maximum numbers. Ezhov treated them as “quotas” – but Ezhov had his own conspiracy against the Soviet leadership, for which he was eventually arrested, tried, and executed.
• Cohen said: “We know Stalin issued an order for the NKVD in prisons” to “use physical force.”
  This is false too. I cover this in Khrushchev Lied. The order in question – which may be a forgery, authorizes the use of “means of physical pressure” only in the case of the most hardened and intransigent enemies of the state. (Cohen gets the dates wrong – the actual date is January 1939, not 1936-37, as Cohen says.)
• Cohen says: “Why did he [Stalin] destroy the military high command? Why did he kill them? He convinced himself that they were not loyal.”

We have a great deal of evidence that confirms the guilt of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other military commanders in plotting both a coup d’etat against the Soviet government and Party leadership, and also plotting with Germany and Japan to join invading fascist armies against the Soviet government in the event of war.

Marshal Tukhachevsky

The truth, as demonstrated by the best evidence, is that in stopping the military conspiracy Stalin’s leadership contributed to saving not only the Soviet Union, but all of Europe and indeed the world from fascism at that time. Both Germany and Japan would have been immeasurably stronger in their wars against the Allies if the military conspirators had succeeded. Germany would have had the immense material and human resources of the Soviet Union to turn against England and the US. Japan would have had the petroleum of the Soviet East and Sakhalin, making it far less vulnerable in its war against the USA.

Since Khrushchev’s day it has been heresy in the USSR, and now in Russia, to discuss the evidence that the military conspirators were guilty. But the evidence is there. I wrote about this in Chapter 17 of The Murder of Sergei Kirov. I have much more about the military conspiracy in my forthcoming book Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams.’ It will be published in December, 2015.

Bukharin

Cohen has been close to the family of Nikolai Bukharin for decades and is completely committed to the position that Bukharin was innocent, “framed” and murdered by Stalin. This flies in the face of all the evidence now available. Vladimir Bobrov and I have published several articles on Bukharin and the evidence against him that is now available. All are on my Home Page.

* Cohen claims that he met the daughter of “Kogan,” an NKVD man who had “tormented” Bukharin, and that Bukharin’s aged widow said that Kogan too had been a “victim” of Stalin. This is all wrong.

There were at least two NKVD men named Kogan. We don’t know which “Kogan” is in question here. In her autobiography, Bukharin’s widow Anna Larina just calls him “Kogan.” She also states that Bukharin sent her a note saying that his conditions in prison were very good! Neither she nor anyone else has any evidence that Kogan, or for that matter anybody, “tormented” Bukharin.

Some other sources assume the “Kogan” here is L.I. Kogan. If so, this Kogan was arrested tried, and executed in 1939, under Beria, for “illegal arrests of Soviet citizens and the falsification of criminal cases.” That is, when Beria, with the agreement of Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership, was investigating the criminal mass executions carried out under Ezhov. I cover this in my book Blood Lies.

Boyko, the interviewer, calls Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum “good historians” and contrasts them to Cohen, who is certainly a liberal compared to these two. In Blood Lies I expose Snyder’s dozens of lies about Stalin, the USSR, and communists.

This shows the convergence of overtly right-wing anticommunists with liberal anticommunists like Cohen in the “anti-Stalin paradigm.” This paradigm can accommodate both. Just as it also accommodates anarchists and Trotskyists, who compete with the overly pro-capitalist anticommunists in spreading lies and horror stories about Stalin.

In conclusion: lies about the Stalin period are promoted by all anticommunists, from the pseudo-left to liberal and right-wing. The Russian Revolution, the high point of whose achievements were attained during the period of Stalin’s leadership, continues to incite fear and hatred among its enemies.

Prof. Grover Furr is a revisionist historian who has dedicated decades to the patient study of Russian history through primary sources, and produced works (Kruschev Lied, Blood Lies), that powerfully contradict the virtually unanimous demonization of Stalin and the USSR, and the crimes imputed to both (such as the Katyn Massacre, Ukrainian famine, etc.), by both Western and even Russian authors. He maintains a page for scholars at https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/

APPENDIX

RT.COM VIDEOS WITH S. COHEN

Was Stalin Tyrant or Reformer? – Great Interview With Top Russia Scholar Stephen Cohen
Brutal monster, tyrant and sadist or moderniser, victor and reformer – it’s hard to find a more controversial figure in Russian history than Joseph Stalin. And while successive Russian leaders have approached his legacy differently, it remains as divisive today as ever. Can Russia come to terms with its dramatic past and is it possible to achieve closure, considering the mark this towering figure has left on the Russian people and national psyche? Oksana is joined by Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at New York University, to examine these issues.
Recorded from RT, Worlds Apart, November 1, 2015

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