THE WEST’S GREAT WAR AGAINST RUSSIA
The object is the defeat and destruction of Russia as an independent world power.

About the author

 Ruslan Ostashko is a distinguished Russian geopolitical analyst.  

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THE WEST’S GREAT WAR AGAINST RUSSIA
The object is the defeat and destruction of Russia as an independent world power.

Photo: Sputnik.com

AS REPORTED BY SPUTNIK

MIDDLE EAST

China’s recent announcement of an increase of its humanitarian support for the Syrian people and that it would provide additional training to the Syrian forces comes as a “headache for the US,” according to the American media.

“As if the multi-party war in Syria weren’t complicated enough, it now appears that the People’s Republic of China has decided to take a more active role in the conflict, providing increased humanitarian assistance and possibly military training to Syrian forces,” says the New York-based news website The Fiscal News.

The website notes that Beijing’s announcement comes just a day after Russia announced that it had launched strikes against Daesh from an airbase inside the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“Combined, these two events create a major foreign policy conundrum for the Obama administration, as three of the countries, most resistant to the US on the global stage, appear to be teaming up against a non-state actor that has frustrated the US for years,” it further notes.

This point of view is echoed by The New York Times (the semi-official voice of the US ruling class), which says that Russia now has “the ability to strike from virtually all directions in a region where it has been reasserting its power — from Iran, from warships in the Caspian Sea, from its base in the Syrian coastal province of Latakia and now from the Mediterranean.”

The newspaper however notes that the decision to fly the long-range bombers from Iran rather than from Moscow is even “far more important militarily”: if it continues, this “could result in a more devastating air war over a long period of time.”

The outlet explains that “while both Russia and the US say they share the goal of defeating the Islamic State group (Daesh) in Syria, they are waging parallel but separate wars against the militant group while simultaneously backing opposite sides in the conflict between Russia’s ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and his other opponents, including rebels backed by the US.”

Meanwhile on Wednesday Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that he US has acknowledged that it has been unable to separate the opposition in Syria from terrorists. (Surprise! As if they had not known this all along, since they created it and have supported it for any years.—Eds.)

“Regrettably, our partners in fact acknowledged that they cannot do this,” Lavrov said.

“But we are not making a tragedy out of this. The directions of our work now allow switching to a coordinated and a more efficient cooperation in the fight against terrorists,” Russia’s top diplomat added.

Earlier in August Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also said that the US was unprepared to separate terrorist organizations from the moderate opposition in Syria.

“The Syrian government has embarked on the separation of terrorists from the moderate opposition and the civilians…Our colleagues in Washington were not ready to do [that] for political reasons, and did not intend to do [that] throughout the past months in defiance of the signals and the promises they gave us,” Ryabkov added.

The Russian-US partnership in Syria cannot be genuine as long as Washington puts forward additional demands, according to the diplomat. 

“We have repeatedly drawn the Americans’ attention to the fact that after each successful round of closed negotiations and after reaching certain agreements, Washington begins putting forward additional requirements that violate the entire balance and prevent progress immediately afterward,” Ryabkov then said.

He added that “there are regular Russia-US contacts along various lines. Both foreign and defense ministries are involved in these contacts.

“We attribute as unflattering the assessments we hear from our American colleagues,” he said.

“Washington has been completely inconsistent in its actions in Syria, putting forward demands to stop fighting terrorists as soon as the Syrian army has achieved real success in fight against terrorists”, Ryabkov said.

As soon as the Syrian government and the armed forces have achieved, with Russian support, a real progress in the fight against terrorists, the Americans began to use unacceptable methods, demanding, in essence, the cessation of the fight against terrorists.

US Secretary of State John Kerry made the promise to separate the groups as part of the understandings underlying the February 22 cease-fire, but never delivered on it.

A central issue in the US-Russian cease-fire negotiations in February was the fact that the opposition groups supported by the CIA operate in close proximity to and full cooperation with units of al-Nusra Front.

Last year the former US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford (2010-2014), admitted that the Obama administration had long “looked the other way while the [al-]Nusra Front and armed groups on the ground, some of which are getting help from the US, have coordinated in military operations against the regime.”

Now, backed with US weaponry, these same groups are a significant barrier to upcoming peace talks in Geneva.

AS REPORTED BY RUSSIA INSIDER/ZERO HEDGE

China Sides With Russia In Syrian War, Will Provide “Aid And Military Training” To Assad

China’s Rear Admiral Guan Youfei

It’s heating up

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Dispatches from
STEPHEN LENDMAN

W 

About the author

STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."  ( http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ) Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Dispatches from Eric Zuesse

Eric Zuesse, updated from his original post at strategic-culture.org

On August 18th, the terrific “Moon of Alabama” blogger posted his brilliant exposé of an operation that the U.S. and its allies support and are lobbying to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but that’s really just a group of people who help Syria’s anti-Assad jihadists by medicating their injured jihadists, and by carrying off and disposing of the jihadists’ victims’ corpses. The headline is “The ‘Wounded Boy In Orange Seat’ — Another Staged ‘White Helmets’ Stunt”. This story concerns staged (faked) photos by that Western-funded-and-backed jihadist organization — photos which have prominently been spread in Western ‘news’ media (and here’s an example of that Western propaganda on August 20th, from NPR’s sanctimonious sucker Scott Simon, quoting the New York Times’s sanctimonious sucker Nick Kristof, both of them [witting] suckers of their own government’s hoax, and passing it on to their fools who trust their deceived and propagandistic ‘reporting’). It’s all being done in order to fool Western publics to support their governments’ financial and military assistance to (actually) the jihadists who have been imported by the U.S. and allied governments into Syria to overthrow Assad, who is supported by the majority of Syrians, while the United States and the jihadists it backs are despised by 82% of Syrians. They’re imported to conquer land there, and to help bring down the Assad government and to replace the existing secular Syrian government with a ‘pro-Western’ government run by ‘our’ jihadists, who (unlike the secular government of Bashar al-Assad) will allow the fundamentalist-Islamic royal families who own Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to pipeline through Syria into the European Union, their oil and gas, so as to supplant Russia’s oil and gas in Europe — the biggest-of-all energy-market.

Here, then, was my earlier report on the White Helmets — these U.S.-backed hoaxters and assistants to jihadists:

A four-minute video that was posted to youtube on April 29th documents that the U.S. government has been lying about an organization, the White Helmets, the U.S. government hires to assist Syria’s Al Qaeda, called “Al Nusra,” to dispose of corpses of persons Al Nusra executes. Nusra kills Syrian government soldiers; and, according to Seymour Hersh and other investigative journalists, has, throughout the Syrian war, been supplied guns and other weapons by the governments of U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, for that purpose. This is part of America’s operation to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, whom even Western polling shows to be popular amongst the Syrian general population. That same polling shows Nusra and other jihadist organizations (and the U.S. government, which arms them) to be extremely unpopular in Syria.

On April 19th, the U.S. State Department had blocked entrance into the United States by Raed Saleh, the head of the White Helmets, and refused to say why. Saleh had been invited to receive in NYC an award by USAID and NGOs that the U.S. government finances, but he was barred at the airport, apparently because the FBI had placed him onto its no-fly list as a known terrorist.

The White Helmets claim to receive no funds from any government, but the four-minute video shows a State Department official admitting “we supply through USAID about twenty three million dollars in assistance to them” (which might be annually, but that question wasn’t addressed in the video). The White Helmets’ founder, James Lemesurier, is himself funded by the governments of UK, Japan, Denmark and Netherlands, all of which are likewise trying to overthrow Assad. 

Thus, U.S. and other Western taxpayers are funding this allegedly ‘non-partisan’ and ‘humanitarian’ but actually jihadist, organization, whose leader was, on April 19th, prevented from receiving in the U.S., a ‘humanitarian’ award, for processing corpses that Nusra — which the U.S. government also supports — is producing. The White Helmets also rescue jihadists (and their inevitable civilian hostages), who have been injured by Syrian government forces. That’s their ‘humanitarian’ work. This video shows jihadists cheering White Helmets. The anti-Assad ‘charities’ that were wanting to award Raed Saleh in the U.S., have said they’ll instead do it in Turkey, which is a U.S. ally — even a member of NATO.

As regards what the Syrian public think, it’s highly favorable toward Assad and highly unfavorable toward the jihadist organizations that now infest their country from abroad, and also against the United States, which they view as being the main source of this ‘civil war’ (which is instead actually a foreign invasion of their country).

The video also shows the British agent (and Britain is yet another U.S. ally) who founded and organized the ‘non-partisan humanitarian organization’, White Helmets, Mr. Lemesurier.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Syrian government is an ally of Russia, and America’s policy is to overthrow and replace the leader of any nation who is friendly toward Russia, such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Manuel Zelaya, Viktor Yanukovych, or Bashar al-Assad. These governments then become failed states. When Zelaya was replaced in 2009, the country he led, Honduras, became a narco-state and has since had the world’s highest murder-rate. Jihadists weren’t even needed in the Honduran case. The U.S. government didn’t perpetrate that particular coup, but only helped it succeed and enabled the installed new regime to remain in power. The Honduran coup was actually perpetrated by agents of that country’s twelve aristocratic families, who own almost all of the country. However, normally, the U.S. government itself overthrows the leaders it doesn’t like, and doesn’t merely aid the regimes that a coup by the local aristocracy has already installed. Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Presidential candidate, was the key person in the Obama Administration who worked, behind the scenes, to keep in power the coup regime that took over in Honduras on 28 June 2009. Without her assistance to the Honduran coup-regime, Zelaya, whom virtually all other governments supported as being still the legal leader of Honduras, would have been restored to power; the coup-regime would have had to bow out. By contrast, her — and President Obama’s — efforts to replace Syria’s secular but nominally Shiite President Assad, by using Saudi-funded foreign-imported Sunni jihadists, haven’t been nearly so successful, unless creating the highest degree of misery among the residents in any country in the world, is viewed by Obama and Clinton as ‘success’. 

As I had reported on April 16th, headlining, “Why Obama Prioritizes Ousting Assad Over Defeating Syria’s Jihadists”:

The “2016 Global Emotions Report” by Gallup, surveying over a thousand people in each one of 140 different nations, found that, by far, the people in Syria had “the lowest positive experiences worldwide,” the people there were far more miserable than in any other nation. The score was 36 (on a scale to 100). Second and third worst were tied at 51: Turkey because of the tightening dictatorship there as Turkey has become one of Obama’s key allies in toppling Assad; Nepal, on account of the earthquake.

So: America certainly doesn’t give a damn about the sufferings of the Syrians, and of the Iraqis, sufferings that the U.S. itself caused and which invasions by us (and by the jihadists we and our Saudi and other ‘friends’ have armed and assisted to get into Syria through our ‘friend’ Turkey) have produced the two nations with the most misery on this planet. Our Presidents mouth platitudes of ‘caring’, but, to judge by their actions, are merely lying psychopaths. But whatever they are, they’re causing the most misery of anyone. How much coverage of that fact is there in the American press? Hasn’t America’s press actually been complicit in this, all along?

So, this is the reason why the U.S. government refuses entry to a terrorist it hires to create hell for the people in Syria: it doesn’t want individuals such as Raed Saleh inside the United States. America’s leaders know that, if something like this happens, and if word of it becomes well known, the American public could become even less supportive of their leaders than they already are. It’s not what America’s aristocracy want. They might not care about the American public, but they care very much about staying in power, regardless whether under the “Democratic” or under the “Republican” label.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ack on 26 June 2015, Raed Saleh had somehow been allowed into the United States, to address an “Arria” briefing (named after the far-right aristocratic military Venezuelan diplomat and member of the U.S. aristocratic Council on Foreign Relations, Diego Arria) to the U.N. Security Council, where Saleh announced in his opening paragraph that his focus would be “to convey the message of the search and rescue teams in Syria about the suffering of the Syrian people due to the regime’s bombing with indiscriminate weapons, particularly barrel bombs.” Those were the cheap, even amateurish, improvised bombs that the Syrian Army were using to kill as many of the jihadists as they could, but which also inevitably killed and maimed also many Syrian civilians in the occupied areas of the country — there’s no way to avoid it. Saleh’s speech didn’t mention any of the many foreign jihadist groups such as Nusra and ISIS that were and are killing far more of everybody than Assad’s forces were. His focus was instead totally against Assad and the government’s forces, not at all against the jihadist mercenaries who had entered the country and made hell there; and, Saleh said, “The Syrian people who are being killed every day, Ladies and Gentlemen, hold you responsible” for not helping those jihadists eliminate the existing Syrian government. He said this without at all referring to what even Western polling of Syrians had consistently shown to be the case, which was the exact opposite: they hold the U.S. to blame and they loathe the jihadists and support the government. So, clearly, the United States did the correct thing when finally placing this jihadist of theirs onto America’s no-fly list. To the exact contrary of the U.S. government’s propaganda which says that he’s a hero and that he and his organization are ‘nonpartisan’ and that he is, as he calls himself, “the head of Syrian Civil Defense,” that appellation for him is like calling Hitler’s medics during his invasion of, say, France, “French Civil Defense.” George Orwell’s allegorical novel 1984 has clearly been surpassed in today’s reality. The extent to which Western publics accept the arrant lies they’re fed is exceeding, perhaps, even Orwell’s expectations.

Media “bipartisan” lies for the same Imperialist Objective

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o: one typical piece of Republican propaganda about the White Helmets is the May 1st article in the Wall Street Journal, “White Helmets Are White Knights for Desperate Syrians”, while a typical piece of Democratic propaganda about them is the New York Times eleven days earlier, on April 20th, which headlined “Leader of Syria Rescue Group, Arriving in U.S. for Award, Is Refused Entry”, and it reported there that “Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, called the denial of entry ‘a scandal.’ ‘The White Helmets are one of the few organizations in Syria that have been above reproach,’ he said. ‘They have tried to observe strict neutrality in order to facilitate their humanitarian work and save lives. To do this they have worked along side all sorts of militias in order to get to victims of the fighting.’” He didn’t say that the “militias” are overwhelmingly foreign jihadist groups paid by America’s fundamentalist-Sunni allies the Sauds, and Qatar’s royal family the Thanis, to overthrow the secular Shiite Assad. But, after all, it’s only propaganda, anyway. Right?

Furthermore, the Syrian public might view that conception of ‘strict neutrality’ much the way Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps viewed the conception of ‘strict neutrality’ as between themselves and their oppressors, or the way Chinese in the Nanjing Massacre viewed that ‘strict neutrality’ between themselves and the Japanese invaders. And, polls in Syria do show they view the U.S. and its allies as the invaders. Instead of ‘strict neutrality,’ the U.S. and its allies are the foreign invaders, and not at all ‘neutral’. And, to state this documented fact (documented here by the links) isn’t propaganda at all; it’s news-reporting, in an entirely verified historical context (which is very different from propaganda).

What that four-minute video shows is news-reporting, in exactly this sense. That’s why it’s presented here: it brings all of this together, succinctly; and what I’ve done here is to document some of its important historical context, to help people who are skeptical of it (and, in such a lying world, everything should be viewed with a scientist’s skepticism) understand and evaluate it, at a deeper level than a mere four minutes can possibly present, even in a video.

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By Gilbert Mercier
NEWS JUNKIE POST

INTRO BY THE EDITORS OF SURVIVING CAPITALISM

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nybody who has been unfortunate to be in a car or plane crash, but lucky enough to survive it and tell the story afterwards knows the inherent paradox: the event occurred in the blink of an eye, but seemed, in retrospect, to have unfolded in a dreadful slow-motion sequence. What can be called the crash time elasticity contradiction is an accurate metaphor for our era. It is the deep dichotomy of an intuitive knowledge that we, as a global collective, are on a deadly collision course while wearing the distorted slow-motion rosy glasses of projection, looking into some fictional eternal future. If time has, by essence, no end, our life span as a foolish megalomaniac species is about to reach an ugly curtain call. While the end times is a religious fiction, our looming apocalypse is entirely man-made and, as such, is a mere by product of ignorance and collective apathy.

For the very few of us still trying to impact the discourse, it has become incredibly challenging not to give in and surrender to the general entropy of crash time. With so many with their heads in the sand, ignoring an imminent systemic collapse, the effort to wake people up has become more than a Herculean task. The overall attention span is so minimal that ideas are almost never transformed into actions but are just ephemeral ripples on the deep water of forgetfulness. The constant media assault with its cacophony of  killing mayhem, spectacles staged as reality, and propaganda passing  for news has thoroughly brainwashed many people into a state of uncomfortable numbness. Meaningful ideas could, not so long ago, make waves and even change the tide of history. Now, the words of complex concepts have been gutted of all significance and served for idea consumption as trending hash tags. The media brainwasher/propagandists have powerful bullhorns and are always hard at work to keep their vast audience either uninformed, anxious, and feeling powerless or entertained. The news cycle has to spin so fast that critical thinking is never an option.

This deliberate aggression on our collective psyche, switching in rapid daily succession, is similar to the sleep deprivation torture technique known to induce psychosis in individuals. As an example, here is a frantic but accurately summarized version of a recent chain of events which was conveniently tucked in between two feel-good big media stories: Euro 2016 in the sports/entertainment division and the Democrats’ convention in the politics/entertainment category. A mass killing in Nice, conveniently justifying a three-month extension of the state ofemergency in France; a failed military coup in Turkey, conveniently allowing PM Erdogan to assert a near absolute dictatorship in the country; an attack in Munich allegedly from Islamists, conveniently allowing Chancellor Merkel to reverse her previously generous Syrian migrantsasylum policy; the killing of more than 200 Shiites in Kabul, Afghanistan, conveniently ignored by most Western media outlets.

It can reasonably be argued, and easily demonstrated, that a disease afflicting a person usually quickly affects a community. This goes of course for the middle-age plague pandemic called the Black Death which killed an estimated 50 percent of Europe’s population, and more than 120 million people worldwide. Beside its death toll, which reduced  the world population by more than 25 percent during the 14th century, the plague pandemic induced deep collective psychological turmoil in connection with the interpretation that it was God’s punishment on mankind, and the start of the apocalypse. The plague revived the intolerance of religious fundamentalism. The Black Death was a foray into collective psychosis, where affected people were quarantined to die by the million from starvation.

A lot more recently, another form of collective psychosis struck humanity. That one was not a disease brought by rats, contaminated by infected fleas, to the shores of Europe, it was the ideology of  the Nazis in Germany, and their fascist allies in Italy and imperial Japan. During the Weimar Republic, which  spanned from 1919 to 1933, Germany was a culturally vibrant country at the vanguard in art, music, sciences, philosophy and literature. Nobody could have forecast that such an advanced civilization would become literally hypnotized by a mad man like Adolf Hitler. The global collective psychotic episode which engulfed the world between 1939 and 1945 and is called World War II, killed an estimated 72 million people worldwide. When one studies the history of mankind, it appears that mental disease combined with unusual charisma in a leader can be even more contagious than the plague in the middle-age. Contemporary Germans and Japanese suffer, in large part, from a convenient historical amnesia, but the evidence proves that their ancestors living during World War II were, by an overwhelming majority, fanatic supporters of  Hitler and the emperor.

Hitler and the Nazis used the powers of seduction, decorum and elaborate brainwashing strategies to propagate their brand of madness, but in the summer of 1945, across the Atlantic, a seemingly quiet and normal leader did the unthinkable with two criminally insane decisions. On August 6, 1945, unassuming Harry Truman had no moral issue with ordering the killing of 140,000 civilians in Hiroshima, Japan with atomic bombs. Truman coldly did it again three days later and killed another 80,000 in Nagasaki. The quiet little man should be remembered as the lunatic who established terror as state policy. In August 1945, Japan was on its knees. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not about speeding up the end of World War II like American historic propaganda still claims, it was about asserting US hegemony and scaring the world into submission. It is not a coincidence that only the United States of America has used the atomic bomb in warfare; it has been the empire’s ultimate prerogative.

From August 1945 to the present, the biggest collective fear has been nuclear annihilation, but like lab rats are often exposed to unmotivated electric shocks, smaller doses of fear and paranoia are administered to the population almost on a daily basis. Mass killings in some part of the planet or another, have become extremely useful to condition people  into submission. In November, it will be a year since France has been under the boots of a state of emergency. Who would have thought that the country of revolution would have tolerated this? But again, who would have thought that Germany, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Yugoslavia could fall into the darkness of collective psychosis almost overnight? Who would have thought that a little man with the charisma of an accountant could have been mad enough to go on a rampage and kill 220,000 Japanese in August 1945? In a world gone mad, perhaps letting the criminally insane run the asylum is not such a good idea after all.

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