By Marcus Godwyn for the Saker blog
(with huge thanks to Gleb Glinker for expert proof reading and wise editing; the introduction to this article has been posted before here)

As western media and politicians relentlessly continue to spew forth warnings to their hapless populations about the ever present and growing “Russian threat”, only today: 12-11-2017 NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg has told Europe to “Prepare for a Russian invasion”. Let us take a moment to analyse just who exactly among the hundred and fifty million odd Russians in the world actually constitute a threat to “the west”, to anywhere else or indeed, to other Russians.

Putin is hated because he incarnates the resurgence of a sovereign Russia, and opposition to global US hegemonism. Of course, those reasons hardly justify a war on Tussia, hence the barrage of never ending lies.

For the rest of this article, I will use the term “the west” to define the rulers, as well as the public faces (politicians, journalists etc) of North America, the rest of the Anglo Saxon world and western and northern Europe i.e. the geopolitical alliance whose leaders have once again declared war on the Russian world.

So who are the most dangerous Russians in the world today? Are they, as the west so desperately needs you to believe, the Russian government and its president Vladimir Putin? A resounding NO is the only possible answer that any sane, rational and even slightly informed conscious individual could give. If I had to think of one word to sum up the behaviour of the Russian government over the last four years it would be: “ZEN”! The west started openly provoking Russia in the early 2000s but since the attempt to attack Damascus by the US in 2013 was thwarted by Russia (and some say China, too), Russia has been subjected to endless and very extreme provocations which can only be interpreted as being designed to goad Russia into making the first move towards war with the west. Whether the western rulers actually want a third world war now and nuclear Armageddon (We have all read the stories and seen the photos of what are allegedly the luxury underground “bunkers” that the ruling elites have been preparing for themselves to inhabit while the rest of us burn at their bidding) or, whether they are arrogant and self deluded enough to think that Russia will just capitulate to their will if faced with the threat of all-out war or that the population of Russia is actually oppressed and ready to rise up against its leadership for the chance to be “liberated”, or whether they believed that the Russian armed forces remain as inefficient, ill equipped, demoralized and potentially disloyal as they seemed to be, or at least as we in the west were told they were, in the years immediately after the collapse of the USSR and thus war with Russia this time round will be a pushover, I cannot tell but these provocations have been extreme and extraordinarily dangerous on the part of the west.

"The Russian restraint in retaliating in kind and refusing to be dragged into war has left the west increasingly exposed, at least to the more perceptive among its own population and others around the world, as the aggressive, lying, land grabbing force it actually is and has led to increasing frustration among the west’s rulers culminating in a petulant frenzy of provocations in the dying months of the Obama regime..."

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government by The US and EU in February 2014 could oh so easily, if hotter heads had been in charge in the Kremlin, have led almost immediately to WW3. It is clear that the Russians did not expect such an extreme move from the west and were caught napping. If Putin was the kind of person who allows himself to be eaten by personal pride or whipped into action while smarting from loss of face and even a few of his ministers and advisers were of a similar hue we could all be radioactive dust by now.

The fact is that under Putin’s leadership, Russia has simply absorbed and dissolved every attack the west has thrown at it resorting to physical, military action only when considered absolutely necessary but also, crucially, when the possibility of success without bringing the west into a major, immediate armed conflict seemed virtually assured. The saving of Crimea and its population and the Russian intervention in Syria at the Syrian governments behest being the two most prominent examples. The Russian restraint in retaliating in kind and refusing to be dragged into war has left the west increasingly exposed, at least to the more perceptive among its own population and others around the world, as the aggressive, lying, land grabbing force it actually is and has led to increasing frustration among the west’s rulers culminating in a petulant frenzy of provocations in the dying months of the Obama regime. Ultimately, this outstanding display of disciplined, “Zen” self control from the Russian leadership may not avert the all the out war that the west appears to crave so much but it certainly has done so up until now and will still be talked about in a thousand years time assuming we somehow survive. If ordinary citizens of the west can still go ordinarily about their ordinary business, it is thanks to team Putin in the Kremlin and certainly not their own governments.

Putin demonisation by the presstitutes: journalistic excrement for the Western publics.

So if not the Russian leadership, who then could be the most dangerous Russians in the world today? What about the Russian mafia we used to hear so much about? Well they certainly were dangerous, in Russia and around the world back in the 90s and early 2000s. Have western headline writers forgotten about them? The fact is that Putin, slowly but surely crushed them! I’m not pretending that crime has disappeared from Russia; that would be nonsense, but the grip of organized crime on Russian life has been all but eliminated. Also gone are the gangs of ultra racist, decidedly dangerous skinhead types whom I saw with my own eyes in St Petersburg in the early 2000s. That leads me on to hooligans. Russia, like Britain has a hooligan culture and a culture of street fighting and like Britain, Russia is a country of extremes. Hooligans can still be dangerous late at night in Russian towns and cities but the problem has receded greatly since my time of living there. Something which cannot be said of The UK.

What about crazy Russian drivers? While there has been a slight but definite improvement. It is still true that many Russian drivers, men and women, seem to enter an alternative universe as soon as they get behind the wheel. A universe where the basic laws of science, gravity, mass, velocity, momentum etc suddenly don’t apply to them. You do still take your life in your hands when setting out on the roads of Russia and yes: these irresponsible drivers I would put in second place for this ignominious title but they are not the most dangerous. Not even close.

By far, dear reader...by far the most dangerous Russians in the world today, dangerous for themselves, dangerous for their own country, dangerous for the peace the whole world, and even the survival of human civilization are those who have come to be known as “Russian liberals”! Those Russians who, stubbornly and obstinately and against all the overwhelming evidence that stands against them, still persist in believing that the west remains, (if it ever was), the guiding light on the hill, the pinnacle of justice, freedom, democracy, innovation, quality and the place where people simply have most “fun”.

Thanks be to God this kind of Russian is now in a small minority in their own country but they are still very vociferous and of course always sought out by western journalists for interviews which are then presented to the western public as representative of Russian popular opinion which they are not. For whatever reason by far the largest concentration of Russian “west worshipers” is found in St Petersburg. A fact that is definitely not lost on the western rulers whose private army, NATO, is just a hundred and fifty kilometers down the road massing on the Estonian-Russian boarder. The second biggest concentration of them is in Moscow. They are found in all corners of Russia but in provincial towns and cities most people seem to have a much more down to earth grip on reality. Examine and discuss.

From my observations I will break these most dangerous Russians down into various separate but overlapping categories:

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

No 1 The first is the purely evil. Those who know perfectly well the kind of micro-chipped enslavement the western private central bankers are preparing for the rest of humanity and want “IN” to those western ruling elite circles. These are, of course, in a very small minority but by far [remain] the most dangerous of the dangerous. I would say that Khordokovsky is one such as are many of his erstwhile colleagues. Such people are knowingly and wantonly collaborating with ultimate evil for power and sometimes, untold riches on this earth now and the western rulers are counting on them to deliver Russia for dismemberment, rape, pillage and oblivion. They have literally sold their souls to the Devil just as in all those old stories. Unlike the Russian liberals further removed from the upper echelons of the west’s ruling elite, they perfectly understand the deep ancestral hatred of Russia largely because Russia became the largest and most powerful Christian i.e. Orthodox country in the world and which resisted, until 1917 all their attempts to gain control of its central bank and money supply, and are more than ready to participate in her ultimate destruction. It is vital to understand here that it is people of this mind set who, a hundred and more years ago were responsible in facilitating for the west the overthrow of The Russian Empire and the ensuing, illegal Bolshevik putsch. Even senior government ministers became spies for the western powers.

No 2 The second are those Russians who pathologically hate everything Russian including its people! For these Russia haters, the Russian people are a primitive mass of zombies who are desperately in need of being educated by THEM. This is an unfortunate tradition that the Lord sent to test Russia that goes centuries back. Lenin and Trotsky were two prime examples of this mentality. Such people are utterly convinced that everything foreign but especially from the west is innately superior to anything home grown from religion, philosophy, art, science, to clothes, food, toothpaste, dust and so it goes on. (Note: In this we completely disagree with the author, as an instance of misplaced conceptual overreach reeking of blind anti-Sovietism. Surely he can find better and fairer examples in the contemporary record.—Editor.)

Alexey Navalny: already a witting tool of the Western intel agencies, part of the new wave of "dissidents" the West is always upholding in its hypocritical effort to demonise Russia.

No 3 The third are those who do not hate everything Russian. They can and do enjoy many aspects of Russian life and culture from Banya to literature, dacha to classical music, theater or Russian alternative culture but still pathologically hate everything concerned with the Russian state and government which for them is always bad. The Tsars were bad, The Bolsheviks were bad, Yeltsin was bad but just slightly less so as he was pro western but Putin is somehow the worst of the worst. Their only solution to all problems is that Russia should copy the west in every aspect of its governance, submit unconditionally to all the west’s demands on her and until it does so it will remain “backwards and primitive”. Many however have only the vaguest idea, if any, of the realities of modern western governance. Navalny is probably the most well known example here.

A large proportion of the third category mentioned above are elderly people who still seem to regard the west as that kindly old uncle that it genuinely seemed to be back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. The kindly, rich old “Uncle West” who looked after Joseph Brodsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to name but a few when they fell foul of the Soviet authorities. Who also provided superior consumer items through relatives who had managed to emigrate. Who provided vinyl disks of “free & exciting” popular music and jeans to go with it, published and translated writers banned in the USSR, who had better clothes, cars, food, restaurants and whose shops were groaning with copious choice of what to buy compared to near empty and dismal Soviet ones. It is undeniable that in the postwar world the west outshone the communist east in pretty much every way and seemed, on the surface at least, to have a genuine claim to the moral high ground.

I, like many on both sides of the iron curtain had simply assumed that this was due to the innate superiority of free market economics compared to centrally planned economies. Nothing is so simple. It is only relatively recently that I have learned and then understood that in the “free west” we no longer have any free market economy. (There have been times in history, ancient and modern when free market economies have existed. Because our country’s central banks, and hence the control of the amount of money circulating in any given country are controlled by very secretive, publicly unaccountable individuals who can and do create booms and busts to suit their own private agenda which is total global control and domination via their grip on the money supply and loans at interest i.e. usury which is actually forbidden by most of the world’s major religions but….)

These [plutocratic] elites control the governments, the media and the education system and have, of course never allowed their all pervasive role to appear in the history books. They took a huge leap forward when they created, by stealth, The Federal Reverse in the US in 1913 and when their seventy year campaign to bring down The Russian Empire finally came to fruition in 1917. As I have mentioned every Tsar refused and foiled every attempt to gain control of the Russian money supply and Russia’s immense wealth by these private banking families and this was the main reason why the so called Russian Revolution happened. These families now funded the new Bolshevik state for interest and, whether the new terrorist rulers liked it or not, the USSR became a captive market for these western bankers and their western-engineered but built-in the USSR products.

A few years ago the top of my head blew off when I read an interview with Soviet dissident Alexander Zinoviev given in 1999 which filled in perfectly for me one of the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle I had been striving to find, namely: why living standards in the west began to decline for most people as soon as the USSR was dissolved. Frankly I find some of his assertions verging on the insane, such as: “Stalin should have had me shot when I was seventeen because I was against him and hence a threat to the USSR” but Zinoviev had the real nature of the west perfectly sussed! He understood the existence of the financial control system I have outlined above and that the western nations had been allowed, in the post WW2 period and for the time being, to experience a semblance of real freedom and enterprise in economic, political, artistic and scientific fields by these financial ruling elites so that it would outshine communism over which the bankers had lost some but not all of their control due to the the Soviet victory in WW2 and occupation of many eastern European states but also because the USSR had begun discovering oil and gas in very many places on its territory which, together with the successful testing of the first Soviet atomic bomb, enabled Stalin to show the western manipulators a fairly stiff middle finger.

Now: in 1991, there was no more communism that needed to be “outshined” and westerners’ disposable income was systematically “called in” as if it were a debt owed to the financial elites.

Alexander Zinoviev: a professional dissident?

As someone who was living in western Europe at the time I can testify to feeling that as soon as the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin on the evening of 26-12-1991 life in the west began to become ever more expensive and more oppressive and life there, somehow empty! As Zinoviev put it: “The end of communism in the Soviet Union also meant the end of democracy in the western world”.

Our Russian liberals have not the faintest idea about any of this. They still see western Europe and America as having superior everything as it did in reality by the time the USSR “collapsed” and hence believe in the false divide of capitalism vs communism. Most cannot accept the one hundred percent role reversal that has taken place between the west and Russia, just as many people everywhere have great difficulty in accepting the one thing that none of us can avoid: change.

There is also a category who were dissidents in the late Soviet era (to which, ironically, Alexander Zinoviev to some extent belongs) and just can’t stop being anti instead of pro. They were anti-Soviet. the USSR collapsed so they were anti-Yeltsin. He resigned so they became anti-Putin. Now most of them are anti-Russian Orthodox Church. I have the feeling with these people that even if the Lord himself came down to earth and righted all the world’s wrongs in front of their noses they would soon, even overnight, turn into dissidents against God bursting with flatulent reasons for complaint and dissatisfaction.

No 4 The fourth category is the category of expats for whom time stands still. These are people who emigrated from the USSR or the Russian federation in the late 80s, early 90s and for whom time stopped at that moment. Yes they live in the west using internet, mobile phones and many other innovations that have come into our lives since their emigration but their relationship to the land they left, whether accurately assessed at the time or not, remains exactly where it was at the moment their plane took of or their train crossed the Russian border. This is a very interesting phenomenon that merits serious psychological research. Even those who regularly return do not see the new Russia in front of their eyes! They see only the country as it was when they left. They represent an extreme example of Man seeing only what he wants to see or that which he has been taught to see as I suspect, ironically some may mistakenly say, that it is the extreme effectiveness of Soviet brainwashing that has rendered these people so incapable of perceiving the reality that is in front of their eyes.

I will give one of the most extreme examples from personal experience. Once upon a time not so long ago in a land not so far away I was invited to a party near Paris by a close Russian friend. About half the guests were Russian expats living in or around the French capital most of whom I already knew. There was one forty-something lady whom I had never met. Soon enough we fell into conversation. She was from St Petersburg and had been living in France for more than twenty years.

I happened to mention that it seemed to me that living standards in Russia had begun rising again despite western sanctions. She rounded on me like you can’t believe. “What are you talking about? Ninety percent of Russians are living in abject poverty and it’s getting worse” Under some shock at the strength and erroneousness of this reaction I hesitantly retorted: “Well, that’s not my impression having lived in St Petersburg for most of the last thirteen years.” “Oh you westerners never know anything about the real Russia! Where do you live when you’re there?” “Apraksin Lane” I answered. Now: Apraksin Pereulok = Lane is a rather tatty street in the very center of the city which many Peters-bourgeois dislike because of a famous clothes market mainly run and manned by people from the Caucasus and central Asia. Its location in the city suits me perfectly however. “Aha” she replied. “That is in the center. Only rich people live there! I knew it! You can’t learn anything about the real Russia living there!” Now flabbergasted, I attempted to explain to her that I had lived there since 2005 and that I knew many of my neighbours and had seen many come and go, had many a tale to tell and the vast majority were certainly not “rich” although as I repeated, living standards had been rising and all the old, Soviet cars in the courtyard had been replaced by modern ones. When was the last time you were in Russia or St Petersburg I ventured to ask. “Three months ago” came the reply. “Marcus! I’m telling you! Apraksin Lane is only for the super rich and living there you never see the penury that the vast majority of Russians are condemned to endure every day. Of course there are no prizes for guessing on whose shoulders she laid the blame for all this “penury”. Realising it was hopeless and wondering whether this woman could actually be considered sane, I moved on.

NATO Warmonger in Chief—Jens Stoltenberg. A disgrace to Scandinavia, too.

Such people are of course, manna from heaven for the western media being onsite as it were and can often be seen, heard and read on western media outlets. That lady is the most extreme case I have come across so far.

No 5. The fifth category are the young “west worshipers”; some of them so young they were not even born when the USSR collapsed and are hence, in theory, untouched by the effects of Soviet brainwashing. (See editorial note at foot of this article)  It is hard for me to understand why they are so fact-resistant but I will put forward a few theories.

Firstly: in their childhood and formative years, the nineties, Russia was robbed dry by corrupt oligarchs in league with corrupt financial “advisers” from western governments and “prestigious”western universities which resulted in the standard of living for many falling even lower than it had been in the USSR, mass unemployment and the inevitable spread of mass corruption from the street level to the very top which meant that most continued to see the west as a beacon of hope and this was indeed a period of mass emigration to western countries with highly qualified people having a particularly easy passage as yet again the west profited from the high standards of Russian Empire-Soviet education. It is not hard to imagine the conversations they heard at their parents’ dinner tables and through the thin Soviet walls at night. Meanwhile, Russian media and those of other Soviet republics, now “independent countries”, were taken over by the west and citizens were bombarded with all the worst and the lowest with which the west had already been dumbing down its own citizens for at least a decade or two. [The "dumbing down" of the US population has been going on far longer than a decade or two, easily 100 years, reaching its more virulent phase in the last 4 decades.—Ed]

Secondly. Scientists have recently confirmed by physical, empirical experiments what many of us had come to realise anyway: that aspects of memory are actually passed on genetically and this could also be a reason why young people with absolute free access to information on one of the world’s freest Internets choose not to use it. They have inherited their “west is best” leitmotif from their parents. Of course some of them have literally been taught it from early childhood. It can never be underestimated just how deeply the idea of the innate superiority of the west has sunk into the subconscious of so many Soviet citizens but this phenomenon started well before Soviet times in fact as any one who has read Dostoyevsky will know.

Thirdly. In more recent years many young people have been seduced by what, have been dressed up, especially for them, as new, exciting and fashionable ideas such as for example: being gay. In nineteen eighties Britain I knew people who were trying to be gay when they weren’t just because it had become “a la mode” especially among “left wing” circles and had a flavour of being anti-establishment and above all, anti Thatcher who in reality was herself anti-establishment but let’s stay on track. I was amazed to see exactly the same phenomenon played out among some Moscow and Petersburg friends with great enthusiasm and excitement (like little children discovering their first naughty rhyme and being sure that they are the first to know it) more than thirty years after I had first witnessed this in eighties Britain. I repeat that these people are in a minority everywhere in Russia, even in St Petersburg, but it is true that western “political correctness” is popular among young Russian liberals but far less so among the older ones. Also I should state that the above mentioned trying to be gay phenomenon was and is far more popular among women than men in Russia whereas in eighties Britain, it was rather more fifty-fifty. This goes hand in hand with young people who have become communist or very left wing in the sense that we in the west have come to understand since the sixties as opposed to Soviet communism within the USSR which came to represent a kind of “conservatism”. Many of them agree with our Russian liberals on almost everything. Especially their hatred of the current Russian government, media, family values and perhaps above all, the resurgent Russian Orthodox Church.

Some further analysis as to why this phenomenon exists and why it is so dangerous!

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]f the categories of “Russian Liberals” I have listed above, the first category are clearly in a class apart. They are the very antipode of naivety. Indeed, faced with them it is the rest of us who are naïve (And I’m not talking only about other “liberals” here), the vast majority of us are usually unable to comprehend, or not strong enough to face the terrifying fact that such pure evil can exist and that it already has control of most of our world. In my own case this was certainly why it took me so long to wake up to the true nature of the west, only doing so when I saw the Ukrainian putsch and the west’s reaction to the reunification of Crimea with Russia. The deep knowledge I had gained from many sources but above all from personal contact over many years, with Ukrainians and Russians of all hues and my years living in Russia left me no psychological escape route whatsoever.

The remaining categories are naïve however although some are consumed by negativity and even hatred and could easily be enticed up to the underworld of the first group. One important thing they all have in common is a refusal to watch mainstream Russian television or listen to Russian radio having convinced themselves that it is full of anti western, pro government propaganda and lies. In other words they are living in the world as it was forty and more years ago. As many have noticed and commented on, the actual world is a one hundred percent reversal of the cold war situation. It is the western TV and media which is full of lies, disinformation, fake news and total reality inversions. Yet this is the only “media” that these “Russian liberals” will pay any attention too.

While some aspects of Russian TV still leave plenty to be desired (especially the prevalence of low quality extremely violent dramas, cop shows etc), Russian news broadcasts are infinitely more objective and informative, in other words, HONEST, both on domestic and international issues than their contemporary western counterparts. More importantly there has been an explosion in the popularity and hence number of political talk shows on Russian TV. These shows invite guests of all sides of all political spectrums and nationalities. Our anti Putin, pro western “Russian liberals” are given free voice on prime-time major TV channels as well as Ukrainian, pro Maidan nationalists, Polish nationalists, Russian speaking Americans who support the US State Department “party” line and other pro western voices. Furthermore within the spectrum of what can be collectively labeled pro Russian government, who are also invited obviously, the range of opinion and stance is extremely broad. Within the ruling United Russia Party itself, the spectrum of opinion is wider than that between supposed opposition parties in many western countries. Even if, as some have commentated, some of these shows are designed for entertainment and confrontation, the fact remains that many outstanding experts on pertinent world issues, cultures, civilizations and history take part in these programs and any Russian speaker who watches them is getting themselves a pretty broad education and, and hence, your average Russian viewer is infinitely better informed than western viewers as well as those who are the subject of this article who rely only on mainstream western sources.

Why is this so dangerous?

I’ll try to be brief. Russia is once again under existential threat of attack from the western deep-states and their real rulers because Russia is again resurgent and yet again rejuvenating and worse still for the western elites, she is resurgent as the multi confessional, multi-ethnic but predominantly CHRISTIAN country she always was as the Christianity the west thought it had destroyed in 1917 arises phoenix-like from the ashes of the twentieth century. Whatever negotiations might be going on on a political level, preparations for attack are continuing! If they were not then the barrage of anti Russian propaganda would be withering by now. It is in fact intensifying.

As I have said above, the the first category of “Russian liberals” are collaborating with the west. The other categories just refuse to believe that the west is any threat to Russia and often claim that this is all invented to make Putin more popular. As Sheik Imran Hussein has said we are entering the great epoch of truth versus lie as opposed to the epoch we are leaving of false, fabricated conflicts where endless nuanced arguments about the reasons and nature of those conflicts seemed to have their place. Today, western mainstream politicians and journalists whenever speaking about Russia, Ukraine, Syria and N. Korea always say the exact, one hundred percent opposite of the truth. “Russian liberals” choose to believe this double speak and accuse their own government, media and people of doing exactly that which the west is doing.

We are living through an unprecedented moment of change that is happening at lightning speed and it seems as if all humanity has been put into a giant shaker which is shaking to dust all the isms & wasms that were invented for us to fight over, leaving only truth and falsehood and those who can see it and those who can’t and again down to those who are prepared to sacrifice and fight for truth and who are prepared to fight for falsehood and ultimate iniquity. Few indeed are those who will openly side with evil but many are those who can be seduced into doing so when evil dons the mantle of good; when evil cloaks itself in the guise of freedom, democracy, human rights, tolerance and other comfy sounding words to an ear influenced by the “comfy western democracy world”. The fact is that it is precisely from the countries that are still known as “western democracies” that this falsehood i.e. evil comes and it now takes very little research to understand that it always did. If Russia loses this struggle then not only Russians but western citizens too will become as expendable for the western ruling elites as Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Yemenis and many other African peoples have tragically proved to be. They need you and your backing for the fight that’s coming dear westerner and Russian liberal but the fight once won, you will all be gumming up their works and they will proceed with your conversion into fertilizer to fertilize the few, replacing you with technology! They openly state that they believe the world is overpopulated and something needs to be done. This is the force that these “Russian liberals” are collaborating with, albeit for the most part out of naivety and this is why they are so dangerous for the continuance of human civilization and culture, world peace and of course Russia as a sovereign nation state and all sovereign nation states.

Lastly these Russian liberals are a danger to themselves (Except the first category of course, although in a much deeper and blacker way they are too but we don’t have time to go into that here). Especially those who become “activists” are quite literally putting their own lives in danger! They themselves would of course say: “Yes. That’s right! Our lives are in danger from the evil dictatorial Russian government and the “Great Dictator” Putin. Aren’t we great? Look at us everybody! We’re putting our lives on the line for your liberty so that you can be governed by freedom loving, democratic Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Gary Kasparov, Anne Applebaum, Alexey Navalny, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and all the rest of the “progressive” gang! You have to be so grateful to us!” Well I’m sorry dear Russian and other liberals. You are blinded and hoodwinked by your own egos’ vanity!

Many have commented, especially the many who have defected from the “liberal” camp to the infinitely broader camp of those seeking truth, struggling towards the light, that liberalism is fueled by the ego; by a desire to bask in the supposed reflective glory of being a “good, caring” person which is why liberals are in fact so intolerant and so quickly become the dictators they claim to be opposing assuming that their “liberalism” gives them a birth right to dictate to, manage and control those whom they perceive as, but won’t admit it publicly of course; “the lower orders”. The ego cannot tolerate criticism, contradiction or exposure of its whims and fears which is why all who do not resist its beguiling iron grip end up serving evil one way or another.

The brutal fact for you Russian liberals is that, except for some student circles in St Petersburg, (Why is it always students?) all your efforts have come to nothing. Almost no one in Russia believes you and most see right through you. Many even hate you for your expressions of joy when a Russian fighter jet on a combat mission against ISIS was shot down by Turkey in a surprise attack and one of the pilots was machine gunned by “Yankee Jihads” as he parachuted to the ground. By your attempts to show the Immortal Regiment as fake government propaganda. By your insistence that Crimea must be “returned” to Ukraine thus negating the right of several million Crimeans, not only to be able to choose to live under a government that represents their past, present and future, but their right not to be baseball-batted, Molotov cocktailed, Kalashnikoved out of existence by, foreign to Crimea, ultra nationalist, NATO backed Ukrainian thugs that would have poured into the peninsula if Crimeans hadn’t acted so decisively, to do the west’s bidding to name but three shameful episodes.

B. Nemtsov (screengrab): Much more useful to the west dead than alive.

Yes! Your lives are in danger. Especially if you become a little high profile, not from anyone in the Russian government or even deep state, but from your own bosses, financiers and the secret services of the western states that are involved in the war on the Russian world. The chilling fact is that for your bosses, you are much more useful dead than alive! Your murder, especially if it can be done in a very public, publicity attracting manner can be used as another major propaganda coup against the Russian government.

Now you see: call me naïve but I do not see anything in Vladimir Putin that makes me think that he assassinates his political opponents. He engages with them unless they are beyond the pale i.e. have actually tried to sabotage the development of Russia or collaborated with her sworn enemies such as Khordokovsky, Navalny, Kasparov, Ponomarev et al, all of whom however, are very much alive. When it comes to the unfortunate Boris Nemtsov, R.I.P: the idea that the Russian government wastes time assassinating people who pose absolutely no threat whatsoever to the stability of the Russian state and its government or, even if taking the most cynical possible view, the grip on power of Russia’s current rulers, is simply mental excrement.

If one looks, as any police detective would do when investigating crimes, for repeating patterns and connections then it quickly becomes clear that the string of appalling, heinous murders of “Putin critics” and others over the last eleven years or so all seem to have been designed to create the maximum publicity, often coinciding with high profile political events and significant dates. Politkovskaya was murdered while Putin was giving a major, highly publicized speech in Germany, one of the first where he stated that Russia would no longer be following the west’s plans for her and it just happened to be his birthday. The downing of, or whatever really happened to, MH17 coincided within an hour with Putin landing in Moscow after a six day tour of Latin America where breakthrough BRICS agreements had been signed as well as coinciding with the black anniversary of the Satanic murder of the Russian Royal Family and their aids on July 17^th and so it goes on. It does not take a tactical genius to understand who gains from these murders and the ensuing orchestrated anti Russian propaganda campaigns. Yes: that’s right! The west gains all and Putin, his team and Russia as a whole gain precisely nothing. Only problems and sanctions so neither does it take a tactical genius to understand who is really behind these crimes or at the very least, in some cases, who exploits them very ruthlessly and cynically in ever more desperate attempts to paint Russia as an evil menace which the west will have to “liberate” as it did with Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria etc!

It is the nature of propaganda that it cannot remain silent. If there is any pause then people’s intuition i.e. connection to universal wisdom —truth, reality—kicks into action gently but resolutely posing very awkward questions for the propagandists such as: “Surely modern Russia can’t be responsible for all the world’s ills can it? It doesn’t seem to make any sense.” or “ You mean ALL Jews are involved in some sort of plot against the rest of us? Every single one of them? Including my neighbour? That’s gotta be nonsense!” etc.  This is why totalitarian regimes build ever bigger statues, ever bigger posters and placards covering whole facades of massive buildings, and in today’s age, evermore blanket TV propaganda, often resorting to loudspeakers in streets blaring out whatever they need the public to believe at any given time! Silence is their worst enemy! Much more powerful than opposing propaganda or even the opposing truth!

In today’s world it is the so called western democracies that, while attempting to maintain the facade of actual freedom (and democracy!), are racing full tilt down this path. They started with this particular, final, all out campaign twenty or more years ago and have been steadily picking up momentum ever since. For the underlying forces that are fueling and driving this momentum, their overriding purpose is the final destruction of Russia, the Russian world and traditional i.e. REAL Christianity as well as other genuine religions of which Islam is their second target and, by chance, the second religion of The Russian Federation. “Third time lucky” they are saying to themselves! All the other invasions and destruction of sovereign states listed above, while handing the western rulers some immediate “advantages” in each case, were only another step on the road towards this ultimate goal! In spite of these “victories” all is not going as planned for the west! To quote Sheik Imran Hussein again: “The west makes its plans but Allah-God makes his.” He also stated that which many of us felt. That the reunification of Crimea with Russia is an event of deep spiritual significance, as well as being of crucial military importance and even that it was foretold by the Prophet Mohammed in The Koran. Given what the Russian world was forced to endure in the twentieth century, nearly all of it at the hands of the west actually, the deep destructive consequences of which are still troubling Russia today, it is nothing short of a miracle that Russia has risen to become the leading resistance to the forces of evil which are now so energetically and openly on the march. I find it desperately sad that these “Russian liberals” can’t see or feel this huge moment in history and that they are choosing to aid the forces of darkness!

May the Lord send you light and have mercy on your and all our souls, for naivety can have an appallingly high price! Almost as high as selling your soul to……!

by Janine Jackson, a FAIR report

Janine Jackson interviewed Shireen Al-Adeimi about the Yemen crisis for the December 1, 2017, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Yemen's war is a tragedy, but is it also a crime, asks the New York Times. The answer is obvious.

MP3 Link

Janine Jackson: The enormity of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen is staggering. At least 10,000 people have died in the last two years of Saudi war in the country, already among the poorest in the region. The UN says Yemen faces the worst famine the world has seen for decades, with at least 7 million people in need of immediate food aid. More than a half million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition, and millions more lack access to any healthcare at all. This while Yemen faces an outbreak of cholera that’s being called possibly the worst in history.

Yet Americans have heard little about what’s happening in Yemen, and still less about how it relates to us. Shireen Al-Adeimi is a doctoral candidate and instructor at Harvard University, working to bring attention to the crisis. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Shireen Al-Adeimi.

Shireen Al-Adeimi: Thanks for having me.

JJ: It has been noted that US media are doing really very little, particularly television, on the ongoing disaster in Yemen. One outlet that did, CBS’s 60 Minutes, reported compellingly, and under difficult journalistic conditions, about the famine and the bombing victims, and they indicated the Saudis as aggressors. But despite being a US program aimed at a US audience, 60 Minutes said not one word about US involvement, leaving the impression of a regional conflict, fitted into this familiar, reductive “Sunni versus Shia” framework. What would you have Americans understand about this country’s role in the Yemen crisis?

SAA: Thanks for bringing up the CBS report, because that was a huge disappointment. It was just one opportunity for a mainstream audience in the US to learn, for the first time, perhaps, what is going on in Yemen, and what our role is especially. But it was quickly, like you said, characterized as a Sunni/Shia conflict, which is far from the truth. And not once was it mentioned that the US is, in fact, very much involved in Yemen, and has been from the onset of the war.

So when the Saudis decided to attack Yemen in March 2015, the Americans, under Obama’s administration, were right there along with them in the command room, helping them with targeting practice, helping them with logistics and training. The US military refuels Saudi jets midair as they’re bombing. And so we have been heavily involved, we’ve continued to be involved under Trump’s administration, and this is, of course, in addition to the billions in weapons sales that have occurred over the past couple of years.

JJ: There also is the role that the US plays in shielding Saudi Arabia at the UN, isn’t there?

SAA: Exactly. Over and over, the UN has failed to really take any decisive stance against Saudi Arabia. In fact, there have been some really outrageous moves. For example, they’ve been allowed to investigate their own crimes in Yemen, and of course they come out, months later, saying that they were cleared. So it’s just been an absurd game that they’re playing in the UN, and people’s lives are at stake here. And we’ve been shielding them from any independent investigation.

JJ: The latest headlines are about an easing of the Saudi blockade, with some food and vaccines coming through, but we’re told not really to take that as a sign of real easing of the hardship there.

SAA: Not at all. So it’s trickling in; whatever aid is coming right now is trickling in. And like you mentioned, 7 million people are in desperate need of that aid. You know, they need it immediately. But then you also have 20 million people who need food who can’t afford what little food remains in the country. And so we don’t only need aid coming in, but we need trade. And in fact we can’t be begging the Saudi-led coalition to make these positions and [allow them] to hold an entire country hostage and to use starvation as a war tactic. In fact, we should be demanding that they end this intervention in Yemen, so that people can go back to their lives, and try to rebuild and deal with their internal conflicts.

JJ: The New York Times had a piece on November 22 that talked about how this isn’t any sort of natural disaster. It used the phrases “when food is a weapon,” “when disease is no accident,” and “when civilians are targeted.” And it even noted:

United Nations experts have warned that some of the actions carried out by the warring parties, the Saudi-led coalition and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, could amount to crimes against humanity because of their systematic and widespread execution.

Still, that seems to me to be, at most, talking about the US pressing the Saudis, and not about US citizens pressing their own lawmakers here.

SAA: Exactly. This is presented as an equivalent war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and again it couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s very little evidence that Iran is involved at all in Yemen. And the way Yemenis see it is that this is very much a US/Saudi war on Yemen, with the help of other regional powers. And so to characterize this as something just that’s happening over there in a foreign land, and we’re trying to put an end to it, that’s really not the case. We are at the center of this, and if our citizens don’t really know our involvement, then there’s no hope for us to be politically involved to try to push our elected officials to do something about our role in Yemen.

JJ: We have of course Donald Trump bragging about $110 billion of arm sales to Saudi Arabia, which the best thing you can say is that he’s probably lying about that amount. But at the same time, the House of Representatives, they passed this resolution stating that US military assistance to Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen is not authorized under this authorization for use of military force, this post-9/11 legislation. Now, it’s nonbinding, it doesn’t actually stop the support, but it does acknowledge the US role. How meaningful do you think that resolution is?

SA: So the problem with that resolution is that it was a compromise resolution. The previous resolution was House Concurrent Resolution 81, which actually called for the US to stop helping Saudi Arabia in any way, shape or form. And that was proposed by Congressman Ro Khanna in California. Basically he had invoked the War Powers Resolution, which meant that it had to go to vote, and they had to debate it in the House. But it was quickly stripped of its privileged status, and they had to negotiate this compromise bill that was, like you said, nonbinding. And, yes, it acknowledged that this war is unauthorized, but it doesn’t mean anything for US involvement in Yemen; nothing changes. We continue helping the Saudis without any repercussions.

JJ: And am I right that there is nothing in the Senate that’s comparable?

SA: There’s nothing in the Senate right now. There are a couple of senators who’ve been vocal against this, so Sen. Chris Murphy, for example. We need senators to introduce legislation that would extricate the US from the war on Yemen.

Shireen Al-Adeimi on the Real News (11/24/17)

 

JJ: I read some of the comments after your appearance on the Real News, and one of them said, well, yes, you’ve outlined the suffering in Yemen, but what about the root causes? And what I hear in that is a suggestion that there could be some political or strategic consideration that would somehow make 7 million starving people make sense.

SA: Of course the US has interests in the region. Yemen is at a strategic location at the Red Sea and it’s at the Bab al Mandab Strait, and there’s some oil barrels that go through there every day; not many in the grand scheme of things, but still, the US has interests there. And Saudi Arabia, of course, has always wanted to maintain control in Yemen, and they’ve been involved in Yemen’s various wars and internal politics over the years.

But this comes down to this alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United States that we refuse to even reconsider given the tremendous humanitarian impact in Yemen. This is not just, as I think the Saudis had imagined, a war that was going to end in a couple of weeks, where they were going to come bomb, and leave, and things were going to go back to normal for them. They didn’t anticipate that this was going to drag on for two years and eight months now.

So we should be reconsidering our help with the Saudis. We’re not just selling weapons; like you said, we’re so involved in many ways. And every ten minutes, a child is dying, 130 children are dying every single day. Sixty-three thousand children died last year, 50,000 more died this year. So the numbers are incredible, and the suffering is just horrendous. At what point do we stop and say, well, maybe we should reconsider this alliance, because it’s not helping anyone?

Shireen Al-Adeimi: “We’re not asking for intervention. We’re asking for them to stop this intervention, to remove themselves from this conflict.” (Image: BBC)

 

JJ: To the extent that that 60 Minutes segment referenced a US role, it was by spotlighting the American who heads the UN’s World Food Program. So if anything, we’re sort of the heroes of the piece. I have a concern that even as headlines come in about people dying, about cholera, that Americans will then talk about the need for the US to “take action,” you know, as if we weren’t taking action now. So to be clear, if the US were to cut off the refueling and the targeting aid and the shielding at the UN, it would change the situation here?

SA: Absolutely. Yemenis are not asking the US to come and save them from Saudi Arabia. We have to be very clear about that. We’re not asking for intervention. We’re asking for them to stop this intervention, to remove themselves from this conflict, to stop interfering in the politics of Yemen and causing this egregious humanitarian suffering by helping the Saudis at all these levels.

And so if the US were to stop, like you said, refueling, shielding the UN—there are even reports that they’re helping impose the blockade—if we stop all of this, then there’s no way that the Saudis can continue this war much longer, because they’re so incredibly dependent on the US’s support.

JJ: So if people are looking for something to do right now, in response to this information, what would you recommend?

SA: I’d recommend that people call their senators and their congressmen, email them, visit their local offices, and really urge them to introduce or support legislation like House Concurrent Resolution 81, that really pushes the US to stop its support of the Saudi Arabians in their war against Yemen.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Shireen Al-Adeimi. Her October article, “Only Americans Can Stop America’s War on Yemen,” can be found on Common Dreams. Shireen Al-Adeimi, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SA: Thank you so much for having me.

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