In-depth coverage – Page 5

Why the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault

The Liberal delusions that provoked Putin

By John J. Mearsheimer.

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine — beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 — were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president — which he rightly labeled a “coup” — was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant — and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.

U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border.
THE WESTERN AFFRONT

As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.

The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. … The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement — which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.

Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, “These countries will become members of NATO.”

Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.”

The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion.

The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.” As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED’s president, Carl Gershman, has called that country “the biggest prize.” After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions.

When Russian leaders look at Western social engineering in Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next. And such fears are hardly groundless. In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added: “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

CREATING A CRISIS

Imagine the American outrage if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico.
The West’s triple package of policies — NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion — added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one hundred protesters. Western emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve the crisis. On February 21, the government and the opposition struck a deal that allowed Yanukovych to stay in power until new elections were held. But it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled to Russia the next day. The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists.

Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup. Nuland and Republican Senator John McCain participated in antigovernment demonstrations, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, proclaimed after Yanukovych’s toppling that it was “a day for the history books.” As a leaked telephone recording revealed, Nuland had advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government, which he did. No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West played a role in Yanukovych’s ouster.

For Putin, the time to act against Ukraine and the West had arrived. Shortly after February 22, he ordered Russian forces to take Crimea from Ukraine, and soon after that, he incorporated it into Russia. The task proved relatively easy, thanks to the thousands of Russian troops already stationed at a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Crimea also made for an easy target since ethnic Russians compose roughly 60 percent of its population. Most of them wanted out of Ukraine.

Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new government in Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow, making it clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a functioning state before he would allow it to become a Western stronghold on Russia’s doorstep. Toward that end, he has provided advisers, arms, and diplomatic support to the Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, who are pushing the country toward civil war. He has massed a large army on the Ukrainian border, threatening to invade if the government cracks down on the rebels. And he has sharply raised the price of the natural gas Russia sells to Ukraine and demanded payment for past exports. Putin is playing hardball.

THE DIAGNOSIS

Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.

Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia — a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear.

Officials from the United States and its European allies contend that they tried hard to assuage Russian fears and that Moscow should understand that NATO has no designs on Russia. In addition to continually denying that its expansion was aimed at containing Russia, the alliance has never permanently deployed military forces in its new member states. In 2002, it even created a body called the NATO-Russia Council in an effort to foster cooperation. To further mollify Russia, the United States announced in 2009 that it would deploy its new missile defense system on warships in European waters, at least initially, rather than on Czech or Polish territory. But none of these measures worked; the Russians remained steadfastly opposed to NATO enlargement, especially into Georgia and Ukraine. And it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.

To understand why the West, especially the United States, failed to understand that its Ukraine policy was laying the groundwork for a major clash with Russia, one must go back to the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration began advocating NATO expansion. Pundits advanced a variety of arguments for and against enlargement, but there was no consensus on what to do. Most eastern European émigrés in the United States and their relatives, for example, strongly supported expansion, because they wanted NATO to protect such countries as Hungary and Poland. A few realists also favored the policy because they thought Russia still needed to be contained.

But most realists opposed expansion, in the belief that a declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional economy did not in fact need to be contained. And they feared that enlargement would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in eastern Europe. The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies,” he said. “I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else.”

The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer.
Most liberals, on the other hand, favored enlargement, including many key members of the Clinton administration. They believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed international politics and that a new, postnational order had replaced the realist logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the “indispensable nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it; it was also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look like western Europe.

And so the United States and its allies sought to promote democracy in the countries of eastern Europe, increase economic interdependence among them, and embed them in international institutions. Having won the debate in the United States, liberals had little difficulty convincing their European allies to support NATO enlargement. After all, given the EU’s past achievements, Europeans were even more wedded than Americans to the idea that geopolitics no longer mattered and that an all-inclusive liberal order could maintain peace in Europe.

So thoroughly did liberals come to dominate the discourse about European security during the first decade of this century that even as the alliance adopted an open-door policy of growth, NATO expansion faced little realist opposition. The liberal worldview is now accepted dogma among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about “the ideals” that motivate Western policy and how those ideals “have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power.” Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”

In essence, the two sides have been operating with different playbooks: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The result is that the United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine.

BLAME GAME

In that same 1998 interview, Kennan predicted that NATO expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents of expansion would “say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.” As if on cue, most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine predicament. In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was “in another world.” Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no evidence supports the charge that he is mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy.

Other analysts allege, more plausibly, that Putin regrets the demise of the Soviet Union and is determined to reverse it by expanding Russia’s borders. According to this interpretation, Putin, having taken Crimea, is now testing the waters to see if the time is right to conquer Ukraine, or at least its eastern part, and he will eventually behave aggressively toward other countries in Russia’s neighborhood. For some in this camp, Putin represents a modern-day Adolf Hitler, and striking any kind of deal with him would repeat the mistake of Munich. Thus, NATO must admit Georgia and Ukraine to contain Russia before it dominates its neighbors and threatens western Europe.

This argument falls apart on close inspection. If Putin were committed to creating a greater Russia, signs of his intentions would almost certainly have arisen before February 22. But there is virtually no evidence that he was bent on taking Crimea, much less any other territory in Ukraine, before that date. Even Western leaders who supported NATO expansion were not doing so out of a fear that Russia was about to use military force. Putin’s actions in Crimea took them by complete surprise and appear to have been a spontaneous reaction to Yanukovych’s ouster. Right afterward, even Putin said he opposed Crimean secession, before quickly changing his mind.

Besides, even if it wanted to, Russia lacks the capability to easily conquer and annex eastern Ukraine, much less the entire country. Roughly 15 million people — one-third of Ukraine’s population — live between the Dnieper River, which bisects the country, and the Russian border. An overwhelming majority of those people want to remain part of Ukraine and would surely resist a Russian occupation. Furthermore, Russia’s mediocre army, which shows few signs of turning into a modern Wehrmacht, would have little chance of pacifying all of Ukraine. Moscow is also poorly positioned to pay for a costly occupation; its weak economy would suffer even more in the face of the resulting sanctions.

But even if Russia did boast a powerful military machine and an impressive economy, it would still probably prove unable to successfully occupy Ukraine. One need only consider the Soviet and U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, the U.S. experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, and the Russian experience in Chechnya to be reminded that military occupations usually end badly. Putin surely understands that trying to subdue Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine. His response to events there has been defensive, not offensive.

A WAY OUT

Given that most Western leaders continue to deny that Putin’s behavior might be motivated by legitimate security concerns, it is unsurprising that they have tried to modify it by doubling down on their existing policies and have punished Russia to deter further aggression. Although Kerry has maintained that “all options are on the table,” neither the United States nor its NATO allies are prepared to use force to defend Ukraine. The West is relying instead on economic sanctions to coerce Russia into ending its support for the insurrection in eastern Ukraine. In July, the United States and the EU put in place their third round of limited sanctions, targeting mainly high-level individuals closely tied to the Russian government and some high-profile banks, energy companies, and defense firms. They also threatened to unleash another, tougher round of sanctions, aimed at whole sectors of the Russian economy.

Such measures will have little effect. Harsh sanctions are likely off the table anyway; western European countries, especially Germany, have resisted imposing them for fear that Russia might retaliate and cause serious economic damage within the EU. But even if the United States could convince its allies to enact tough measures, Putin would probably not alter his decision-making. History shows that countries will absorb enormous amounts of punishment in order to protect their core strategic interests. There is no reason to think Russia represents an exception to this rule.

Western leaders have also clung to the provocative policies that precipitated the crisis in the first place. In April, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden met with Ukrainian legislators and told them, “This is a second opportunity to make good on the original promise made by the Orange Revolution.” John Brennan, the director of the CIA, did not help things when, that same month, he visited Kiev on a trip the White House said was aimed at improving security cooperation with the Ukrainian government.

The EU, meanwhile, has continued to push its Eastern Partnership. In March, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, summarized EU thinking on Ukraine, saying, “We have a debt, a duty of solidarity with that country, and we will work to have them as close as possible to us.” And sure enough, on June 27, the EU and Ukraine signed the economic agreement that Yanukovych had fatefully rejected seven months earlier. Also in June, at a meeting of NATO members’ foreign ministers, it was agreed that the alliance would remain open to new members, although the foreign ministers refrained from mentioning Ukraine by name. “No third country has a veto over NATO enlargement,” announced Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary-general. The foreign ministers also agreed to support various measures to improve Ukraine’s military capabilities in such areas as command and control, logistics, and cyberdefense. Russian leaders have naturally recoiled at these actions; the West’s response to the crisis will only make a bad situation worse.

There is a solution to the crisis in Ukraine, however — although it would require the West to think about the country in a fundamentally new way. The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, akin to Austria’s position during the Cold War. Western leaders should acknowledge that Ukraine matters so much to Putin that they cannot support an anti-Russian regime there. This would not mean that a future Ukrainian government would have to be pro-Russian or anti-NATO. On the contrary, the goal should be a sovereign Ukraine that falls in neither the Russian nor the Western camp.

To achieve this end, the United States and its allies should publicly rule out NATO’s expansion into both Georgia and Ukraine. The West should also help fashion an economic rescue plan for Ukraine funded jointly by the EU, the International Monetary Fund, Russia, and the United States — a proposal that Moscow should welcome, given its interest in having a prosperous and stable Ukraine on its western flank. And the West should considerably limit its social-engineering efforts inside Ukraine. It is time to put an end to Western support for another Orange Revolution. Nevertheless, U.S. and European leaders should encourage Ukraine to respect minority rights, especially the language rights of its Russian speakers.

Some may argue that changing policy toward Ukraine at this late date would seriously damage U.S. credibility around the world. There would undoubtedly be certain costs, but the costs of continuing a misguided strategy would be much greater. Furthermore, other countries are likely to respect a state that learns from its mistakes and ultimately devises a policy that deals effectively with the problem at hand. That option is clearly open to the United States.

One also hears the claim that Ukraine has the right to determine whom it wants to ally with and the Russians have no right to prevent Kiev from joining the West. This is a dangerous way for Ukraine to think about its foreign policy choices. The sad truth is that might often makes right when great-power politics are at play. Abstract rights such as self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states get into brawls with weaker states. Did Cuba have the right to form a military alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War? The United States certainly did not think so, and the Russians think the same way about Ukraine joining the West. It is in Ukraine’s interest to understand these facts of life and tread carefully when dealing with its more powerful neighbor.

Even if one rejects this analysis, however, and believes that Ukraine has the right to petition to join the EU and NATO, the fact remains that the United States and its European allies have the right to reject these requests. There is no reason that the West has to accommodate Ukraine if it is bent on pursuing a wrong-headed foreign policy, especially if its defense is not a vital interest. Indulging the dreams of some Ukrainians is not worth the animosity and strife it will cause, especially for the Ukrainian people.

Of course, some analysts might concede that NATO handled relations with Ukraine poorly and yet still maintain that Russia constitutes an enemy that will only grow more formidable over time — and that the West therefore has no choice but to continue its present policy. But this viewpoint is badly mistaken. Russia is a declining power, and it will only get weaker with time. Even if Russia were a rising power, moreover, it would still make no sense to incorporate Ukraine into NATO. The reason is simple: the United States and its European allies do not consider Ukraine to be a core strategic interest, as their unwillingness to use military force to come to its aid has proved. It would therefore be the height of folly to create a new NATO member that the other members have no intention of defending. NATO has expanded in the past because liberals assumed the alliance would never have to honor its new security guarantees, but Russia’s recent power play shows that granting Ukraine NATO membership could put Russia and the West on a collision course.

Sticking with the current policy would also complicate Western relations with Moscow on other issues. The United States needs Russia’s assistance to withdraw U.S. equipment from Afghanistan through Russian territory, reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, and stabilize the situation in Syria. In fact, Moscow has helped Washington on all three of these issues in the past; in the summer of 2013, it was Putin who pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire by forging the deal under which Syria agreed to relinquish its chemical weapons, thereby avoiding the U.S. military strike that Obama had threatened. The United States will also someday need Russia’s help containing a rising China. Current U.S. policy, however, is only driving Moscow and Beijing closer together.

The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process — a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.

Source: Foreign Affairs

‘Shock and awe’ comes to America

The United States has employed “shock and awe” techniques – described by Pentagon policy documents as the use of “spectacular displays of force” to intimidate an opponent – against the civilian population of the St. Louis, Missouri suburb of Ferguson, just a stone’s throw from Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.

The police use of shock and awe tactics followed street protests after the police shooting death of an 18-year old black teen, Michael Brown. According to a private autopsy, Brown, an African-American, was shot six times, including twice in the head, by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. The St. Louis County coroner concluded that the number of shots that hit Brown could have been as high as eight.

Many media commentators also drew comparisons between the scenes of the heavy paramilitary presence on the streets of Ferguson to scenes of Israeli soldiers in Gaza and on the West Bank. There are valid reasons for the comparisons.

In 2011, St. Louis County Police Chief Timothy Fitch received training from Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and Israeli National Police officials during a trip to Israel sponsored by the right-wing Anti-Defamation League (ADL). That same year, Oakland, California police who received similar training from former members of the IDF, shot Iraqi war U.S. Army veteran Scott Olsen in the head. Olsen suffered a severe brain injury from the assault.

Companies associated with Israel’s military-law enforcement infrastructure, including those specializing in Israeli Krav Maga martial arts techniques and other Israel crowd control tactics, have not only trained state and metropolitan police forces in the United States, but also state National Guard units. Police departments receiving such training include the St. Louis County Police, as well as the police departments of New York, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Louisville, Richmond, Charlotte, Nashville, Albuquerque, Tulsa, and Atlantic City.

American police departments have a seemingly unlimited supply of military gear, weapons, and vehicles at their disposal. Under the Pentagon’s 1033 program, the Defense Department has made available, often free-of-charge, surplus military equipment to police departments from St. Louis County and Ferguson to Lewiston, Maine and Ohio State University.

Among the excess military equipment distributed to local, metropolitan, county, and state police by the Defense Logistics Agency are highly-mobile multi-wheeled vehicles (Humvees), militarized water craft, mine-resistant ambush protection (MRAP) vehicles, long-range acoustic device (LRAD) sound cannons, assault rifles, night scopes, flash bang grenades, and helicopters.

In addition to receiving population control training from Israelis, American police departments have also been trained by the constantly name-changing firm once known as Blackwater. Formerly known as Xe Security and Academi, the CIA-linked private military company, now merged with Triple Canopy under the Constellis Holdings, Inc., trained a number of U.S. police departments at its military base-like facility in Moyock, North Carolina. One of the police patches on the firm’s training alumni board in Moyock is that of the St. Louis County Police.

In addition to the St. Louis County Police, other U.S. law enforcement agencies trained by Blackwater include the Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff’s Department; Atlanta Police; Chillicothe, Ohio Police; Charleston, South Carolina Police; Metropolitan Washington, DC Police; Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Police (Dulles and Reagan National Airports); Prince George’s County, Maryland Police; the FBI SWAT Team; New York Police Department; Fairfax County, Virginia Police; Tampa Police; U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); DeKalb County, Georgia Police; Arlington County, Virginia Police; Baltimore Police; U.S. Coast Guard; University of Texas Police; Norfolk, Virginia Police; Chicago Police Department; Oregon State Police; Los Angeles Police Department; Harvey Cedars, New Jersey Police; City of Fairfax, Virginia Police; Alexandria, Virginia Police Special Operations; Illinois State Police; and Dallas Police.

Based on the actions of the St. Louis County police and their cache of Pentagon weapons, as well as their Israeli and Blackwater training, the next dead U.S. citizen – African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, or otherwise – could be found lying in a pool of his or her own blood, drawn by a militarized police officer, from the Jersey shore to the streets of Los Angeles.

By Wayne Madsen.

Can statins help treat Ebola?

THIS week, the World Health Organization endorsed the use of experimental drugs in the fight against the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. That is the right decision. There is no proven vaccine or treatment for Ebola, and in light of the severity of the current outbreak, experimental treatments that have not been tested on humans should be an option.

The problem is that these drugs are in exceedingly short supply. Recently, two American aid workers infected with the Ebola virus were treated with the experimental drug ZMapp, and they survived. Unfortunately, only a handful of doses of ZMapp have been produced. For the foreseeable future, even limited deployment of this and other experimental drugs will be impossible.

Is there anything else that could be used to treat Ebola patients? Surprising as it may seem, we believe that several widely available drugs that were initially developed to treat patients with cardiovascular diseases and diabetes may be effective.

More than a decade ago, clinicians noted striking similarities between patients with Ebola and those with bacterial sepsis. Both diseases involve severe dysfunction of the endothelial cells that line blood vessels throughout the body. This dysfunction in turn precipitates major abnormalities in blood coagulation. Both can eventually lead to the failure of internal organs, primarily the liver and kidneys, and organ failure often leads to death. Something similar is seen in many patients with other forms of acute critical illness, including pneumonia and influenza.

Researchers have since discovered that abnormalities of endothelial function and coagulation can be modified or reversed by treatment with drugs such as statins, angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin-receptor blockers (ARBs), which were developed to treat patients with cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. Known as immunomodulatory drugs, they also have the ability to modify the body’s response to infection. While they don’t prevent infection itself, they can prevent complications like organ failure. A clinical trial published in the journal Critical Care in 2012 demonstrated, for example, that early treatment of sepsis patients with a statin reduced the occurrence of organ failure (a complication that often kills Ebola patients) by 83 percent.

Unlike experimental Ebola treatments, these immunomodulatory drugs have been approved and are produced as inexpensive generics. They are available to anyone who lives in a country with a basic health care system, and this includes the countries in West Africa that are struggling to cope with Ebola.

Representatives from the World Health Organization have expressed reservations about what we are proposing. They have suggested, for instance, that the use of such drugs could increase viral replication and worsen the disease. But several studies have shown that statins actually reduce viral replication in human diseases like hepatitis C and improve clinical outcomes.

Our proposal would not be without risk. But the best evidence we have suggests that Ebola patients and their doctors should be given a chance to consider the benefits as well as the risks that these drugs may offer. Nothing should stop physicians from using them as long as they document the impact of treatment on disease outcome.

We want to stress that we support the public health measures that are being used to combat the outbreak. That said, the urgent needs of individual Ebola patients demand that something more be offered.

The challenge presented by Ebola in West Africa could be viewed as one aspect of a larger problem. Perhaps one day these immunomodulatory drugs might be used in the treatment of patients with many forms of acute critical illness, including pneumonia and influenza, much as oral rehydration solution is used to treat patients with severe diarrhea, regardless of the cause.

Viewed in this way, the challenge of treating Ebola patients also represents an opportunity to transform the way acute critical illness is managed throughout the world. We should not pass it by.

Source: By DAVID S. FEDSON and STEVEN M. OPAL, NYT

SA’s ‘intelligentsia’ supports Pallo Jordan

Senior academics and journalists say Sunday Times revelations do not detract from ANC politician’s intellectual eminence

A number of leading members of South Africa’s “intelligentsia” have expressed support for prominent ANC intellectual and former cabinet minister Dr Z Pallo Jordan. This follows the, as yet undisputed, report in the Sunday Times that Jordan does not have a doctorate, and does not seem to have any postgraduate or undergraduate degrees at all.

The newspaper reported on Sunday that neither the University of Wisconsin-Madison nor the London School of Economics have any record of Jordan of receiving a degree from their institutions, though he did attend the former in the mid-1960s. This appears to contradict inter alia Jordan’s official curriculum vitae, as posted on the website of the Department of Arts and Culture during his term of office as minister. This stated:

“After Jordan had finished his schooling in Cape Town, he attended various universities in South Africa, the USA and Britain. He left the country in 1962 to study at the University of Wisconsin in the US. He has acquired a number of degrees – including a post-graduate degree from the London School of Economics.”

Jordan has, in the past, been commonly referred to as “Dr Pallo Jordan” in the press and official government communications. A profile of Jordan, then Minister of Arts and Culture, in Leadership Magazine in 2005 stated that “With degrees from several universities, including the University of Wisconsin, where he completed a doctorate in history, and the London School of Economics, Jordan could easily – and brilliantly – slip into quieter realm of academia. But with names like Zweledinga (promised land) and Pallo (destiny) and his long immersion in politics that won’t be happening any time soon.”

In an opinion piece in the Daily Maverick on Tuesday journalist Stephen Grootes commented that the appellation of “Dr” was clearly important to Jordan. He wrote: “Jordan seemed to almost demand to be called “Dr”. Blade Nzimande is also a doctor (for real) and yet he’s not someone you would necessary feel you have to refer to by those first two letters. But Jordan prided himself on it. It was clearly important to him.

However, the news that the claims made in Jordan’s CV appear to be false, and that Jordan was unable to validate them despite numerous requests, has provoked a significant push-back. The argument made is that questions around Jordan’s CV should in no way detract from his immense intellectual achievements.

Professor Mary Metcalfe, former MEC, Director-General and head of the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand defended Jordan. In a comment on Facebook she wrote:

“Firstly, Pallo’s intellectual contribution and standing is leap years ahead of many PhD holders in the country. Secondly, there are many people who ‘schooled’ in the trenches of struggle who did not have the opportunity to complete formal qualifications but whose achievements are equivalent to or surpass those who did have that luxury. Pallo performs way ahead of the pack. It should not be the case that we value him (and others in a similar position) less because of the absence of formal qualifications. However, he needs to tidy up his CV so that it is accurate – I understand that CVs get rewritten all of the time for different purposes (and sometimes on one’s behalf), and that ‘abbreviations’ happen, but he should stand tall and confident in his leadership and clarify the situation. If he has an honorary doctorate, I don’t mind if he calls himself Dr.”

TO Molefe, a contributing writer for the international New York Times, also commented on Facebook:

Sure. Pallo Jordan is a member of Parliament who’s sworn an oath (or made a solemn affirmation) binding him to certain ethical standards. He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with lying, if indeed he did lie, be it by commission or omission. But we should not wholly dismiss the fact that our society fetishises formal education as the singular mark of actual ability. The problems this fetish creates are compounded by the fact that access to education was and remains inequitable racially, economically and in a few other important ways. And no other mechanism exists for people to indicate their abilities to the rest of society. In such a situation, it is understandable why people feel the need to fake qualifications and keep up the ruse even when they subsequently establish their own individualised objective ways to signal their abilities.

Professor Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg, made a similar point to Metcalfe’s in his initial comment on his Facebook page:

“I have no idea whether there is any truth in the attacks on Pallo Jordan’s qualifications in a Sunday newspaper. What I do know is that Jordan is one of our outstanding intellectuals. Over the years, we have disagreed strongly from time to time but there was never any doubt about my respect for his intellectual ability. I was reminded of this when I was researching my book on Harold Wolpe and South African radical thought. Jordan’s very generous response confirmed what I knew already – that he is extremely well read, has a passion for ideas, is highly intelligent and very perceptive. I am convinced that, had he chosen to enter academic life, his impact would have been immense. Frankly, I don’t care whether he has a doctorate – formal qualifications are not a particularly good test of whether a person is an intellectual. We will remember Pallo Jordan’s intellectual contribution long after we have forgotten this weekend’s reports.”

In a subsequent clarification on his original point Friedman commented:

“I just want to clarify what I was saying and what I wasn’t. Of course I agree that it is not OK to lie in public and that he therefore needs to explain himself. But my point is that this matters rather less than people seem to think. If a person claims to have medical or accountancy or legal qualifications that they don’t have, they are committing fraud because they cannot practice the profession without the qualification. But you don’t need a doctorate to be an intellectual and so it is hard to see what a person gains from claiming a doctorate that they don’t have except personal prestige. Jordan didn’t need a doctorate to be a cabinet minister or to participate in the public debate and so he would not have defrauded anyone if he did lie. So I would like all the facts before I judge what happened but it is hard to see how fraud could have been committed here.”

Friedman wrote that in his own case he had only acquired a doctorate late in his career, in 2007, as it was helpful as he wanted to move across to work in the universities. “Incidentally, my own doctorate is not a PhD, it is a DLitt, which is awarded if a panel of Professors agrees that your years of written work are of doctoral standard. By awarding the degree, they signal that what you were contributing before your doctorate was of doctoral quality even though you did not have a doctorate.”

In his Daily Maverick piece Grootes noted that there had been no “burn the politician in the town-square outrage” directed against Jordan following the Sunday Times’ revelations. One of the reasons for this, Grootes wrote, echoing Metcalfe and Friedman, is that “no matter what your view on Jordan, he is, first and foremost, a genuine intellectual. And that doesn’t just mean he’s clever. No, he’s far more than that. He’s incredibly well-read, hugely knowledgeable, and seems to have a grasp of everything.”

Grootes concluded by cautioning against a rush to judgment on the matter. “While Jordan may well have committed some kind of fraud here, and while we will never view him in the same way again, we need to judge him on what else he has done for this country. It’s not about condemning someone for one act; it’s about the entirety of their life’s work….At 72, Jordan has been spared the outrage so far, precisely because of his intellect, his sacrifices and the life he dedicated to the ANC and South Africa.”

The view articulated by Friedman, Metcalfe and Grootes was not universally shared. Friedman was taken to task by, amongst many others, former COSATU General Secretary and Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa. Shilowa – who, unlike Jordan, came from a working class background, rose through union ranks and claimed no academic qualifications on his government CV – observed in his response to Friedman:

“The [Sunday Times] article in question doesn’t question his intellect. It simply points out that the PHD claimed seemingly doesn’t exist. If this is the case why is a defence on his intellect being mounted if not to say: “Guys, chill. Sure he lied. So what? He’s a man of intellect. If the debate is on his intellect [why] raise it if not to defend him lying and offering a scoop?” I was in government. The CV posted was approved by me. Any false claims not removed are confirmed as part of my CV. Am not asking people to not defend him. Simply to acknowledge that in future they should take a similar position even on some amongst us that may be seen to be lowly beings based on intellect.”

In a follow up comment Shilowa added:

“Dear Steven. I never thought the article is questioning his clarity of thought. Simply whether a Doctorate he claims exists or not. If it doesn’t exist, then he surely is a fraud. It is not whether he has benefitted from it or not. Simply that if one lies about such matters, what else can they lie about. He doesn’t need a doctorate for us to accept him and his contribution, but to ignore his feet of clay simply because it is Jordan in area we would have reacted differently were it someone smacks of double standards. I always thought we hold to high standards those who sets the bar higher.”

Source: Politicsweb

The madness of humanitarian imperialism

Vladimir Putin is demonized by western media according to an old humanitarian agenda. The more imperialism is cruel, the more it pretends to be moral and humanitarian. This is not a paradox; not even a mark of hypocrisy. This is just the way the West works since it began its cruel imperialistic agenda in the nineteenth century. Any kind of enemy has been since demonized on a moral ground which precedes and accompanies the chaos and plundering of an unlucky land. And anything the west does is good.

Lenin used to quote a lot from John A. Hobson, an English scientist and writer who wrote an outstanding essay in 1902 about British and European imperialism. History repeats itself since oligarchic democracy and capitalism have frozen temporality, according to the famous Russian philosopher Alexander Kojève.

But let’s read the observations of Mr Hobson, a politically incorrect leftist.

First of all, for Hobson the West is never hypocritical:

So every other European nation recognises the true outlines of British Imperialism and charges us with hypocrisy in feigning blindness. This charge is false; no nation sees its own shortcomings…

Any imperialistic nation is naïve and of good faith: there is just a genuine desire to spread Christianity among the heathen, to diminish the cruelty and other sufferings which they believe exist in countries less fortunate than their own, and to do good work about the world in the cause of humanity.

Even infamous king Leopold of Belgium who ruined and massacred the people of Congo was of good faith: he has claimed for his government of the Congo-“Our only programme is that of the moral and material regeneration of the country.”

As we know nowadays the great European monarchs rule the Bilderbergs with the banksters and the architects of the new World order. In the time of Kipling, the average imperialist pretended that England is a knight-errant, everywhere in search of a quest to deliver oppressed peoples from oppressive governments, regardless of her own interests and perils.

The victim of the humanitarian imperialism could be a Boer (a Palestinian in our times) or any people convinced of a barbarian conduct (see the pamphlets of the NYT against ‘homophobe’ Uganda these last weeks). Writes Hobson beautifully:

Aggressive Imperialism, as our investigation has shown, is virtually confined to the coercion by stronger or better-armed nations of nations which are, or seem to be, weaker and incapable of effective resistance.

Think of Libya, Syria, Iran and elsewhere. Even if tsarist Russia was already hated in his epoch for many lies and prejudices, the Russian might and military forces eventually prevented an attack. It always did except against Hitler (1914 was another history) who used the same western rhetoric to enslave and slaughter Slavic peoples. Goebbels blamed the Russians for the Holodomor as the American senates does.

Writes Hobson with irony:

The chivalrous spirit of Imperialism leads neither Great Britain nor any other Western nation to assail a powerful State however tyrannous or to assist a weak State reputed to be poor.

Hobson adds that public opinion in this time was moulded and formatted by imperialist literature (Verne, Kipling, Rider Haggard or John Buchan) and that the prejudices of the superior race were thus reinforced. He remarks that the cult of sport and the fascination for adventure and travels bolstered western biases and prejudices. The anglo-Saxon sportsman was (and still is in Nepal) always escorted by sad coolies.

The vast majority of “educated” Englishmen genuinely believe that England’s greatest gain from the Boer war is an enhancement of her “moral prestige”!

For John Hobson, the western stupidity is linked to naïve optimism and it results from the celebration of this insane moral imperialism which helped America to destroy half a dozen countries these last fifteen years, no to mention the incalculable bombings of Uncle Sam’s irascible History:

In England, and indeed throughout Anglo-Saxondom, a sort of cheery optimism has commonly usurped the seat of intelligent direction, a general belief in “national destiny,” which enables us “somehow to muddle through,” and advises us “to do the best we can and not look too far ahead.”

The cheery optimism of our business-knights adores destroying any country on earth.

Pravda.ru and other free media often mention the distortion of the facts by western madness and presstitute media. This is unluckily nothing new. Writes Hobson on the subject:

Imperialism is based upon a persistent misrepresentation of facts and forces chiefly through a most refined process of selection, exaggeration, and attenuation, directed by interested cliques and persons so as to distort the face of history.

Then Hobson concludes around the ludicrous state of mind not of Obama’s America but of imperialist Britain:

The gravest peril of Imperialism lies in the state of mind of a nation which has become habituated to this deception and which has rendered itself incapable of self-criticism.

Well, he is for once a little wrong: America is capable of self-criticism: it will confess that it has not helped its ally Israel enough, that it has not nuked Iran enough, not humiliated an alienated Europe enough and that it has not yet declared the war on Russia!

As we know, nobody plagued with such ‘moral prestige’ is perfect! And nothing is better than an atomic war to boost it.

Source: Pravda

Globalists scheming to end sovereign nations in ME

As if globalist scheming had not yet caused enough death and destruction in the Middle East, the global government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations and various outfits associated with the secretive Bilderberg group are now pushing a radical new plot for the region: a European Union-style regional regime to rule over the Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, and other peoples who live there. The sought-after “Middle Eastern Union” would put populations ranging from Turkey and Jordan to Libya and Egypt under a single authority.

If the plot moves forward, like in other areas, it would usurp from the peoples of the region their right to self-government and national sovereignty. It would also advance the longtime establishment goal of setting up regional regimes on the path to a more formal system of “global governance.” Already, the peoples of Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and other regions have had self-styled regional “authorities” imposed on them against their will. In the Middle East, numerous similar efforts such as the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League have been making progress, too.

A true “union” to rule over the broader Middle East and North Africa, though, would represent a major step forward in the ongoing regionalization of power around the world. Using a wide range of pretexts to advance the scheme, top globalist outfits and mouthpieces claim such a regional government would solve myriad real and imagined problems. However, with the plot being pushed hard by the CFR and various globalist propaganda organs such as the Financial Times, a U.K. newspaper that is always well represented at the shadowy Bilderberg summits, there is good reason to be skeptical at the very least.

“Just as a warring [European] continent found peace through unity by creating what became the EU, Arabs, Turks, Kurds and other groups in the region could find relative peace in ever closer union,” claimed Mohamed “Ed” Husain, an “adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies” at the CFR, in a piece published in the Financial Times and on the CFR website last month. “After all, most of its problems — terrorism, poverty, unemployment, sectarianism, refugee crises, water shortages — require regional answers. No country can solve its problems on its own.”

Of course, the notion that Europe “found peace through unity” — in reality it was globalists surreptitiously crushing national sovereignty and foisting an unaccountable regime on the peoples — is fashionable among establishment types. In truth, though, “peace” hardly requires giving up self-government. Plus, many of the wars in Europe over the last century were actually fomented by the very same forces that imposed the EU on the continent. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, for example, was a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) party before going on to create Bilderberg, which attendees openly boast has played a crucial role in imposing the Brussels-based super-state that now dominates Europe.

Plenty of actual examples also refute Husain’s claims about the supposed necessity of a regional regime to solve national problems. The Swiss, for instance, have had peace for centuries, yet they have consistently and overwhelmingly refused to surrender their sovereignty to the EU or any other outfit. Switzerland also has virtually no terrorism, poverty, unemployment, sectarianism, refugee crises, or water shortages, yet it never sought “regional answers.” In fact, contrary to Husain’s factually challenged argument, the Swiss have done better than virtually any other people in solving their problems on their own. Perhaps Husain views Middle Easterners as less capable, but more likely, he knows full well that a country could solve its problems on its own.

“Most in the Middle East no longer feel the dignity of their ancestors,” continued the CFR’s Husain without citing any data or surveys. “What Plato called thymos is desperately missing: the political desire for recognition and respect as dignified peoples. A Middle Eastern Union could recreate it.” How being ruled by an unaccountable and autocratic EU-style leviathan would give the peoples of the Middle East “dignity” or “thymos” was not immediately clear. Plato, of course, like bigwigs at the CFR and their fellow travelers, believed the masses should be lorded over by their superiors — Plato called them “philosopher kings.”

Source: The New American

International spy capital Vienna

According to a survey compiled by specialists in spying activities, Vienna, Austria, is home to more than 7,000 secret agents and spies, a number greater than any other city.

“Vienna is a stock exchange of information. We have the most liberal laws governing this activity in the world,” Gert Rene Polli, the former chief of BVT, the country’s counter-terrorism agency, said.

“It is also a nice place for spies to live and bring their families, with good education and health services after difficult postings in Serbia, Iraq or Afghanistan,” Polli added.

Embassies there are overcrowded with personnel, many of whom are secret agents serving as links to their home countries. Although Vienna hosts spies from a large number of countries, US and Russian spies dominate the numbers.

It was recently revealed that a US spy working for German foreign intelligence (BND) met at least two CIA agents working at the US Embassy in Vienna since 2012. In 2010, Vienna’s airport hosted the biggest “spy swap” in history, where 14 US and Russian spies were exchanged in broad daylight.

“All the services that worked here during the Cold War have a presence in Vienna today,” Siegfried Beer, historian and head of the Austrian Center for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies (ACIPSS), said. “Between the two world wars, Vienna definitely became the center of European espionage,” he added.

Following World War II, Vienna became a battlefield for intelligence operations, competing for influence and information. At the forefront were CIA and KGB agents. After 1955, Vienna became neutral territory, but allied countries left their agents behind. Foreign intelligence agents can rest easy for now since according to law, Austria’s state police can only punish spying aimed at Austria.

As long as Vienna’s laws continue to only punish espionage against Austria, agents will continue to flock to the historically spy-friendly city.

Source: RIA Novosti

Is World War III coming?

Nouriel Roubini, Kyle Bass, Hugo Salinas Price, Charles Nenner, James Dines, Jim Rogers, David Stockman, Marc Faber, Jim Rickards, Paul Craig Roberts, Martin Armstrong, Larry Edelson, Gerald Celente and others warn of wider war

Paul Craig Roberts – former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, listed by Who’s Who in America as one of the 1,000 most influential political thinkers in the world, PhD economist – wrote an article yesterday about the build up of hostilities between the U.S. and Russia titled, simply: “War Is Coming”. In the article, Roberts notes:

As reported by Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge, the Russian response to the extra-legal ruling of a corrupt court in the Netherlands, which had no jurisdiction over the case on which it ruled, awarding $50 billion dollars from the Russian government to shareholders of Yukos, a corrupt entity that was looting Russia and evading taxes, is telling. Asked what Russia would do about the ruling, an advisor to President Putin replied, “There is a war coming in Europe.” Do you really think this ruling matters?”

In January, well-known economist Nouriel Roubini tweeted from the gathering of the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Many speakers compare 2014 to 1914 when WWI broke out & no one expected it. A black swan in the form of a war between China & Japan?

And:

Both Abe and an influential Chinese analyst don’t rule out a military confrontation between China and Japan. Memories of 1914?

Billionaire hedge fund manager Kyle Bass writes:

Trillions of dollars of debts will be restructured and millions of financially prudent savers will lose large percentages of their real purchasing power at exactly the wrong time in their lives. Again, the world will not end, but the social fabric of the profligate nations will be stretched and in some cases torn. Sadly, looking back through economic history, all too often war is the manifestation of simple economic entropy played to its logical conclusion. We believe that war is an inevitable consequence of the current global economic situation.

Reagan’s head of the Office of Management and Budget – David Stockman – is posting pieces warning of the dispute between the U.S. and Russia leading to World War 3.

Investment adviser Larry Edelson wrote an email to subscribers entitled “What the “Cycles of War” are saying for 2013″, which states:

Since the 1980s, I’ve been studying the so-called “cycles of war” — the natural rhythms that predispose societies to descend into chaos, into hatred, into civil and even international war.

I’m certainly not the first person to examine these very distinctive patterns in history. There have been many before me, notably, Raymond Wheeler, who published the most authoritative chronicle of war ever, covering a period of 2,600 years of data.

However, there are very few people who are willing to even discuss the issue right now. And based on what I’m seeing, the implications could be absolutely huge ….

Former Goldman Sachs technical analyst Charles Nenner – who has made some big accurate calls, and counts major hedge funds, banks, brokerage houses, and high net worth individuals as clients – says there will be “a major war”, which will drive the Dow to 5,000.

Veteran investor adviser James Dines forecast a war is epochal as World Wars I and II, starting in the Middle East.

Economist and investment manager Marc Faber says that the American government will start new wars in response to the economic crisis:

“The next thing the government will do to distract the attention of the people on bad economic conditions is they’ll start a war somewhere.”

Martin Armstrong – who has managed multi-billion dollar sovereign investment funds – wrote in August:

Our greatest problem is the bureaucracy wants a war. This will distract everyone from the NSA and justify what they have been doing. They need a distraction for the economic decline that is coming.

Source: Washington’s Blog

Wheels reveal foreign policy choices

Joseph Stalin preferred the American Packard Twelve

The cars chosen by presidents, kings, prime ministers and other leaders of the world in the past and today, also reveal their tastes in foreign affairs.

The car fleet of the last Emperor of Russia Nicholas II in 1913 consisted of 29 vehicles and in 1917 there were 46. The Emperor’s main car was a French Delaunay-Belleville. It all ended badly for the ruler as well as the manufacturer, sadly.

When Vladimir Lenin became the leader of the Soviet Russia, strangely, he displayed a love of Western wheels, but apparently not ideology. In the 1920’s Lenin used a Rolls Royce 40/50 Silver Ghost and the only Rolls Royce-based sledge-car in the world.

Those discussions with Rolls about vast snowy landscapes with no roads for travel must have been long and interesting. Lenin famously erected the Gulags, similar to the concentration camps that the British invented in South Africa at the start of the 20th century.

Even more puzzling is that the next leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, preferred the American Packard Twelve. A man of slight stature, he stood very tall as one of history’s most prolific killers. But he may not have had the only responsibility.

Stalin’s grasp on the Soviet Union featured many atrocities, including purges, expulsions, forced displacements, imprisonment in labor camps, manufactured famines, torture and good old-fashioned acts of mass murder and massacres.

Actually, most of the deaths are today attributed to Lavrenti Beria, head of Stalin’s Checka, and amounted to some 20 million lives, on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War, for a total tally of 40 million. It was not called the Red Terror for nothing.

Both amoral psychopaths, acting like true gangsters, Stalin and Beria eliminated anyone and everyone who was a threat to their absolute power. Beria eventually killed his instrument of power (Stalin) too, new studies have shown, by poisoning him.

Chinese leader Mao Zedong had a Russian ZIS-110 which he got as a present from Stalin in 1949, although he managed to do a fair amount of killing himself.

Other Soviet leaders stuck with domestically produced cars. Nikita Khrushchev was driven in a ZIL-111 or a ZIL-111B convertible when he visited Berlin in 1960.

Leonid Brezhnev and the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev were both driven around in a ZIL. The latter had up to 20 of those on each of his foreign visits. This required seven Il-76 transport planes.

Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin changed to an armoured ZIL-4105 when he became president in 1991. Later he changed it to a Mercedes S500 Pullman Guard (W140).

From then on German wheels seem to have prevailed. Russia’s current President Vladimir Putin is driven in a Mercedes S600 Pullman Guard (W-221).

John F. Kennedy, US president 1961-1963, used a Lincoln Continental. At the time of the assasination in Dallas, Texas, he was in a convertible Lincoln Continental SS-100-Х.

A man of the people, Uruguay’s acting President Jose Alberto Mujica spends almost all of his income on charity and his most expensive belonging is a powder blue VW Beetle, circa 1987.

No rattling along country roads for POTUS to meet fellow Americans, though. US President Barack Obama is transported in the armoured Cadillac One, also known as The Beast. The Bama took no cues from the Batman, clearly. His motorcade counts up to 40 vehicles transported on three Boeing С-17 Globemaster military transport planes.

British Queen Elizabeth sticks to the Bentley State Limousine, created in two copies specially for her in 2002 and British Prime Minister David Cameron still uses a Jaguar XJ X351 which he damaged in a road accident.

French President Francois Hollande changed from an armoured Renault Vel Satis to a Citroen and German Chancellor Angela Merkel drives an armoured Audi A8 L Security. She also has a BMW 760 Li E67 and a Mercedes-Benz S600 Guard V221 at her disposal.

Spain’s new King Felipe has English tastes. He prefers a Rolls Royce.

Dining with POTUS

Order one with mustard, and cross your fingers

The golden age of political poisoning has largely come and gone. POTUS, however, still eats the way a ruler of an Empire did.

We know Saddam Hussein, for one, had people on the payroll to sample his dinner. His son Uday apparently incurred his wrath by having a favorite food taster killed.

Figureheads seem to have let their guard down a bit. Royals in the UK and imperials in Japan have reportedly been eating taster-free for some time now. But others a finger on the reins of world power consider the possibility that he or she might get poisoned.

Which is why, though there may not be anyone who puts down “presidential food taster” under “occupation” on his 1040, there are definitely mechanisms in place to ensure that the U.S. president doesn’t eat anything dangerous. How these mechanisms work in practice, however . . . well, the White House, as one might imagine, plays the topic exceedingly close to the vest, and writers’ requests for details (even mine) tend to go unheeded. So we’ve been left to piece things together as best we can from the occasional news account or memoir.

What seems clear is that when the president eats somewhere other than 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., tasters — in the form of Secret Service agents or military personnel — are likely to be involved. According to a Washington Post article from July 1990, George H.W. Bush ate out at Washington restaurants a lot by presidential standards, about once a month, and when he did he brought along his own condiments, bottled water, and a taster. On at least one occasion the taster was seen to personally wash all of George and Barbara’s tableware before use and subsequently monitor its whereabouts, sample the food, supervise its service, and uncork and taste the first couple’s wine.

Reports from early in Bill Clinton’s first term suggest inconsistent taster use: a March ’93 Post account of an impromptu dinner with the Gores at a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, has a trio of Secret Service agents scrutinizing the preparation of Clinton’s food but not actually trying any. But an “official” food taster (described as a “veteran of three presidencies”) turns up in a local paper’s feature on a Clinton get-together with Silicon Valley types in Los Gatos, California, a month earlier. And lest you think tasters are deployed only when the president ventures off government turf, a detachment of navy culinary specialists did the tasting (per the New York Times) at a congressional lunch held at the Capitol during George W. Bush’s inaugural festivities in 2001. One presumes security has gotten tighter since (a) the 9/11 attacks and (b) the descent of W’s approval ratings to depths previously plumbed only by hostage-crisis Jimmy Carter and athlete’s foot.

The presidential food safety team’s responsibilities go well beyond packing up a squeeze bottle of Horsey Sauce if the POTUS indicates that he’s thinking Arby’s. In his 2005 book Standing Next to History, former Secret Service agent Joseph Petro — who spent 23 years in the suit and shades — writes, “In principle nothing edible gets near the President unless we know where it comes from and who has handled it.” When the president digs in at a state banquet, Petro informs us, he’s eating basically the same stuff as everyone else in the room, but his helping has been prepared specially by White House stewards, who suit up to match the other servers at the event and carry his plate out themselves. For events in foreign countries, it’s the same thing but more so. Petro writes: “Stewards find out what’s being served at the banquet and bring the ingredients with them from the United States.”

OK, but try this one. The president (Reagan) is at a baseball game (opening day 1984, Baltimore), and his handlers decide they need a photo op of him eating a hot dog. You’re the Secret Service guy. What do you do? According to Petro’s account, you do the only thing you can: you pick a vendor at random, order one with mustard, and cross your fingers.

Vladimir Putin brings his own salt, pepper, bottled water and napkin along with him, it is rumoured. Just to be on the safe side when dealing with the Empire.

An end to free government housing?

Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu wants to end to free government housing.

“Somebody has to have the courage to say this is not what we intended,” she said. Free housing was not in the Freedom Charter, which talked of there being houses, or in the constitution, which set out the right of access to adequate shelter.

Currently there are many reports of beneficiaries of free government housing selling their homes, often for next to nothing and without the right paper work.

In her budget speech this week Sisulu said it was do-able to provide 1.5 million housing opportunities over the next five years.

This included about one million brick-and-mortar free government houses, with 50 mega-projects of at least 10 000 units to get under way within 100 days.

The remainder would be made up of site and service spots, where people could build their own homes, affordable rental accommodation and the financing in the gap housing market for those earning too much to qualify for free homes and too little for commercial mortgages.

Land is at the heart of state housing provision in integrated human settlements. Sisulu is determined suitable land will be identified and acquired: “We might think of expropriating for this purpose.”

But as the Lwandle evictions in a freezing mid-winter cold spell showed, the DA-controlled Cape Town council and provincial administration, the government-owned SA National Roads Agency and the national transport and human settlements departments will be subject to a ministerial inquiry.

Sisulu is adamant the lessons from this eviction will be applied countrywide and, if necessary, the Prevention of Illegal Eviction Act will be amended to ensure every party is aware and sticks to its obligations.

“It’s not just about Lwandle,” Sisulu said.

Why America needs war

Wars are a terrible waste of lives and resources, and for that reason most people are in principle opposed to wars, writes historian and political scientist Jacques Pauwels.

The American President, on the other hand, seems to love war. Why? Many commentators have sought the answer in psychological factors.

Ethnic cleansing is coming to Ukraine

The NWO only leaves death and destruction, a scorched earth, in its wake

Ethnic cleansing is coming to Ukraine.

Global chessboard enthusiast Zbigniew Brzezinski has a plan for Ukraine. In a recent speech to the Woodrow Wilson Center, excerpted by the Atlantic Council, he argues forcefully in favor of the United States providing the Ukrainian military far more weapons.

Under the guise of preventing a Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has been the rallying cry of those who seek more US involvement in the region, Brzezinski believes that the US must provide Ukraine with weapons.

Russia has no such plans though.

The odds of defending against the invading Russian military being very low, Brzezinski has a different idea of how the US should arm the Kiev government.

Said the former National Security Advisor:

I feel that we should make it clear to the Ukrainians that if they are determined to resist, as they say they are and seemingly they are trying to do so (albeit not very effectively), we will provide them with anti-tank weapons, hand-held anti-tank weapons, hand-held rockets—weapons capable for use in urban short range fighting.

The US must provide urban warfare equipment to the Kiev government, he says, in order to “forestall” the impending Russian invasion.

Really? What could a huge shipment of urban warfare weapons and the advisors that go with them be used for?

Ethnic cleansing.

We already see with the resumption of Kiev’s attacks on the east, a sharp turn toward the targeting of civilian apartment blocks and non-military targets. We know from a recent United Nations report that more than 100,000 have already fled eastern Ukraine. The country’s post-coup president, Petro Poroshenko, was very clear, ending the ceasefire (that wasn’t much of a ceasefire) by stating that “We will attack and we will liberate our land!”

Does that mean liberating it from the “others” who do not accept rule by the post-coup government? Those who Kiev’s prime minister Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk has already called “subhumans“?

Urban warfare equipment and training for the Kiev military machine would, as Russian political scientist Yevgeny Minchenko points out, mean “municipal infrastructure will be destroyed, leading to a humanitarian catastrophe.” In his view, “[t]he war will continue, and people will gradually leave their homes. It will be bad for both sides, but neither one can stop now.”

Brzezinski has long advocated US domination of Ukraine to deprive Russia of any productive relationship with its neighbor. “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire,” he wrote in his 1997 book book, The Grand Chessboard.

Source: Daniel McAdams

Washington isolating itself says German analyst

Christoph R. Horstel, government consultant and publicist, based in Germany, discusses the situation in Ukraine.

On June, 20 Ukraine’s recently elected president, Petro Poroshenko, ordered a unilateral ceasefire between government-backed forces and independence supporters in the east until June, 27 to defuse the crisis in the country, promising amnesty for all independence defense forces not involved in grave crimes and willing to lay down their arms.

Pro-independence forces in the South East said they do not believe in the goodwill of the Kiev authorities, and that Poroshenko is not in control.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has pointed out that Poroshenko’s peace plan bears no mention of a nationwide dialogue.

Says Christoph R. Horstel, government Consultant and publicist, Germany:

“In fact, if you offer a peace plan, that plan should address the problems which have lead into a violation of peace. But the Poroshenko’s plan has never addressed anything, except for one point – complete obedience, subordination of all the Ukrainian people under the rule in Kiev, which is the result of the coup d’état – the second in ten years – a strange kind of election where a majority was no longer necessary, and meanwhile we had rumors that there were frauds all over the place with the presidential election and the government is still in the interim regime.

I think Poroshenko is a deeply criminal person and that is a big trouble for Ukraine. He is just walking after Washington and that’s a very bad story now.

What now? What could be the implications for Poroshenko?

And if I were a citizen of that area, I would never drop my arms, of course, because that is the only chance I have. Otherwise these people would be just an easy prey for whoever comes and tries to destroy homes or take away the men, and what else has happened in the past – all these kinds of atrocities.

Could it be that the Western media eventually stops to overlook how things really are in Ukraine?

What we have is a general line. The general line is not friendly to Russia.

But what we also have is so much information on the Internet about things contradicting the Washington policies and so much unhappiness among the European politicians with the same Washington policies, that in fact the media are now in a very awkward point. If they continue publishing the official stuff coming from Washington via the Western capitals to the big media, then they will lose the credibility with the population to such an extent, that their economic survival would be endangered even more than now.

You know, we have a reduced circulation number of major papers. The interest in the Internet versions of these papers is so weak, in fact, that they cannot sell their content. This is another problem of this big media. And that is what would aggravate very quickly, if they continue lying in the same fashion and strength that they had in the past.

You’re also saying that politicians are getting increasingly unhappy with the current situation?

Yes, a huge scandal has broken open in Poland. [The scandal erupted last weekend, when a Polish news outlet Wprost released a transcript of an excerpt from secretly recorded conversations involving Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski who was describing his country’s security relationship with the United States as “worth nothing.” ]

And that is in fact shaking Europe, because Poland was always considered to be the mainstay of the American interests, especially against Russia. And now the Foreign Minister, being married to an American national, he himself spoke out in such a brutal blunt way, that everybody is in fact shocked. And that makes waves in Facebook and all the alternative media in the Internet. People are crying “hoo” and “wow” and think that is very interesting, and they are very happy, and they are rejoicing it and things like that. So, in fact, they treat him as a hero. He is a hero, Mr. Sikorski.

In Germany we have a former member of the Foreign Committee of the German Bundestag, Mr. Gauweiler, who is an important person in the Conservative Party in southern Germany, saying that this is all going wrong regarding Russia and Ukraine and he is opposed to it. We have the former politicians speaking out in large numbers. And we know that the whole German Government is very uneasy. The economic circles are up in arms in an unprecedented way since the WW II. So, if that is not enough, I don’t know what is.

But does that imply that perhaps we are going to see a change of heart and a change of course in the West?

I think something is still missing. And I’m wondering myself what that could be. We have so terrible pictures from Ukraine. You cannot in this 21st century oppress people like we have see in the Middle Ages, that this is crazy.

In fact, if we look at the details, we see that the real terror operation by Kiev. We have heard that the professional killers trained by the CIA in Poland are used in Ukraine to kill their own people, their own brothers and sisters, so to say, in such a fashion. This is something terrible. The European people may be corrupt, there may be bad governments, but they are not stupid. And they have open eyes, they see these realities themselves, even if they push their media to publish otherwise. That is the situation. It is a complete hypocrisy phenomena we have there in politics today.

But, at the same time, if Russia actively intervenes, Russia would be there to blame.

Of course! And I’m quite sure, if that happens, if Russia takes out a big stick, that is something Washington is hoping for all the time. This is why they are going so hardcore and push Ukraine to execute these wishes. They hope that Russia would be unwise and come in with big troops, and take up the battle. And I don’t think Russia will do that.

It drives the Western politicians nuts. They get crazy over the fact that Russia is patient, very constructive, all the time talking to everybody explaining exactly what they are doing and the Western side is looking like a warmonger all the time. That cannot continue that way for a long time in the West.

And there is another aspect to that, as far as I understand, shares of leading Western companies are going down. And that is a brilliant chance for the Chinese.

Germany, yes, is doing quite well, but all the other countries in Europe are further and further down the road. These are huge inroads also on the technological advantage of the Western countries, which is diminishing day by day, because they have to simply sell their nuggets to the Chinese in such a bad situation.

So, in fact, one of the big winners keeping out of most of the trouble is China right now.

What we have is that all of these countries – Russia and China, and others – investing a lot of money into armament, and this comes only because of these Washington hegemonic terror policies.

Which means that Washington’s policy is reinforcing China, which Washington sees as its biggest adversary. Where is the logic?

There is no strategy anymore. There is no plan reaching beyond a few months. That is very bad. We have all kinds of plans, of course, of interference and scenarios by the military, and these things. But what we do not have is a real policy – policy planning, policy strategy to go ahead constructively. What Washington is doing, is isolating itself as if it was its own arch enemy.

Source: VoR