One of the interesting revelations in Tucker Carlson’s book, Ship of Fools, is that Bill Kristol said privately what he denied publicly about the Iraq war. That is, the war was about Israel and not American security. Saddam was never a threat to American interests in the region but taking him out was good for Israel. The neocons have always denied this, usually claiming it is anti-Semitic to suggest it, but every time they get caught in a lie they squeal “anti-Semitism” so this is not new.
The thing is though, a schemer like Kristol could have been lying to Carlson, hoping he stepped on the same landmines as Pat Buchanan. Carlson was always a war skeptic and a natural conservative, so Bill Kristol would have seen him as a threat. The main play of the second generation neocons has always been the Hitler card. They look for some way to accuse their opponents of being anti-Semites, so that the focus shifts from the neocon schemers and onto the accusers.
Putting that aside, subsequent events suggest that the crusade against Islam launched in the Bush years was never about Israel. The real target for the neocons was the ancient enemy in the east, Russia. Neoconservatism, after all, was born out of a hatred for Russia during the Cold War. The cover story was that these radicals had turned on communism, but in reality, they were reacting to what was happening on the Left with regards to relations with the Soviet Union.
Soon after the fall of the Cold War, the neocons running foreign policy under the first George Bush engineered the first Gulf War. They did this by baiting Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait. The American ambassador to Iraq at the time was April Glaspie, who met with Saddam before he launched his invasion. It is clear from the notes that he was not committed to war. It is also clear that Glaspie gave him the impression that America was not committed to defending Kuwait.
Why would the neocons want a war with Iraq? It seems like a lifetime ago, but Iraq was a longtime client of the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union fell, the Russians were in no condition to help her allies as in the past. This made it a perfect time to take this piece of the board. Given the behavior of the neocons in Ukraine over the last decade, it is not a stretch to think they baited Saddam into war. After all, they have been trying to bait Russian into invading Ukraine.
If we look at the crusade against Islam as a proxy war against Russia, the last thirty years of foreign policy adventures makes more sense. The second war with Iraq was about finishing the job and preparing for the planned attack on Iran, which so happens to be a Russia ally. The creation of ISIS as a weapon against Syria, another ally of Russia, now also makes sense. The occupation of Afghanistan never made sense as a response to 9/11, but it did make a nice forward operating base.
Long forgotten in all of this is how the neocons pushed the Clinton administration into bombing Serbia during the Balkan war. The Balkans have always been a mess, so there was never a reason for America to take sides. This should have been a European matter, worked out in endless meetings, like everything else in Europe. Instead, the neocons pushed for an aggressive stance toward Serbia, which so happens to be a longtime Russian ally. There is a pattern here.
Fast forward to the present and the pattern is clear. The neocons started the Russo-Georgian war by trying to bring Georgia into NATO. Give or take, Georgia is about 3,000 miles from the North Atlantic, thus making her an odd fit for a military alliance based in the North Atlantic. That was never the point, of course. The point was to pick away at the borders with the ancient enemy. NATO expansion has never been about defense, but always about offense.
In more recent times, the neocons have tried to color revolution Belarus, they have stirred up trouble in Kazakhstan and they are probably involved in the tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Then there is the Ukraine situation. Half of Washington has been taking bribes from Ukrainian oligarchs, which has concealed the fact that the neocons have been plotting trouble there for over a decade. The same people behind the color revolution in the Obama years are in charge now.
The point of all of this has been to weaken Russia by nibbling away at her border, forcing her to commit resources to all of these different conflicts. At some point, the current government becomes too weak to defend itself. Maybe with some outside help, the government falls. This opens the door for regime change and the long dreamed of break up of Russia. This is not idle speculation. A few years ago, the Rand Corporation provide the playbook for those interested.
The old line about the neocons being Trotskyites was mostly a way to point out that they were not conservatives in the traditional sense. Many were communist in the middle of the last century. Their “conversion” was never about the things that had long defined conservatism, but rather the temporary needs of the moment. They cared more about beating Russia in the Cold War than anything else. They simply embraced the rest of the conservative program as a means to an end.
One of the underappreciated aspects of the last five years is the exit of the neocons from Buckley conservatism. They have their own publications and regularly attack their old friends on the Right. Of course, they were outlandishly opposed to trump and the pro-American sentiments he embodied. Their primary complain was that he was soft on Russia and Russian allies. This transformation suggest the paleocons were right about the neocon conversion being less than genuine.
There may have been more to the Trotsky line. In radical politics, it was long held that the Bolshevik revolution was hijacked by Stalin. The Trotsky wing never forgave the Russians for allowing the revolution to turn into Tsarism. This fueled the deep hatred for Russia among Trotskyites of a certain persuasion. The neoconservative persuasion was driven by this animus in the Cold War. After the Cold War, it has driven by the berserk obsession for Russia by the second wave of neocons.
What America, and by extension the West, has been experiencing over the last thirty years is Trotsky’s revenge. Resentment at the failure of his faction in the revolution was probably the second to last thing that went through his head. His followers, however, have had it in the forefront of their minds. The current generation of neocons, lacking the intelligence to understand any of this, are simply left with a seething hatred of Russia that has driven America foreign policy for a generation.
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“Second to last thing…”! 🤣🤣🤣
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“Resentment at the failure of his faction in the revolution was probably the second to last thing that went through his head.”
Z, can I axe you a question about the last thing? 😏
3
As paleos, etc., another one of our distinguishing characteristics is a sense of humor. Today, SNL is the Left’s brand and standard of “humor,” which is, at its best, juvenile and pathetic. However, we gotta give a little credit to (among the living) Chappelle, Rock, Lewis Black, and Maher although I happen to think it’s their writers who provide them with most of their material.
Here’s a clue:
http://nwmountainshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ice_axe_rental.jpg
He just wanted to pick Trotsky’s brain.
2
Ice pick. Ouch!
the thing is, Trotsky thought Stalin’s boy was his barber, and his real last words were “just a little off the top”
Is politics a substitute for religion? Or a way to ignore religion?
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Since you kind of get to make up your own rules, it might fall more under the definition of idolatry. But I like your comment cause it is thought provoking. I mean it is a substitution, it’s a kind of materialism, but it ignores the real God, but it doesn’t claim a god, but it worships things like a god. Very interesting.
I was thinking about this just the other day while driving. I will do my best to explain, and the idea is still somewhat inchoate and being formed
It came to me that a good chunk of a person’s life is in some way religious be it how he spends his time physically at a church or in some ways connected to a religious group or how he ponders what God might be in those thoughtful private moments. Be it public or private, religion and God are inescapable features of a person’s life.
I sometimes like to say, when defining myself, that I am one quarter wolf, one quarter hawk, one quarter dolphin, and one quarter bear. Because I see traits of myself in all of those animals and it’s just fun to goof around with women talking like this, but there is enough truth in it where I can convince them I mean it, and they can kind of see the point and make sense of it. They get it.
The point being, religion and God are at least a good one quarter of who we are. You take away the bear in me, you take away a part of me, you cut it out like lopping off an appendage. You take away the wolf in me, you kill my spirit. You take away my dolphin, you take away the part of me that likes to smile and be happy and splash in the water
Ok, so now we have a society of people who are not whole because they cannot involve God, an essential part of themselves, in their public and political lives. Imagine that. How can politics ever mean anything when it is all about people who have had pieces of them removed. It is like if you want to be in politics and take part in the American system, you have to cut an arm off or gouge out your heart or carve out your frontal lobe. That is the price of admission.
Moral of the story, denying any semblance of God in our politics will result in a freak show of the walking dead
“I am one quarter wolf, one quarter hawk, one quarter dolphin, and one quarter bear”. mescaline is a helluva drug.
Better a man be part wolf than be part tranny
Never forget that my son
The Color Revolution model, alongside a compliant national media, has been an incredibly effective combination that feeds on the old American mythology of a people yearning to be freed from the yoke of an oppressive government. This only works though, when people are not wised up to the mechanisms going on behind the scenes.
The Jan. 6 narrative of federal infiltration is devastating not so much just because it gives the Jan. 6 defendants a much better case, but because it lays bare the MO of our government both here and abroad for the last couple of decades. Any sort of foreign color Revolution will increasingly be seen with cynicism by citizens, which is why they are hitting so hard on the disinformation narrative. They eventually want to make talk of their Color Revolutions illegal.
It also puts the sights on NGO’s who are increasingly the real power brokers, and away from their puppets in Government. The classic example was in Canada, when a representative explicitly stated her concerns that every politician was a WEF shill, and got her mic cut for her trouble.
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I think that was Australia.
But honestly at this point just throw a dart at a map of the west and you will hit a nest of these shills dominating every govt.
It is difficult to know what the intent of US foreign policy for each of the various interventions of the past few decades – but the outcome has pretty uniformly been a significant increase in violence, corruption and chaos.
There is also an unreported consequence of massively reducing the Christian populations in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa (reduced by killing, ‘ethnic cleansing’, exile… from talking to someone on the ground in the Middle East it seems that hundreds of thousand of Christians disappeared in the ‘Arab Spring’ era, but nobody knows (or is telling) exactly what happened to them.
In other words; the theme of US foreign interventions seems to be less about pursing any positive agenda; and a lot about wrecking whatever there is of any source of rival order and capability – and wrecking is of course Much easier than building.
Wrecking any opposition is also vital since the West is rapidly wrecking its own capability – across the board and by multiple means. So they need to ensure that everybody else is being ruined *even more* rapidly than the Anglosphere and EU.
As for the observable anti-Christian consequences across the globe, that is a natural consequence of the identity of the demonic Beings who stand behind and sustain the direction of Western policy across nations and generations – and despite the endless selfishness, short-termism and infighting among the Establishment leadership; which would otherwise sabotage all plans.
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One of my coworkers was from Iraq, and she stated her entire home town was wiped out a couple years after Iraq War II. Saddam was a vicious guy, but he did protect religious minorities reasonably well. The power vacuum led to far worse strong-men.
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Trotsky -as the Commander of the Red Army – should have rightly executed Stalin for the failure to follow his orders during the Polish war. Stalin’s refusal to bypass Lvov left Tukhachevskii’s flank exposed. Had Stalin followed orders, Pilsudski could never have rolled the left flank, even if they were intercepting the Russian communications.
2
i always wonder why the russians just don’t exterminate pests like soros, and the neo-cons. seems easier than dealing with their mischief militarily. they have lots of muslim partners that can act as cut outs; get them to do the wet work (like that saudi journalist that got chopped up for his trouble).
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Don’t be lazy DIY
Jews hate Russia because the Tsar was conspicuously Christian and never let them worm their way into positions of power in his Empire. They’ve never let Russia off the hook for “Fiddler on the Roof” stuff that happened back in centuries long past. Yes, they finally got their dream when the Tsar and his family got Tikkun Olamed, and this turned them briefly pro-Soviet. But the further things got from the Revolution, the more the anti-Russianism was on again – all the more so after communism fell entirely (Unforgivable!), and we ended up with a new, conspicuously Christian tsar-in-all-but-name.
Rich Jews purchased American foreign policy long ago, and have used the country boys of places like Idaho and Kentucky as their personal Janissaries ever since. This will end only when the Global American Empire falls. Which is why I say: “Evil Empires: One Down, One To Go”.
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When you said it that way I realized how much I love America the country and loathe America the empire.
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I think we are all in that position
It’s just a crying shame that we love this place so much but then have a Godless freak show running it and making us hate an essential part of it
Oh well, we shall see. But if a tactical nuke or what have you falls on DC I won’t be saddened or shell shocked but popping the cork on a bottle of bubbly in celebration.
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Neocons, like all such interest groups, ascended to positions of supreme influence in DC via the tried-and-true protocol of purchasing politicians via campaign cash, covert bribery, and sexual blackmail. And these techniques are highly successful because the Stasi only uses its muscle against Dirt People while letting all the DC insiders slide on every crime imaginable (as example, see Hunter Biden). IOW, there are no Checks & Balances anymore, only Congressional show hearings which amount to little more than a magician’s act and head-faking. Joe Normie loves to be entertained by these antics too and thinks he is making a difference every time he watches Carlson on TV. It used to shaman Limbaugh, but he died.
So the beat goes on. More antics, more war, more grift, more entertaining carnie barkers, more plate spinning, more societal degeneracy, and now more inflation. The spring winds tighter and Europe will likely crash within a year, then the fun begins. DC is banking on a new slate of RINOs being selected in November as the tonic for Dirt People anger. Turnover and more fake committee hearings are to become the crack cocaine of the next vote-harder epidemic.
Came to town yesterday for a doc appointment and rode my bike through downtown Big City. New vagrant camps everywhere, hundreds if not thousands of destitute people living in old autos and campers on the street. Never heard a word of English spoken for over two miles on one stretch. Methinks the crash is coming here too.
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Is “Trotsky’s followers” some sort of code term?
(((Trotskyites))).
See I fixed it for you.
You might do a search on “Stalin’s J$ws” and see who was who on that Christian murdregime regieme..
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Yeah, in case someone new here. Neocon= damned perfidious Jews. No offense to the regular Jews.
1
There are more paleo-Jews than neocon Jews. There are more Judeo-Christian neocons than Jewish neocons at this point. The thing with the neocons is they are extraordinarily ruthless and focused, while the paleos have always been too nice and too honest. Whatever it was, neoconservatism is not an end-times cult focused on the final conflagration with the eternal enemy.
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Basically, we should have kept the Benjamin Disraeli jews we inherited from England and kept out the shetle jews from the Pale of settlement.
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What is a Judeo Christian. Is that like a Judeo-Muslim?
I thought the only bible oriented Jews were the Karaites, and all modern jews follow the Talmud?
Bill Kristol in 1999 demanded Clinton “crush Serb skulls.”
3
None of this would be happening if our ancestors had been smart enough to restrict immigration to only European Christians.
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Bravo. Excellent piece. And there’s the added frisson of Russia under Putin returning to the “Orthodoxy/Autocracy/Nationality” scheme of Pobednostev, which defines Russia as a specifically Orthodox civilization that was not corrupted by the “enlightenment.” The Russians are a people with a Christian past who define themselves by it, and that is completely unacceptable to the GAE/Trotskyites.
Russia is lucky that it has this past, with its symbols. to recover. America (outside of possibly the South) quite simply does not.
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Funny when you think of it that when the Soviet Union dissolved, the successor Russia adopted the pre-revolutionary tricolor flag and double-headed eagle complete with the Romanov shield, imperial crown, scepter and all.
They do however trot out the Hammer and Sickle on Victory Day.
1
“It seems like a lifetime ago, but Iraq was a longtime client of the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union fell, the Russians were in no condition to help her allies as in the past.”
During the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s (started by Saddam), the US was feeding both satellite and signals intelligence to Iraq. When the Iraqis mistakenly shot down two US fighter aircraft, the USA said no problem, these things happen. Iraq was seen as a bulwark against the Iran of the Mullahs. This didn’t cease with the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq had had good relations with the USSR prior to Saddam (i.e., when Hasan al-Bakr was in power) but it was never a client state like, say, Cuba.
I also doubt that the USA baited Iraq into invading Kuwait. The USA simply didn’t have a clear policy towards Iraq at the time, what with the general chaos and confusion engendered by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Saddam had some prior animosity towards Kuwait — claims of slant drilling and complaints that the Kuwaitis were not helping him financially plus some gratuitous personal insults from the Kuwaitis. Anyway, Saddam invaded first and thought later. Bush, Sr. didn’t have any clear idea about what to do. Thatcher (among others, probably) goaded him into taking a firmer stance. Bush, Sr. still got approval from the UN before proceeding to give Saddam an ultimatum (some famous Democrat senator whose name escapes me — ah, Daniel Moynihan — urged him to get such approval because, he argued, this is what would grant legitimacy in the post-Soviet era).
In brief, it’s tempting to see a grand overarching conspiracy but I doubt it was there. On the other hand, I do see a grand overarching conspiracy in 2003 and all that ensued subsequently.
3
1
The deeply ironic thing is that in the aftermath of 9/11, and Ll through 2002, Saddam was sitting next to his phone waiting for the US to call. He thought that after Islamic terrorists had attacked America we could all work together against religious fanatics like it was the Iran-Iraq war again.
Bush and Cheney were plotting to kill him.
3
I would not use the word conspiracy, which is why I did not use the word in the post. The thing to understand is emergent behavior is often unknown to the people in a system or community. I do not think Bill Kristol wakes up and lights a candle at his Trotsky shrine. He has his son-in-law for that.
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“I also doubt that the USA baited Iraq into invading Kuwait. ”
I can tell you as a fact it did. See my comment above.
4
Saddam was either goaded into invading Kuwait or told that there would be no interference from the USA. April Glaspie’s comments are well documented and she spoke out afterwards against the idea that she had gone rogue. It was official government policy. Then came the babies tossed out of incubators. This was told to congress by a daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA. A woman who had not been to Kuwait in years and who was posing as a Kuwaiti refugee. Total fabrication.
Other things along the way such as Saddam prepared to pull out and then we began Desert Shield which essentially made his swift pullout impossible from a face saving viewpoint. It is clear that he never intended to go beyond Kuwait anyway.
This was the time when Pat Buchanan used the term “amen corner” for all of the neocon war hawks. It got him into hot water and labeled as an anti-special.
Before this war I was a typical normie conservative and believed in all US military missions but after PG1 I could never look at things the same.
1
Okay, so our neoconservative big dogs are mainly of The Name Changer Persuasion.
Most of them are scions of people who got out of Russia in the 1920’s, so who were they?
First, they were followers of Trotsky, and second they were Communists who were financially supported by “bankers et al.” here.
And yet many refuse to talk about what Churches they of course didn’t go to.
These people in their existence hide who they really are, but of course they’re owned by other Name Changers who are the ones who hide behind the curtains. But I suppose that’s what we’re told is another conspiracy theory.
The funny thing is, here lately, so many conspiracy theories are eventually proven true.
3
Given the unmistakable fact that Russia has a huge nuclear inventory, you’d think our ruling class would tread carefully before putting their backs against the wall.
Theodore A. Postol (PHD from MIT) worked in the Pentagon for years on missile defense, including Star Wars. In a recent interview he stated that the entire concept of a Star Wars missile defense is ridiculous, will never work, and does nothing except spur our adversaries to build more and deadlier weapons.
He’s also afraid that there are plenty in the Pentagon and our ruling class who truly believe that we have some sort of workable “shield”, and that we can win a nuclear exchange with Russia or China. He’s no Republican lackey, but he described Obama’s people as “illiterate. Illiterate..and I say that to be unkind” about ABM technology.
Presumably, these are the same people advising the current President.
It’s insane. But this push to directly engage the Russians in a major war is based on a very false premise, that we can somehow “win” because nukes aren’t a viable weapon to use against the US.
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I think it is worse: TPTB in Clown World think (a) Russia never would nuke the United States and (b) if that is wrong, the United States and importantly they would survive it. Such magical and delusional thinking is very, very dangerous.
3
I think what they would do in lieu of destroying America would be to destroy England. That would be like killing america’s birth mother. And it would be psychologically devastating. And America wouldn’t be able to contain herself and would go rushing out on a revenge mission over there to fight where Russia would have the upper hand, and next thing you got are a million dead American soldiers.
This is going to be nasty blood feud, I think. If it gets to that.
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“…destroying America would be to destroy England. That would be like killing america’s birth mother.”
I like the English as much as the next guy, but if they are attacked, that is their problem. More than enough Americans were killed in the 20th century fighting for Britain.
Of course, it would be a different story if the United States government sent forces to attack the UK… I might be convinced to send over some quid to fight the forces of Globopedohomo.
1
If I had to wager, I bet England drags us into a war with Russia.
They are already busy antagonizing the hell out of them. And it won’t be hard to motivate the Russians; just put a picture of Boris Johnson on the wall and train the boys to go sic him, and they will do it gladly. If there is any face you just want to punch, it’s Johnson’s. He is probably the absolute worst man that can be running England right now while simultaneously poking the bear.
I know we say we don’t want to save the hides of the Brits again, but it will be a full court press in the media, and in the end I just can’t see Americans turning their backs when merry old England is lying in a pile of smoldering ruins or devastated by a nuke-induced tidal wave and all the images of little English boys and girls crying over there in some Dickensian horror show. “Where’s mum, where’s my mum.”
I don’t see Americans not getting emotionally overcome by all of it were it to happen.
The simple fact of nuclear war is, regardless of who wins, everybody loses.
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But that won’t stop it, or won’t stop a few of them being used. From purely tactical perspective, there are a lot of people out there, and you need to get rid of them because they are with the enemy, and conventional weapons don’t live up to the job. A nuke eliminates a good million at a pop. And then we see who cries uncle first.
Thomas Carlyle (I think) once said something along the lines of “No one generation can be allowed to play ducks and drakes with the fate of a nation.”
Our “elites” have no sense of responsibility or stewardship. None.
Largely on the money, but a few corrections based on some personal knowledge, and not as detailed as I will be some day.
1. The Neocons did engineer Gulf War I but in a different way than you set forth. The United States had sided with Iraq during the Iraq-Iran War. Iran initially had great success sinking Iraqi oil tankers in the Gulf. The United States in response reflagged Kuwaiti tankers to transport Iraqi oil. Sink one of those babies and you were at war with the Empire, so Iran backed off. Money from the sale of the transported oil was deposited in foreign banks and supposedly earmarked for Iraq. This is where the Neocons came in. That money was pilfered by You-Know-Who, and the United States told Saddam privately, through Glaspie, he was greenlighted to attack Kuwait if it did not reconcile its balance of accounts. Kuwait refused because it did not owe that money, and Iraq did what it thought it had a free hand to do. So the Neocons got a two-fer: staggering sums of stolen cash, and a reason to go to war with Iraq after it had weakened Iran.
2. The Balkan Wars were fought to make Saudi Arabia happy through protecting their Muslim brothers and sisters in the Balkans. Of course, a certain other Middle Eastern country also wanted to make the Saudis happy and manipulated its US puppet to kill a bunch of Slavs. As a side note, the United State’s closest ally and most vicious dictator in that war, Croatia’s Tudman, killed far more Muslims and Serbs than those two groups combined ever managed to kill. Germany also was a bad actor in the war and used its intelligence to conduct a genocide via its Croatian pal Tudman. Also, the United States’ carving out of the still largely unrecognized “Kosovo” was far less justified and far more outrageous than what Putin is doing in the Ukraine.
There are many nations that want the United States erased from the planet, and they have just cause to want to do so. Between the Slavs and Muslims, it is hard to identify which group has the best case.
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I am noticing that “Anglo-Saxon” is the pejorative that many Russians use when describing America and the west. Apparently that term means something to them though it doesn’t really register with me or I assume with most Americans. But the larger point is that, yes, they have a built in and increasing animus to a foe whom they’ve identified racially and ethnically. It is an actual thing, a real person. So when the gloves come off I bet England will be first. England will be THEIR proxy for getting at America, much as Ukraine is out proxy now at getting at them. I can imagine Russians are foaming at the mouth ready to sink their fangs into to some nice British or Anglo-Saxon flesh.
3
The French also will use Anglo-Saxon as a pejorative. Usually it is in the context of economics. There is an historical analysis that says America is just the British Empire relocated to the New World, much like the capital of Rome moved to Ravenna or even Constantinople.
6
That analysis is pretty accurate.
1
I believe Saddam used the term as well, early in the Iraq war.
Further, somebody mentioned yesterday about the pirate ethos in America. Absolutely. That was and is the British Empire imo. Just a bunch of colonies that exist to make money for the homeland.
The British and Russians obviously were allies against Napoleon and the Kaiser, but for most of the last six hundred years have been at each other’s throats. The UK’s hatred of Russia almost is pathological. Russian opponents of the Tsars and communists, and now Putin, have tended to live in exile and plot from London, for example. You may be right about Britain being Russia’s first target when the gloves come off.
Thanks for those “inside baseball” accounts. Very clarifying.
Also provides some insight into Saddam’s firing off Scuds at “Our Greatest Ally of All Time”, too, if (((they))) had stolen a fuck ton of money from Iraq. And parenthetically, this prior conduct comports with the current seizures of Russia’s foreign reserves under the influence of the GAE; but while Iraq was not positioned to retaliate, Russia, through their countersanctions, export restrictions, and “rubles only” policies, is capable of delivering some pain to their tormenters.
2
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You are quite welcome. The primary difference between stealing Iraq’s money and Russia’s is the former was done surreptitiously. Things have gotten so bad now the United States does not hide its theft, although the seizing of Russian money probably will tank the dollar in the long run because it is now correctly seen as an unsafe shelter.
2
Have to agree with several posters below: calling Iraq a Soviet client by 1990 is off the mark; Saddam didn’t ask Moscow for permission to invade Iraq, he asked Washington. Already in the mid-eighties Reagan had sent some neocon creep to make nice with Saddam, he even took him off the terror list.
The Kosovo War is perhaps the most important war in the post-Soviet era: with one stroke Messrs. Clinton, Blair and Schröder simultaneously ripped up the UN and NATO charters, opening the way for the PNAC program of a the New World Order.
The UN charter was rendered defunct when the US attacked Serbia without a Security Council resolution* and the NATO charter because Serbia hadn’t attacked any NATO country, the war was a unilateral NATO aggression.
On a personal note, the Kosovo War was when I stopped voting. I had voted for the only explicitly pacifist party in the Danish parliament that wasn’t owned by Moscow and lo and behold: my guy – Niels Helveg Petersen – became Secretary of State and wasted no time getting Denmark involved in its first aggressive war since I don’t even know when. The Great Northern War?
In all fairness to Mr. Petersen, he later – long out of office – gave one of those meandering fluff interviews on the radio, and suddenly the reporter asks him about the UN resolution. He hems and haws but in the end his basic decency and honesty gets the better of him and he confesses: there was no resolution.
Not a small admission, considering that waging aggressive war was considered the most serious crime at the Nuremberg Trials, since it leads to all the other war crimes.
*Technically, the First Gulf War didn’t have an SC resolution either -China abstained – but virtually every country in the world joined the party so nobody cared it was illegal.
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That was supposed to have been a top level comment, but it fits nicely under Jack’s post.
“The Kosovo War is perhaps the most important war in the post-Soviet era: with one stroke Messrs. Clinton, Blair and Schröder simultaneously ripped up the UN and NATO charters, opening the way for the PNAC program of a the New World Order.”
All true, but I would suggest the Balkan Wars are more important because it signaled to Russia there could be no peace with the West. One of the most pathetic images imaginable was that of the Russian tanks rolling into the territory of their historic ally Serbia–and doing nothing. It was that moment that paved the way for Putin to replace the feckless Yeltsin, who himself became disillusioned with his United States patron over that outrageous war.
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One of the most pathetic images imaginable was that of the Russian tanks rolling into the territory of their historic ally Serbia–and doing nothing.
Yes. I had forgotten that.
1
In the particular case of Bill Kristol, I have wondered if pressure from his wife and possibly some of their kids, to stay in the good graces of their social circle has been a subtle force in pushing him back to the left. She made a donation to Ralph Northam in 2017 when he was running against Ed Gillespie, one of the ultimate GOP establishment stooges. The kind of people they associate with in the Beltway, were fine with having Republican friends pre-Trump, but then it became a bridge too far.
It would be a reasonable, straight forward explanation, fitting with Kristol’s intellect and character.
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I would have to see a picture of his wife first before being able to form an opinion as to how she might be influencing him.
But it is early and I don’t want to get sick to my stomach.
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Russia isn’t our ancient enemy, but someone else’s. They hate Russians more than Hitler. The Third Reich lasted twelve years, the Pale of Settlement one hundred twenty years. Even though Stalin rescued them by defeating Hitler, they still hate him for getting rid of their boy Trotsky. After 1948, Communism wasn’t their religion anymore, and the Russia hatred became amplified.
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This is how it always happens. You invite them in, they ingratiate themselves with the rulers, they get hired into positions of authority, and then they get a hand at steering the ship.
So they are going to get America into a war that might just end the country, we will be stuck here putting away the dead bodies while they have jetted off to somewhere else, the resentments grow and fester for decades, and voila. You got yourself a nice bottle of industrial strength Jew hatred.
Never changes. But I have to wonder if they are running out of people who will let them in. When you lose america you are pretty much fucked. And now they have lost Israel north in the Ukraine, so not looking good. I foresee many a door being slammed shut on their faces.
5
Remember that back in the sixties, The Socialist Workers Party (the Trots) were opposed by Progressive Labor (the Maoists) and the two never reconciled. Gus Hall, an updated William Jennings Bryan, may have been the last of the old line CPUSA.
If the complement to our anti-Russian foreign policy is the willingness of the foreign policy establishment to render the USA a CCCP satrap, maybe the neocon Trots have been upstaged by the the neolib Maoists. Either way, te Bushes, Rockefellers and WASPs of the CFA weren’t about to let a bunch of (((Straussians))) into the club.
So maybe the “War in Ukraine” will take a different tack if the CCCP tells DC to put on the brakes, the deal being regime change in Russia to everyone’s satisfaction, the Belt and Road Initiative looking east to include Japan, the Koreas and the US. And who knows but Putin, apparently more sane and sensible than his opponents, may yet design to have the last laugh.
Meanwhile, who’d’ve imagined America crying, in such short order, “Jen Psaki, where are you now that we need you?!”
2
I think the war in Ukraine because Vietnam. We will pour money and weapons into the West hoping they can claw back the east, but simply exhaust ourselves in the effort. A year from now, Ukraine will be a rump state, cut off from the sea and wholly dependent on the EU to feed itself.
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From what I understand, China and Japan have deep hatreds going back and forth. If even 1/2 of what I have read about the rape of Nanjing or the medical experiments on Chinese during the war are true, cooperation will be extremely difficult. Also with the Koreans and the Japanese. No love lost there either.
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There is a reason Japan, despite being on a demographic glide path to oblivion, allows almost no immigration, and trade with China and Korea is limited and stilted: China and Korea remember, and Japan knows they remember.
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“Second to last thing to go through his head.” Hehehehehehe
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That one got me too. Come for the essays, stay for the zingers.
3
“The point of all of this has been to weaken Russia by nibbling away at her border, forcing her to commit resources to all of these different conflicts.”
A great plan, but it appears weakness is appearing more in the USA.
3
Z Man writes, “The occupation of Afghanistan never made sense as a response to 9/11, but it did make a nice forward operating base [for attacking Russia].”
This explanation is compelling but it’s hard to dismiss another explanation for the occupation, which is, if the USA must protect Israel at all costs, then Afghanistan is a lot closer to Israel than the USA or Western Europe as a “nice forward operating base.”
That’s fine. The occupation of Afghanistan can have multiple motivations. Both explanations assume that the USA is a golem serving the interests of a foreign people.
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Afghanistan produces most of the world’s opium. Like 90% of it.
With the help of US Gov and the installation of billions in modern irrigation infrastructure, Afghanistan managed to go from 74,000 hectares in 2002 (2001 was an off year due to personal US delivery of “lethal aid”) to 330,000 hectares in 2016.
Given the 3 letter US agencies who’ve been up to their necks picking winners and losers (Hint: the US citizen always the loser), it’s pretty obvious that opium production was another piece of “What the heck are we doing in Afghanistan anyway?” puzzle.
Afghanistan: Come for the opium trade, stay for the pederasty.
3
I lived with some Trotskyists back in the early-80’s in a university city. Anti-whiteness, shutting down opponents’ speech, consciousness-raising/struggle-sessions and promotion of books like Howard Zinn’s monstrosity were their regular tactics–much of what we see today with the Woke. At least one of these former roommates got embedded in influential educational positions, and he advanced much higher than those of us who escaped this cult-like group.
The destructive events of The Year of George Floyd and afterwards didn’t surprise me in the slightest degree.
8
Those who can’t do…teach. What else were they going to do? Either teach or join a foreign policy think tank.
3
There will be a country, the size of a continent, that breaks up after the failure and weakening of its government and economy, not to mention the years long attacks on its borders. A Star Wars bar scene of country where everyone is an alien to everyone. Hint. It won’t be Russia.
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