The BBC noted While Moscow claims the peninsula and its waters are Russian territory, the UK says HMS Defender was passing through Ukrainian waters in a commonly used and internationally recognised transit route.
However, this statement from the UK is simply lies. The ‘Defenders’ passage off the coast of Crimea is not in any way ‘recognised transit route’ to anywhere. This was pure and simple provocation by the British.
That provocation intent is confirmed by the BBC reporter aboard the ‘Defender’ notes; (Defender) Weapons systems on board the Royal Navy destroyer had already been loaded.
As the History website notes, Crimea had been part of Russia for 200 years until 1954, when it was gifted to the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine by the then Russian Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. This was to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the historic decision by Ukraine to unify with tsarist Russia. At that time, it would have been impossible to foresee that the Soviet Union would collapse and split into separate republics, that the borders would have to be renegotiated and that Ukraine would again be an independent country.
More importantly, Sevastopol had been Russia’s only ‘warm water’ (not shut in by ice over winter) naval base since 1783, when Catherine the Great ‘acquired’ it from the Turks.
And once the Ukrainian 2014 Maidan coup leaders made their decisions to designate Ukrainian Russian speaking citizens second class citizens by making the Ukrainian language the only official language of the Ukraine, the Russian speaking Crimean split from Ukraine was inevitable. That split has however never been recognised by Western powers or Ukraine.
The British report that the Russians did not fire ‘at’ HMS Defender is indeed true, but simply semantics ; warning shots are just that-not fired at the aggressor, but fired just far enough away to demonstrate that the defender will fire directly at the aggressor if they continue to approach.
What the British government was hoping to achieve by this deliberate provocation is hard to know. The action was purely and simply adolescent and stupid and could very easily have lead to a hot war, and potentially a nuclear exchange.
Britannia -despite Boris Johnson’s wish to be some kind of Churchill, no longer rules the waves. As Craig Murray notes, this gunboat diplomacy by Britain is lunacy.
One wonders what would happen should a heavily armed Russian destroyer with weapon systems activated, stroll across Britain’s maritime borders near the Portsmouth Naval Base, or perhaps the illegally occupied Chagos Islands and the huge American military base there at Diego Garcia?; accidentally of course.
British promises to conduct more ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises near Russian Crimea military bases that defend Russia’s southern flank…..
The recent article in the Guardian which notes that the world has the “worst cascade of human rights setbacks in our lifetimes’, focuses on a rather selective set of human rights abuses. While no-one in the West at least, can argue that Russia is a ‘selective’ democracy and the Chinese Communist Party (while supported by the vast majority of mainland Chinese) rules the country with a strong and often repressive hand, those excesses pale into insignificance when we look at the human rights abuses perpetrated by many Western states across the globe.
Wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen (let alone their unconditional support for Israel’s slow genocide of the Palestinian people), by the West are indisputably gross human rights transgressions which require the U.N. to demand , on behalf of those populations, compensation from the aggressor. The U.N. is silent….
While Uighur ‘re-education’ camps, which significantly impact on some Uighurs’ human rights, certainly exist in Xinyang (China says these are to reduce the risk of Uighur Muslim extremism and terrorism promoted by Turkey, the Saudis and Western intelligence groups); current evidence tends to suggest that statements about genocide are a fabrication by those very groups.
The Uighur genocide stories can perhaps be likened to the U.S. state political propaganda theatre of American POWs captured by the Koreans and Vietnamese in the United States’ genocidal colonial wars against those two countries. No solid evidence exists of genocide of Uighurs, but we can make up a really good story with ‘anecdotal evidence’ and ‘statistics’ and newspaper headlines …..
In response to U.N. criticisms of Navalny’s political party in Russia being forcibly disbanded, and Hong Kong protesters and their Western funded protests militantly arguing for separatism from mainland China, we may yet have to see how Western countries respond to foreign countries funding political parties advocating separatism and sanctions of their own countrymen, on their own patch….
Indeed the continuing and increasing use of sanctions by Western countries against those countries they wish to destabilise is surely another key example of breaches of human rights of those populations. Cutting off access to food, energy and medical supplies and ‘withholding’ ( i.e stealing) money in state bank accounts from countries like Iran, Venezuela and Cuba are blatant abuses of those populations ‘ human rights.
As Telesure notes about Nicaragua: Human Rights Watch… has been notorious for taking a pro-State Department line on Latin America and even contains former State Department personnel on its board of directors. The former (the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation ) , meanwhile, is led by an anti-government partisan who supports imperialist sanctions on her own country. As The Canary reported in December 2018, Jagger has not only expressed support for the crippling US sanctions already in place but even called for the European Union, Canada, and other Latin American nations to issue their own set of sanctions as well.
And perhaps we could look at the multiple and gross human rights violations committed by the West’s ‘colonial’ troops in Africa in the past decade, or the ongoing catastrophe in South and Central America caused by the United States’ brutal Monroe Doctrine tactics.
Western led statements supporting greater freedom and democracy in Russia and China and other autocratic states that don’t kneel to Western business interests, should indeed be a wonderful ideal and a catalyst for freedom for all, were it not for that fact that those very Western governments- particularly the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and some other Western European countries, are also the countries that have waged savage wars across the third world to promote their own ‘interests’ ( i.e. money).
For some unknown reason, those countless wars of aggression by Western and predominantly ‘white’ countries; along with indiscriminant sanctions, torture, drone murders and the promotion of extremism in other countries, do not appear on the list by the U.N. advocate for human rights- one might wonder why that is?
(Note: this is a slightly re-edited version of a NewAntarctica post first published in 2014)
Every year in this fair little country of New Zealand, we “celebrate” Anzac Day on 25th April. We remember our “glorious dead” who fought in all those wars for king and country; beginning way back then with the Second Boer War of 1899 in South Africa, supporting our British countrymen in the British Empire’s fight against the “evil” Boers, to ensure South Africa could become a safe place for English speaking white men to colonise and rule over the black man.
Since then we have had the First World War where 100, 000 New Zealand men (and some women) were shipped overseas, out of a total population of just over 1 million people. 18,500 New Zealanders were killed in that ‘war to end all wars’ and more than 40,000 wounded. Anzac Day “celebrates” the day New Zealand and Australian troops along with troops from other parts of the Empire, India, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, India, and Newfoundland as well as French forces invaded Turkey (a German ally) at Gallipoli ( or Gelibolu as the Turks call it).
The “Great War”, as it was once known, was initially at least, a European war to divide up the spoils of empire, with each countries’ soldiers the cannon fodder for money and power.
‘Only’ 2799 New Zealand soldiers died at Gelibolu attempting to break the Turkish defences in the harsh hills above the beaches, where 87,000 Turks died defending their homeland. Nothing in comparison to the many thousands killed and wounded in the trenches in Flanders and other parts of France; machine gunned, shelled and gassed by the “Hun” -the Germans.
Yet New Zealand collectively now glorifies Gallipoli; it was apparently (according to later New Zealand historians who should know) our “nation-building” exercise. Yet after that first world war to end all wars, every cenotaph
The Unknown Soldier
in every little town and city across New Zealand which named their dead, inscribed the lines “Lest We Forget”. In my imagination perhaps , it is ‘lest we forget’ those who died for nothing; the horror, the stupidity , the inhumanity to man of soldiers at war; not “lest we forget” our glorious war dead.
Let us not forget either, the many thousands of women and children who suffered at the hands of those damaged men returning from the wars; the family and community violence caused by the trauma of war and death.
The Send-off: a Poem by Wilfred Owen: -English soldier poet, 1918
And then we have the “good war”; the war against the Nazis and the Japanese between 1939 and 1945, where 140,000 New Zealand men and women were conscripted to fight overseas. Kiwi soldiers, while comparatively small in numbers, played a significant role in the European war against Germany and later against the Japanese in the Pacific. Could that war have been avoided without appeasement of Nazi and Japanese supremacism? There are many historians who say , that had the terms of the Versailles Treaty not been so punitive against Germany , German nationalistic fervour would never have produced such a cancer as the national socialists (Nazis). Similarly there are those who argue that had the Japanese also been able to obtain their Imperial “place in the sun” , Pearl Harbour would never have happened. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
New Zealand’s obligations for self-defence against the Japanese is inarguable; The Japanese were planning to invade New Zealand as part of their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, along with invading Australia. The evil of the Nazis is also inarguable, and the horrors committed by them; New Zealand soldiers helped to bring those horrors to an end. Ultimately 11,900 New Zealand soldiers lost their lives in the second world war. However New Zealand is implicated in the war crimes resulting from the bombing missions undertaken by the Allies against German dams and the firebombing of Dresden; Tokyo and Kyoto .
New Zealand’s role in wars since the second world war has (aside from several small UN peace-keeping missions) been less than exemplary. 4,700 New Zealand soldiers fought in Korea between 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953, with 49 men killed in action. New Zealand (under U.N. auspices but without Russian attendance at that security council meeting ) was a party to the genocide committed largely by the Americans carpet bombing every North Korean town and city over that period.
Fighting as part of ANZUS, New Zealand enthusiastically supported the American pretext for invading Vietnam from 1963 to 1975 ( supposedly to halt the insidious spread of Communism (the ‘YellowPeril”) across Asia), while the New Zealand national government supported the bombing by the U.S. of cities and towns across Vietnam Laos and Cambodia, causing more than a million deaths. 37 New Zealand soldiers were killed in that war and many more afflicted by the impacts of “Agent Orange”, the chemical warfare “defoliant” sprayed by U.S. planes over the jungles and hamlets of South Vietnam. 33 New Zealand soldiers were also killed in the preceding Korean War where millions of Koreans were killed in that largely forgotten genocidal war.
Once again supporting the U.S., New Zealand inserted a small number of troops into southern Iraq near Basra during the second Iraq War. While for most of its service there, NZ troops were confined to base, it is highly likely that NZ troops were well aware of the wide-spread torture and murder of Iraqi civilians in that area by British troops . New Zealand is, by its support of that war, also implicated in the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died as a result of a war based on the pretext of Saddam’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.”
New Zealand continues its commitment to “freedom and democracy” by supporting the Americans in Afghanistan. Initially promoted to the public as an incursion to eliminate Al Qaeda as a threat after the 9/11 bombing of the New York towers, the war has dragged on since its inception in 2001 and morphed into the elimination of the Taleban (an Afghan Pashtun tribal entity with previous links to Al Qaeda). New Zealand troops have likely been involved in capturing Taleban fighters and sending them to the US Bagram air base in Kabul for torture. A rather dubious analysis suggest that up to 20,000 civilian casualties alone have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001- the mortality figures for direct war impacts are likely to be in the many many thousands. ( the U.S. doesnt “do headcounts” anymore.)
New Zealand continues to be a key member of the U.S. run western intelligence community “Five Eyes”, which attempts to maintain the U.S state’s power and control over most of the world, and while NZ has publicly been cast in the shadows of ANZUS because of its nuclear-free stance, it in reality maintains an extremely active role.
However , even with the huge amount of information provided by internet and phone tapping provided to “Five Eyes” intelligence ‘experts”, it is clear that those security operatives have over the years since the second world war, acquired a farcical level of incompetence and lack of intelligence and judgment. Their wild misinterpretation of other states’ and non-state entities’ intent and motives has resulted in massive suffering to millions of human beings. It is highly likely that incompetence is not going to be changing any time soon.
In summary, ANZAC Day; that tribute of poppies and wreaths and guns , celebrates not our glorious dead, but the utter farcical futility of war and the greed of the powerful.
At the time of writing, the jingoistic drumbeats of war are sounding to fight once more the Russian threat against “poor little” Ukraine.
I note the U.K.s Daily Telegraph criticizm of the New Zealand’s stance in not following the white Anglosaxon “Five Eyes’ ‘intelligence’ group in condemning China’s excesses at home and abroad, and our ‘cosying up to China’s communist rulers’.
One wonders when the Daily Telegraph and other jingoistic British and other Western mainstream media, will begin condemning the U.K.s longstanding abuse of foreign populations; its enthusiastic military support for the House of Saud’s genocidal war in Yemen, its ongoing support of Wahhabist jihadists in Syria and elsewhere, its illegal deportation of Chagos Islanders so it can help its buddy in war-crimes, the United States, establish an air base there, the ongoing imprisonment of Julian Assange; human rights media activist on spurious charges, or even begin to question for a moment the Uyghur genocide allegations almost exclusively coming from the clearly disturbed Adrian Zenz
I am thankful that the New Zealand government and Foreign Minister Mahuta has the balls to stand up to the bullying by the U.K. U.S., Australia and Canada in their zenophobic racist attacks on China (whose sole aim is to ensure that the United States and its buddies can continue to engage in genocidal action around the world for fun & profit without constraint), but it is now time that New Zealand exits from this shameful alliance and closes down the Five Eyes spy station in Marlborough.
Five Eyes is an alliance of bullies and war-mongering murderers, and we as New Zealanders are currently actively supporting their drone murders against innocents, supporting illegal wars, and of helping to amp up a nuclear confrontation with China and Russia.
New Zealand has a proud history as a nuclear free nation.
Apparently we are expected to now believe that the Russians have now not only been paying the Taliban to kill U.S. occupying troops (likely ‘admitted’ after a little bit of healthy torture of a Talban suspect) but have also been blowing up Czech munitions dumps.
Apparently we are expected to now believe that the Russians have now not only been paying the Taliban to kill U.S. occupying troops (likely ‘admitted’ after a little bit of healthy torture of a Talban suspect) but have also been blowing up Czech munitions dumps. And that those pesky Russian GRU ‘intelligence’ operatives Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, identified by the ‘brilliant’ Western intelligence funded masterminds at Bellingcat (using Google Photos and other hi tech equipment) not only botched the poisoning of Sergie Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in March 2018 , but had, 4 years earlier, botched the blowing up a Czech munitions dump, whose armaments were supposedly destined for the Ukraine after the Maidan anti-Russian coup in Ukraine.
“Hey guys, they swallowed that ridiculous story we made up about Gadaffi and the boxes of viagra for his troops to rape civilians, I’ll bet they swallow this one about Petrov and Boshirov again!”
The Russian government it would appear, has now lost its patience with the Americans after Biden deliberately insulted the Russian president as a ‘soul-less killer’, after years of sanctions of the Russian state, and will now make life very difficult for the remaining American diplomats in Moscow .
Diplomacy is thus now at an end between the two countries. In addition, the forceful tit for tat Russian response to the Czech expulsion of Russian diplomatic staff will mean that diplomatic efforts are also unlikely to occur in Eastern Europe in the near future.
40,000 NATO troops are massed near Russian borders and 80,000 Russian troops and other units are stationed close to the Russian border with Ukraine.
Steadily increasing NATO military exercises along the border with Russia seem to presage an attempt by NATO forces to probe for weaknesses and then attack Russia, or at least provoke a response from Russia that Western media can proclaim is proof of Russian evil.
Not content with setting the scene for a war over Crimea (a territory occupied by the Russians since it ‘acquired’ it from the Turks in 1774), and the festering Donbass civil war in Russian speaking Eastern Ukraine; the Ukrainian Kiev government is now bizarrely accusing another Russian ally, Iran, of deliberately downing a Ukrainian airliner in the confused aftermath of the Soleimani execution by the United States.
The decision by the Biden administration to withdraw some of it’s forces from Afghanistan by September 11 2021 , is indeed welcome and indicative of the total pointlessness of that 19 year war- other than to maintain a lucrative heroin supply trail for Western intelligence services. However the withdrawal is possibly also indicative of the American military’s recognition that fighting too many wars on two many fronts, is a recipe for defeat.
Alongside these aggressive actions go the sanctions designed to weaken Russia, Iran and China (and Syria, Venezuela and North Korea) for their temerity in not kowtowing to the American ‘world order’.
As American society and their economy continues to implode, we see increasingly desperate measures by the U.S. and their remaining ‘allies’ to try and contain and destroy those governments which do not support the American way of brutal colonial aggression.
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This short and innocuous tweet from U.S. Strategic Command on April 20th 2021, gives Russian and China clear warning that the U.S. is quite prepared to use nuclear weapons as a first option in resolving their differences.
We are all in desperate need of real investigative journalism which is not paid, bullied or feel obliged to follow the current state propaganda line.
There is not much more one can say about Media Lens’ concise summary of the activities of Western countries- particularly the United States and its closest ally, the United Kingdom, in engaging in serial murder over many years, against countries and peoples more vulnerable than their own, whose misery and deaths can be exploited for profit.
While the barbarity of the U.S. and U.K is documented elsewhere in great detail, Media Lens’ great strength is to outline the consistent role Western mainstream media have played in actively supporting those wars and the lies they knowingly propagated ( or in a few cases simply failed to do their journalistic duty of investigation)
As the wheel turns, the U.S. will in a few short years, no longer have the preeminent global role it has acquired through military domination. As the U.S. global role declines, so the need for justice for those many millions victimised by that imperial power will steadily rise until those responsible are indeed facing the court at the Hague for their war crimes .
Alongside them in the dock will surely be those media propagandists who knowingly aided and abetted their crimes with media lies and encouraged the lust for war.
On a more absurd and light-hearted note, we note the allegations from an Australian TV channel, Channel 9, that Vladimir Putin hacked their TV broadcast because he didn’t like what they said about him . While the ridiculous allegations are unsurprising from such a news source, there will be any number of gullible xenophobic Australians ready to be whipped up into a frenzy about malign state actors ( any one of either China, Russia, North Korea or Iran-take your pick) interfering with their TV viewing !
We are all in desperate need of real investigative journalism which is not paid, bullied or feels obliged to follow the current state propaganda line.
John Pilger has for several years now been talking about the ‘Coming War with China’-something I had in earlier years regarded as foolish speculation . However, in recent times I now hear much more loudly the drumbeats of war from America, and its more foolish and racist allies.
John Pilger has for several years now been talking about the ‘Coming War with China’-something I had in earlier years regarded as foolish speculation . However, in recent times I now hear much more loudly the drumbeats of war from America, and its more foolish and racist allies.
And in a more recent John Pilger article about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima ‘ANOTHER HIROSHIMA IS COMING… UNLESS WE STOP IT NOW‘ he notes: “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said The New York Times front page on 13 September, 1945, a classic of planted disinformation. “General Farrell,” reported William H. Lawrence, “denied categorically that [the atomic bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.”-John Pilger .
It should therefore be no surprise that Western governments have lied and lied again in their pursuit of war and profit. The ongoing deluge of Western propaganda against China and its ally Russia, is clearly designed to ‘soften up’ Western publics for a war with those ‘evil orientals’.
The Western media claims of Uyghur genocide by the Chinese government have been largely constructed from one source; a somewhat ‘unusual’ gentleman called Adrian Zenz, a Christian fundamentalist evangelist and devout anti-communist. The Gray-Zone has published a damning report on the curious ways Mr Zenz has used public data to support his beliefs that Uyghur genocide is occurring. Western intelligence has latched onto Mr Zenz fundamentalist fervour to promote his views to the wider world, because it fits so well with their need to portray the Chinese government (and all things mainland Chinese) as evil .
As the GrayZone outlines in its article on the U.S. based Uyghur American Association (UAA), the Altay Club and other organisations determined to once again create an independent state in Xinjiang since its re-incorporation into the Chinese state in the 18th Century, there are multiple organisations both internal and external to China, determined to overthrow the current status quo in Xinjiang.
The Chinese government is now in the process of suing Zenz for libel in the courts.
Numerous Muslim Uyghur have in fact been radicalised by the Saudi Wahabbi doctrine and continue to play an important role as Salafi jihadi soldiers in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries, with funding and support from the Saudis and Western intelligence operatives. It is likely therefore that the Chinese government has put considerable effort into reducing the risk of Uyghur radicalisation in mainland China; the truth of how much repression of the Uyghur population in China is occurring is unknown at this point-although the Chinese government denies any such repression. It is however certain, given current population counts, that a Uyghur ‘genocide’ is not happening.
As one of the Chinese government’s representative Yang Jiechi so rightly put it at the recent Alaska China/U.S. Anchorage summit at the Captain Cook Hotel;’ the United States uses its financial and military might to bully other countries. …(and that) America had its own long history of human rights problems and foolish actions abroad. ‘Foolish actions’ is a wonderful euphemism for the scale of genocidal war and terror inflicted by the United States on ‘non-compliant’ countries over the past century and more ( i.e. countries that do not comply with the United States view of it’s ‘international rules based order’- not to be confused in any way with U.N. declarations)
Alistair Crooke summarises the theme of the anti-Russia-China rhetoric as ‘the U.S. thinks to lead the maritime and rim-land powers in imposing a searing psychological, technological and economic defeat on the Russia-China-Iran alliance’.
As with all colonial powers, the current arrogance and bellicosity of the Americans is premised on racism- the view that the Chinese are somehow an inferior nation who need education and ‘realignment’ with Western values and principles of what the Americans call ‘democracy and freedom’-but which in reality are principles based on the exploitation and subjugation of others.
The United States’ personal delusions of their exceptionalism – which align closely to Nazi views on the superiority of the German ‘race’- also play an important role in their incapacity to peacefully collaborate with others.
Given the United States appalling centuries long history of abuse of the vulnerable, at home and abroad, its view of itself as a pure, supremely democratic and exceptional nation (which many in the States undeniably believe) is psychotic, and indicative of the level of risk the world is facing when delusional people hold the reins of power in the worlds’ most militaristic country.
The United States appears ‘hell-bent’ on ensuring that no other country can get in the way of ‘rule-based order’ where the United States can and does whatever it likes, to whomever it likes, to ensure the money keeps rolling into the troughs of its billionaires.
It should be noted that while Navalny is certainly a thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party from an anti-corruption point of view, and attains mythical status in Western mainstream media as Putin’s potential nemesis leading his ‘Russia of the Future’ political party , Nalvany’s has 3 to 5% support amongst Russian voters nationally and by whom he is often perceived as an extremist, means that he is currently little of a political threat to Putin. However Nalvany’s supporters in Russia and West allege, “state-run” media ignore him and the ballot boxes are always stuffed in Putin’s candiates’ favour. He may however have many enemies in both government and private corporate Russian circles.
Craig Murray, ex U.K. ambassador, whistleblower on U.K complicity in torture, supporter of Assange and other unpopular human rights issues, and now conveniently likely soon to be imprisoned by the U.K. government on some highly questionable charges , outlines below just some of the ‘peculiarities’ of the poisoning.
Let us first take the weapon of attack. One thing we know about a “Novichok” for sure is that it appears not to be very good at assassination. Poor Dawn Sturgess is the only person ever to have allegedly died from “Novichok”, accidentally according to the official narrative. “Novichok” did not kill the Skripals, the actual target. If Putin wanted Navalny dead, he would try something that works. Like a bullet to the head, or an actually deadly poison.
“Novichok” is not a specific chemical. It is a class of chemical weapon designed to be improvised in the field from common domestic or industrial precursors. It makes some sense to use on foreign soil as you are not carrying around the actual nerve agent, and may be able to buy the ingredients locally. But it makes no sense at all in your own country, where the FSB or GRU can swan around with any deadly weapon they wish, to be making homemade nerve agents in the sink. Why would you do that?
Further we are expected to believe that, the Russian state having poisoned Navalny, the Russian state then allowed the airplane he was traveling in, on a domestic flight, to divert to another airport, and make an emergency landing, so he could be rushed to hospital. If the Russian secret services had poisoned Navalny at the airport before takeoff as alleged, why would they not insist the plane stick to its original flight plan and let him die on the plane? They would have foreseen what would happen to the plane he was on.
Next, we are supposed to believe that the Russian state, having poisoned Navalny, was not able to contrive his death in the intensive care unit of a Russian state hospital. We are supposed to believe that the evil Russian state was able to falsify all his toxicology tests and prevent doctors telling the truth about his poisoning, but the evil Russian state lacked the power to switch off the ventilator for a few minutes or slip something into his drip. In a Russian state hospital.
Next we are supposed to believe that Putin, having poisoned Navalny with novichok, allowed him to be flown to Germany to be saved, making it certain the novichok would be discovered. And that Putin did this because he was worried Merkel was angry, not realising she might be still more angry when she discovered Putin had poisoned him with novichok- Craig Murray
Curiously again, Navalny’s poisoning just happened to coincide with an intense level of blackmail and lobbying from the United States for Germany to renege on its agreement with Russia to provide Germany with cheap natural gas via Nordstream 2 pipeline ( to ensure Germany buys vastly more expensive U.S. gas) and the current political debacle occurring in Belorussia, where Poland, the Ukraine and the Nordic states are putting intense pressure on the Belorussian state to not sign up to the previously agreed political and military merging of Belorussia with Russia.
As Southfront notes, it would appear that the Navalny case and the colour revolution style demonstrations supported from those states, has prompted the Belorussian President Lukashenko; just recently re-elected on somewhat dubious grounds after obtaining 80% of the vote!- to once again change direction and support the merger with the Russian Federation.
It also appears somewhat strange that Germany has decided that a Russian national , supposedly poisoned on Russian soil, is the political business of the German state. Should Germany wish to pursue that line of political enquiry, then Germany should have rightly long ago sanctioned and demanded explanations from the United States, United Kingdom, France and other Western states for their appalling record of genocidal wars they they have engaged in.
All this alongside the ongoing attempt by Western intelligence agencies and their mainstream media “associates” to ‘fit up’ Russia and China with every possible charge of criminal activity and human rights violations, so that Western populations can accept and applaud the loss of access to Russian and Chinese goods, the need for more weapons and even the justification for war. It is important to recognise too, that the linkages between Western intelligence agencies are very strong, and often can be at odds with the positions of those in government, to the benefit of those who can make money out of death and destruction.
The U.S. and the U.K. are very much aware that their economic influence on the rest of the world is rapidly waning, and their historical methods of violence intimidation and corruption no longer have the power they use to, with the rise of China as an economic counterweight.
Thus we see a long term pattern of accusations of the use of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” or other mass human rights violations against states the U.S. and the U.K wish to first destabilise and then extract the profits from that destruction. The list includes Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, China… Those countries that continue to violate human rights on a massive scale like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Colombia and many others are exempt from that pressure because they are already within the US/UK economic sphere . And of course the genocidal activities of the U.S. and U.K. in their endless colonial wars are simply brushed under the carpet.
Both the U.S. and the U.K. know that once China , in collaboration with its Belt and Road partners, achieves overwhelming economic ( and military) superiority, there will be many many British and American leaders confronting the International Court of Justice in the Hague for their crimes and the need for just compensation for those states they have destroyed over the past 100 years.
Follow the money….
Postscript
Southfront posits some alternative reasons for Navalny being ‘poisoned’ here
Over the last few months (May, June, July 2020) we have seen increasing numbers of media articles lambasting the Chinese and Russian governments for various supposed or presumed crimes. In almost every case of these articles – little or nothing has been presented to argue an alternative view of this anti-Sino-Russian agenda ( which one would suppose to be one of the virtues of a ‘free” press).
We are told that the Chinese or Russians are ‘highly likely’ to have done this or that, often purely based on ‘opensource’ material- i.e. online authors with a variety of axes to grind about Russia or China, and who invariably use speculation , innuendo or simply falsehoods, to explain their prejudices and their sponsors.
Along with other U.K. media, The Guardian, once a British left-wing newspaper, now continually trots out anti-Russian propaganda, with the latest most absurd article being its allegation that Russian hackers had stolen information about a COVID-19 vaccine from Oxford University. The newspaper reports failed to mention however that the Russian government had in fact previously purchased the vaccine information, so was somewhat unlikely to have also stolen it.
The fictions about Russian involvement in the tawdry Skripal affair and the subsequent death of Dawn Sturgess have been meticulously pulled apart by Craig Murray and others and shown to not only be implausible, but impossible. However as Craig Murray reminds us, simply to argue that the Russian’s were highly unlikely to have been responsible for what happened to Sturgess or the Skripals, does not mean that the Russian government, like most large state agencies around the world- does not engage in illegal international activities.
It should be clear however that the ongoing farcical campaign against President Putin by the Western press, relates less to any real international Russian activities that breach “international norms”-and rather more to do with the annoying habit of the Putin administration of blocking ongoing foreign access to Russia’s state assets, which under President Yeltsin were appropriated by so-called Russian oligarchs and siphoned off through bank accounts managed via the City of London. Now in dire economic circumstances because of Brexit and COVID-9 lockdown, the British government is desperate to regain access to that little gold-mine.
Similarly with the U.S. economy in free-fall, the Americans are desperate to halt the rise of China. China is fast becoming a world leader on the economic and technological innovation front, and with largely comprehensive and safe response to COVID19, appears to have weathered much of the resultant economic storm from lockdown. In contrast, both the U.S. and the U.K. have demonstrated staggering levels of stupidity and incompetence in their response to the virus, which will mean ongoing risks to their economies for years to come.
The United States response therefore, to issues like the Russian Nordstream2 pipelines to Europe and their determination to bring down Huawei’s technological leadership in 5G or the attempt to undermine China’s Belt and Road are simply part of the U.S.’s intent to ensure the U.S. retain its global economic leadership for as long as it can so that American big business can continue to exploit its more vulnerable partners, while its internal infrastructure crumbles.
Along with attacks on Russian and Chinese economic initiatives, we see ongoing American and U.K. attacks on Chinese and Russian vulnerabilities. In China those attacks focus on the Uighur separatist and jihadist concerns ( funded and trained in Syria by the Turks, the Saudis and Western intelligence ‘interests”) and the subsequent Chinese government crackdown on the Uighur population, and also on the Chinese response to sometimes violent demonstrations by young Chinese people in Hong Kong – which again have been supported in their battle for a fictitious Free Hong Kong (something that their former British colonial overseers only appeared to promote in the last few years of the colony once it become clear that HK was going to be returned to Chinese government rule) The waving of American and British flags, singing the Star Spangled Banner and the calls for the “Han Chinese’ to stay out of HK by Chinese Han HK protesters, only highlighted the absurdity of the issues they were demanding. Hong Kong could not survive a year without their economic lifeline to the mainland.
There is no doubt that the Chinese government will be ruthless in its crackdown on dissent, but we should not forget how ruthless both the Americans and the British have been in their exploitation of “the coloured races’ over the last 100 years; From the use of Hong Kong to funnel opium to addicts on the mainland right up to the Japanese invasion of HK in 1941 ( which was only stopped because the Japanese did not have access to the British controlled opium producers ), the atom bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Korean genocide where millions of North Korean civilians were exterminated as American and British ( and other ‘allies’ ) bombed every town and city in North Korea, to the millions dead in Vietnam Cambodia and Laos: Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen … the list of barbarity is endless.
As the British and U.S. begin their rapid slide to long term economic depression, we shall undoubtedly see more strident and likely more ridiculous claims surface about the Russians and the Chinese. However as the Russia/ Brexit media response has shown in recent times; it works! Many of the British and American public are indeed gullible and uneducated enough to believe anything that their government throws at them. Yes, of course the Russians made Brexit a reality by putting a few articles in Russia Today and Sputnik supporting the British exit from the European Europe!!
But, through all of this, we should note that these competing nations appear oblivious to the rapidly developing climate catastrophe, now aligned with catastrophic species loss. War and human deprivation are key drivers of the degradation of our environment; alongside the insane drive for our global populations to ‘consume’ more inanimate things whilst destroying our living world.
Sadly , real human statemanship, intelligence and vision simply does not exist in our time of greatest need.
On 11th June 2020, the United States reacted with outrage that the International Criminal Court (ICC) intends to investigate the United States and Israel for crimes against humanity. How dare they? Surely the exceptional nation and its closest ally have every right to conduct mass-murder and torture with impunity?
By 2012, U.S. Congress had threatened that it would use military force to rescue any US citizens that were somehow called to account by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and has signed agreements with more than 100 governments pledging them not to hand over US citizens to the ICC. U.S. Secretary of State, Texan, Mike Pompeo ; the epitome of the “exceptional nation” in all its bravado, bullying and sheer brutality , has also recently threatened the families of ICC justices with ‘consequences’ should any indictments proceed.
Impact of sanctions
Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Libya, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Eritrea, Palestine, and hundred other little hidden wars were American troops are engaged in “counter-terrorism” and ‘black sites’ of torture.
Only when it becomes the international norm that any war fought by an aggressor shall require full reparations to the victim state, will wars be finally deemed not to be financially advantageous. That day is coming; the United States should be aware that its leaders are likely to be prosecuted and condemned for the litany of war crimes they have committed since the most heinous of all- their merciless slaughter of Koreans in the Korean War, and that the reparations for their endless wars will be in the many trillions of dollars.
The United States and its allies will one day soon, no longer be able to inflict its savagery on the world.
New Antarctica 