Tag: western intelligence

There is(apparently) only one ‘Truth’

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has it seems irrevocably pinned her flag to the mast of the ‘dark side’- the U.S. ‘rule based order’ ( not to be confused with the UN charter of human rights or anything silly like that, but with the right of the YS to do anything it damn well likes to any country and people it pleases. (bombing an allies’ gas pipeline is just one of so many examples)

Once a president of ‘International Union of Socialist Youth’, which among its neoliberal causes, supposedly also stands for ‘Social justice and democracy – to ensure participation for all citizens based on the principles of freedom and equality, against authoritarianism, populism and dictatorship; for the right to self-determination, to liberty, and freedom of expression of all peoples‘- Jacinda is now calling for the world to install what Zerohedge calls a ‘world censorship system’

Whil insisting there is only one truth in regard to world conflicts (no room for peace negotiations there!) she also insisted there could only be one view about climate change. As one who does not deny the reality of climate change, I find it astonishing that Ardern suggests we can legislate climate impacts away by saying we will not allow the world to increase global temperatures by 1.5C.

Either she is amazing badly informed by her science advisors about climate change, or she is simply posturing. The reality is that it is now inevitable that the world will experience much more than 1.5C warming. Governments across the world (including her own) have talked a lot about climate change impacts and what should be done- but have in fact done nothing more than pretend to their voters they are doing something. Co2 global production continues to increase, not decrease.

And in fact Ardern’s government has continued to push for more international tourism (which in New Zealand results in massive production of Co2 from the passenger jets winging their way around the world to the South Pacific from the Northern hemisphere), more extensive dairy and agribusiness farming which continues to destroy our environment in multiple ways and generally more ‘progress’ (which means more businesses which inevitably destroy more of the environment and induces more consumption of goods people don’t need.

Ardern and her Labour are like her National Party opposition and all the other New Zealand political parties, locked into requiring financial support from businesses- and ‘more business’ and ‘progress’ are simply euphemisms for making money from environmental destruction.

But, to return to the earlier argument about there being simple single truths about the Ukraine war; that a democratic Ukraine with ‘European’ values of tolerance and freedom is fighting against a relentless ruthless behemoth of Putin’s Russian Empire, we might put forward a counter ‘truth’. That Ukraine is in fact a brutal single party white supremacist state whose only reason for Western support is to defang the Russian bear so that Western corporations can once again (as in the Yeltsin years) begin to appropriate Russian assets at bargain prices.

As the Scrum notes: Incited by Western powers, Poland, Lithuania, and the Habsburg Empire, the key to Ukrainian nationalism was that it was Western, and thus superior. Since Ukrainians and Russians stem from the same population, pro-Western Ukrainian ultra-nationalism was built on imaginary myths of racial differences: Ukrainians were the true Western whatever-it-was, whereas Russians were mixed with “Mongols” and thus an inferior race. Banderist Ukrainian nationalists have openly called for elimination of Russians as such, as inferior beings.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1577289845155983361

The destruction of the Russian state was the prime agenda for UK and US ‘intelligence’ operatives after the second world war, making enthusiastic use of Ukrainian neonazi groups like Stepan Bandera’s OUNB and then latterly with OUNB’s successors like the Right Sector and their militants the Azov and Aidar battalions, and the consequent overthrow of the corrupt (as every Ukrainian president has proved to be) but democratically elected President Yanukovych in the US backed Maidan revolution of 2014.

Western intelligence has since played a major role in re-arming the Ukrainian army and the neonazi militant groups to not only get rid of the problem of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Dombas, but also to fight a war with Russia itself.

These Ukrainian ultra-nationalists have also been enthusiastically supported by strong Nazi elements in the Baltic States, Germany, Poland and the Ukrainian post WW2 diaspora, particularly in Canada.

So, naturally, any compromise in the grand Western agenda, not to mention a reduction in the Western PR media effort to discredit Russia (and now China) in any way possible how ever implausible, is completely impossible- peace negotiations are not an option. Nuclear war with Russia is also being promoted in Western media as also an option, deliberately misrepresenting (as Scott Ritter-former UN weapons inspector notes)the Russian position on first use of nuclear weapons.

The ‘perhaps’ unintended consequence of this glorification of the ultra-nationalist agenda, along with the self-destruction of European economies causing poverty and anger and demonstrations on the street, is the resurrection of the white supremacist ultranationalist movements, like Zelensky’s, across Europe.

First in 2022 we saw the ‘Sweden Democrats’ far-right movement gain political power in Stockholm and then the ascendance to power in Italy of the ‘Brothers of Italy’-a direct descendant of Mussolini’s fascist party.

These far-right groups not only celebrate intolerance of minorities, but also any dissent of the view that the state is pre-eminent in all things, that the corporations should rule in tandem with government (as in the US), and that consequently any collective view of humanity outside of the state apparatus is a threat to be stamped out.

However the far-right’s biggest threat to humanity is their denial of the climate change disaster. How can the state become strong in their view, without industrial ‘progress’ and a strong war-machine?

We can already see that view reflected in those European ‘moderate’ parties who currently control the EU. They’ll talk about mitigating climate change and green energy and all those cute things, as long as it doesn’t impact on the economy and the money that rolls into party coffers from the corporations-‘fire up the coal boilers for electricity again ‘cos we need to destroy Russia first!’

We are, after all, talking about Jacinda Ardern’s favourite ‘international rule-based order’ here!

Let’s get our priorities straight with the one true Truth!

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Links

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/a-cia-theme-park?

Who profits from Pipeline Terror?
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/30/scott-ritter-the-onus-is-on-biden-putin/

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/revanchism-in-germany

The Nightmare of Military Spending on an Overheating Planet
https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2022/09/25/nyt-on-ukraine-vietnam-dj-vu/
Kharkov and Mobilization

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-10-05/uks-secret-diplomacy-and-european-wars

NATO: The White Supremacists’ Club

On June 26th Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s current prime minister, admitted in a TV interview, that New Zealand had been a NATO ‘partner’ -not member (as Ukraine also is) for the past 10 years. The interview was undertaken while Ardern was travelling to make a brief presentation to a NATO meeting in Spain, currently discussing how they can mitigate the Western disaster in Ukraine where Russian and Ukrainian ‘separatists’ are bulldozing through the remnants of Kiev’s army in the Donbass .

As Murray Horton notes ‘The message from Washington is clear – be in our “club” and we’ll make it worth your while’.

New Zealand has thus made it clear that it, along with NATO members, is de facto at war with Russia, along with the rest of the Western world. Apart from the U.S. occupied colonies of Japan (50,000 U.S. troops) and South Korea (23,000 U.S. troops), no other non Western countries have subscribed to trying to defeat Russia in Ukraine through the use of arms shipments to Kiev’s troops, or tactical guidance on the ground and satellite and in-air drone and manned aircraft surveillance of Russian forces. However New Zealand has also admitted to providing Kiev with artillery training and actively monitoring radio and other ‘chatter’ from Russian and their allies’ troops.

Given the admission from Ardern that New Zealand has been a NATO partner for the past 10 years, and has also been part of the Five Eyes alliance since 1956, we are thus a co-conspirator to the Minsk 1 and 2 subterfuges of 2014 and 2015 by Western nations in their pretense to the Donbass residents that a Ukrainian semi-autonomous region for the Russian speakers there was going to happen, and Kiev would stop bombarding Donetsk and Lugansk. New Zealand is also party to the provision of military equipment to the Kiev ‘regime’ (certainly not a ‘democracy’ now that almost all political parties other than Zelensky’s have been banned) which have been used to deliberately target civilian populations in Donetsk city in the past few months.

However if one were to believe Western and New Zealand media, Russia is shelling its own allies in the Donbass!- or as some Kiev residents have liked to call it over the years- the ‘Bombass’.

But let us not over-estimate the intelligence of our (Western) world leaders either!…

For New Zealand to pretend it is not at war with Russia is absurd. New Zealand is aiding its Western ‘allies’ to ensure that as many Ukrainians die for nothing in a war that could easily have been avoided if the West had insisted that Kiev abide by the Minsk agreements it signed in 2014 and not re-armed Kiev and its neonazi groups.

And let us not forget the colossal destruction this war is wreaking on the environment and the staggering amount of human resources wasted building weapons that could have been used to plant trees, and build a sustainable world….Or forget the increasing probability of a ‘hot’ war between Western white countries and China and Russia, which would likely then lead us all to nuclear armageddon.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1540853710720475137

Once, Ardern’s Labour Party had the courage to ban nuclear armed warships from New Zealand’s shores, to confront France in its contamination of numerous Pacific Island’s with nuclear bomb tests, and to press for a nuclear free South Pacific. But no longer. Ardern and her party (despite the spin from local policy New Zealand people that New Zealand has its own foreign policy) have completely sold out to the U.S., the U.K. and their white supremacist NATO minions, to the great enthusiasm of all of Australia’s main political parties. And we hear no word from the NZ government or the media about the U.S. latest military base in the south pacific, because of course U.S. bases are not a threat to anyone!

Recently the U.S. orchestrated yet another Pacific military alliance between the U.S., Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK., strangely titled ‘Partners in the Blue Pacific’ whose purpose is to operate, the U.S. says “according to principles of Pacific regionalism, sovereignty, transparency, accountability, and most of all, [will be] led and guided by the Pacific islands.”. (Strangely those Pacific Island nations are not actually party to this agreement! )

This comes on top of the other new Indo-Pacific military ‘white folks’ agreement signed between Australia the United States and the U.K.; entitled AUKUS, which is intended to break the Pacific nuclear free agreement signed by most Pacific Island nations.

China has recently had the temerity to sign economic and security deals (not military bases) with a number of pacific island countries. If you believed NZ and Australian media and government lurid pronouncements, the ‘red peril’ is once again on the march to take away our democracy and freedom!

Presumably it’s the freedom to colonise vulnerable south pacific countries, to threaten and blackmail governments in the region, and to exploit Pacific Island communities using their cheap labour – dastardly Chinese stuff to try and limit us “good white folks'” exploitative opportunities in the Pacific !

Denis Argall notes from an Australian perspective that ‘the United States is entering into a period of instability at home and overreach abroad. The US’s declared intent to use the Ukraine war to diminish Russia is neither healthy nor attainable. The US provocation of war with China is contrary to our interests as well as common sense’.

And as Murray Horton succinctly notes from a New Zealand perspective; ‘NZ is in the white Western world’s self-proclaimed elite intelligence club, namely Five Eyes. Which proved to be absolutely useless in seeing what was going on in Afghanistan, a country which had been an adventure playground for Western spies for 20 years. So, why is New Zealand in Five Eyes, what use is it to us (or anyone else, for that matter)? Time for NZ to get out, time for Five Eyes to become four eyes.’

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Links

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-global-power-shift-isnt-west-to.html

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2022/06/prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-s-europe-trip-to-include-attending-nato-summit-meeting-with-boris-johnson-pushing-for-trade-deal-with-eu.html

NZ BECOMES FURTHER ENMESHED IN US EMPIRE The Politics & Economics Of Five Eyes By Murray Horton (Page 5)

Understanding the NY Times Article on the CIA in Ukraine
New clear ways for the Pacific- Address historic nuclear injustices in the Pacific
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/06/07/australias-newly-elected-labor-prime-minister-anthony-albanese-rushed-to-meet-with-joe-biden-in-tokyo-after-his-election-victory-to-fortify/
The United States- the Pacific bully
Opposition political parties banned in Ukraine and ‘unified information policy’ imposed

Where to from here?

As two of the world’s ‘superpowers’ fight it out in Ukraine for the spoils of war, the world descends into a dystopian whirlpool of economic stagflation and environmental catastrophe.

While the Western propaganda war of obvious lies to its populations about the war in Ukraine is deeply disturbing, what is far far worse is the psychotic behaviour of all the world’s political classes in talking about the need to address climate change while doing the exact opposite- promoting ‘growth’, trying to revitalise tourist air travel, more production of goods, more industry..

The evidence is unequivocal; only a reduction and stabilization of human ‘growth’ will allow species on this planet to barely cope with the ongoing and now inevitable climate and ecocide we are experiencing. Promoting more growth is simply going to push us all faster off the cliff to a far deeper environmental catastrophe.

Sadly the Ukraine war has given us ample evidence of the concerted activity of Western media to consistently lie to its populations. The refusal to acknowledge the war of terror by the Kiev government on its Donbas population for 8 years since 2014 ( with 14,000 deaths), the refusal to acknowledge the existence of the well documented neo-nazi military groups working to eliminate Ukrainian Russian speakers (even while promoting videos made by them), or even the refusal to acknowledge that much of the fighting against Western Ukrainians is being carried out by Russian speaking Ukrainians from the Donbas against Western Ukrainians and the neonazis, are all examples of the subterfuge Western governments are required to commit to ensure a compliant population supports their war against Russia, while ignoring the horrors of Palestine’s slow genocide by Israel or the rapid genocide in Yemen by the Saudis, both enthusiastically supported by the U.S. and U.K.

My ‘favourite’ so far from New Zealand state tv , TVNZ, is their recent video clip of an interview with an elderly man in Donetsk (a Donbass city held by Russian speaking Ukrainians and constantly bombarded by Kiev’s troops since 2014) after shelling of his apartment building by the Western Ukrainians, while the commentator pretends the damage has been caused by Russian shelling.

The level of ineptness and stupidity of politicians across the globe is staggering: countries with artificially determined boundaries lurch towards war with each other and potential nuclear armageddon, for no apparent reason other than the engorgement of weapons contracts and politicians and bureaucrats’ egos. This craziness is fuelled by corrupt and inept journalists who parrot the ‘official’ line of their country’s equally inept politicians.

When media have no compunction to consistently lie to get their ‘message’ across, one knows we have no hope of the media presenting an honest case about the desperate need for genuine action about climate change. We are instead presented with occasional short media articles about climate change, followed by a psychotic switch to the main propaganda barrage of ‘produce more, work more, buy more, sell more, fly more’. Greenwashing is now the ‘in thing’. Half-truths and pure lies infest our mainstream media.

Perhaps the one saving grace of our incompetent leaders is that they are, through their own incompetence, leading the world into a severe economic depression, which, together with the impacts of climate change, will inevitably reduce consumption and consequently allow some restoration of our natural world.

Sadly however that economic depression will lead to much suffering and many deaths. A planned and systematic approach to de-growth would have been a far more humane response.

Unfortunately , politicians’ and bureaucrats’ responses to the various crises enveloping the world is either to make war, or ‘grow’ economies more.

Because that’s ‘progress”?- isn’t it?

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Links

https://phys.org/news/2022-02-planet-mind.html

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/the-defactualization-of-america?s=r

https://www.rt.com/russia/556334-ukrainian-camp-nationalistic-narrative/

Jacques Baud: “The goal is not to help Ukraine, but to fight Putin”

The Western Propaganda War Against Russia

I live in New Zealand . Every day now, on our government funded Television New Zealand news channel TVNZ 1, I watch reports about how Russia is about to invade Ukraine. It is somehow never mentioned that western media and governments have been predicting imminent Russian invasions of Ukraine since 2015, when the Eastern Ukraine Donbass broke away from Western Ukraine after the U.S. supported coup against the marginally Russian supporting Ukrainian president of the time.

We have had videos of desperate Ukrainian military at the front lines vowing to re-take ‘occupied Ukraine’ – we are not told that those ‘occupiers’ of Eastern Ukraine are in fact Russian speaking Ukrainians who have lived in the Donbass for hundred of years, but who have been threatened and systematically militarily attacked by ultra-nationalists (i.e neo nazis) from West Ukraine since the Maidan coup in 2014.

We are not told that the Kiev government has refused to implement the Minsk agreements they signed up to , and were approved by the U.N. , that would have granted some level of autonomy and safety to Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine and ended the ongoing war in the Donbass and any need for Russia to continue to provide support against what it calls genocide in Eastern Ukraine.

We are not told that the 79 year old woman being trained to fire a rifle against the Russian invaders in the Television New Zealand news clip, is in fact being trained by a neonazi of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, who wears his Nazi insignia. That Nazi insignia – called the Wolfsangel-is the same insignia worn by the Nazi SS Reich Division Das Reich. When that is pointed out to TVNZ, there is no apology or retraction of the nazi propaganda.

We are shown videos of a serious Anthony Blinken, U.S. secretary of state, ‘imploring’ the Russian to say they will not invade Ukraine. When the TVNZ anchorperson directly asked their reporter on the ground in Ukraine what Russia was saying about Ukraine, the reporter neglected to somehow mention that Russia has repeatedly said it would not invade.

Bizarrely in a recent Youtube interview, the former head of Britain’s MI6, Sir John Sawers, has admitted that their ‘imminent Russian invasion’ information comes out of their own delusional Russophobic heads, rather than from any facts on the ground.

‘What has been released, the idea that Putin might want to dislodge [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and replace him with a puppet government, or that he’s going to contrive a pretext for Russian intervention in the east of Ukraine, these are based on a growing understanding, an analysis of Putin, rather than deep, secret intelligence reports‘.(my emphasis)

And if the analysis of the situation of Russian troops ‘about to invade” by the BBC is anything to go by- Western media and the intelligence community are just making it up as they go along.

As Scott Ritter has recently stated on Twitter, ‘On Feb 4 the Russians and Chinese signed a strategic agreement predicated on the mutual embrace of the rule of law predicated on the UN Charter. It’s hard to see how Putin would undermine this foundational doctrine by invading Ukraine in a manner that violates international law.’

We all know that Western governments and their compliant media have lied repeatedly about their rationale for starting yet another war. We know that the stated reasons for their wars in Libya, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, let alone Korea or Vietnam, were all based on lies, and lies that were easily disputed and verified as falsehoods, if we had had true fearless investigative journalism.

One can therefore only conclude sadly, that the New Zealand government and its government funded media outlet, Television New Zealand , are fully in lock step with the Americans and the British in stoking a war with Russia, and that New Zealand still remains merely a colony of the British Empire that we all thought had sunk at Singapore when the Japanese invaded in 1941.

Postscript

As of 18th February the Donbass authorities in Eastern Ukraine have asked all civilians , particularly women and children, to evacuate to Russia across the border. Western media is portraying this as some kind of strange false flag incident, although it is hard to rationalise that one. Certainly both the Donbass separatists and the Ukrainian military have upped their shelling across the line of contact considerably in the past 2 days . It would appear that the Donbass separatists are calculating that should the Ukrainian forces invade across the contact line, Donbass military will be able to once again eliminate the Ukrainian ground troops in ‘caldrons’ , as they did in 2014 and 2015, knowing that they effectively now have a free-fire zone with no Donbass civilians at risk.

Or it could be seen as victory for the extremists in Kiev. As President Zelensky himself has said:

“I think that if you live today in the territory of Donbass, temporarily occupied, and you think that: “Our cause is right, we are Russians, we are going to Russia, it’s a big mistake to stay in Donbass…” For the future of their children and grandchildren… it is already necessary to go and look for a place in Russia. It is right. Because there will be no civilization on this territory without Ukraine. Ukraine will grow upwards, Donbass in the occupied form will not grow anywhere. There will be no happiness for these people.”. In another words, Zelensky (although himself Jewish) is supporting the neo-nazi drive to eliminate all Russian speaking Ukrainians from Ukraine- a process that is internationally defined as genocide

The Donbass civilian evacuation is a calculated risk, given that Ukrainian forces have considerably upgraded their weaponry with American and British offensive weapons since 2015, but a sound one. It is unlikely that the Ukrainian military will risk such another debacle, much to the chagrin of their U.S. and U.K military advisors who have now safely left the country!

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MintPress Study: NY Times, Washington Post Driving US to War with Russia Over Ukraine
Cry “Havoc!” and Let Slip the Dogs of War
John Pilger: War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda
We Are Not Useful Idiots!
A comprehensive outline of the complex history of Ukraine

Russia Begins Preparing for Refugees From Donbass

Rather than produce fake evidence to the U.N. Security Council, as Colin Powell had, Antony Blinken just produced nothing at all, though the U.S. has intelligence it can show, writes Scott Ritter.

Ukraine: Where to Find the Truth in Enormous Detail
https://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/reports/?filters=+ds_date:(%5B2022-02-01T00:00:00Z%20TO%202022-02-21T00:00:00Z%5D)&solrsort=score%20desc&rows=10
Daily reports from the Ukraine Line of Contact from the  Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe– (OSCE)

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/icrc-calls-sides-spare-critical-civilian-infrastructure-eastern-ukraine

‘Marching off to War’

‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching off to war, with the cross of Jesus, going on before..‘ So begins the bizarrely militant 19th century hymn of the Salvation Army. And so it would appear that all of us good ‘Christians’ of the Western world are being asked to defend ourselves against the ‘soul-less’ Chinese and the Russian hordes of the steppes- simultaneously. Why should that be?

In Europe, the ongoing hype that the Russians are about to invade the Ukraine and massing troops on the border, is mounting, while the Russians report their concerns that the Ukraine Army is poised to attack the semi- autonomous Russian-speaking Ukrainian regions of the Donbass and Lugansk.

The Minsk agreement that was brokered by the Normandy Four Powers (Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France,) in 2015 which established Donbass as a Ukrainian semi-autonomous region, is in practice no longer supported by Ukraine, Germany and France. With the Ukrainian economy deteriorating ever more sharply, Ukrainian President Zelensky is desperate for some salvation. Provoking a ‘little war’ with Russia he supposedly anticipates, will be enough to keep him holding onto power and acquire that much needed support from NATO and the European Union.

https://youtu.be/K2kx4mlW3KU

What the truth on the ground really is- we may never know, but there is a high probability that the Russians would not want to invade Ukraine and acquire a completely dysfunctional and hostile entity, but would be prepared to militarily support their Ukrainian Russian-speaking cousins if the Ukrainian national army attacked the Donbass.

As has been noted elsewhere, a Russian attack across the Ukrainian border would be the gift to the United States that just keeps on giving- confirmation that Russia truly is that evil rapacious empire they have always been described as in mainstream Western media, and an opportunity to further isolate and sanction Russia and shut down Russian gas supplies to Europe.

The high risk of a wider war does not seem to be factored into Western media and politician’s view of the issues-naturally so for the Americans who can watch the destruction from a distance. However, given that the Russians have put their military on high alert and dispersed their Pacific submarine nuclear fleet from their bases in Siberia- that alone must be causing some concern in Washington.

And to the east, the Americans are continually hyping up the Chinese Communist threat. The ‘Chinese mainlanders are about to invade Taiwan’, they have trampled on human rights in Hong Kong and conducted genocide against Uighurs, let alone the sexual abuse of star tennis players!

China, having eradicated the threat to China/Hong Kong integration without loss of life , Western governments are now desperate to portray the Chinese government’s response to the terrorism by Uighur separatists as a ‘genocide’. Unfortunately for anti-communist religious cranks like Adrian Zenz, the latest ‘leaked reports’ indicate that far from there being ‘genocide’, some of the Chinese government’s concerns relate to Uighurs having a much more favourable policy to permit them to have more children that Han Chinese. The Uighur population has in fact increased at a far higher rate than the Han population over the past few years. The ‘genocide’ argument is a fiction. The need to non-violently suppress the Uighur terrorist violence in Xinjiang, is not.

Former U.S. ambassador Chas Freeman, has an excellent summary of the United States’ duplicitous responses towards Taiwan over the years: for the first 20 odd years after the end of the Chinese Communist/Kuomintang war, unequivocally supporting Taiwan as the real Chinese mainland government, despite being a brutal dictatorship run by the Kuomintang, then pivoting to Communist mainland China to try and split China away from its informal alliance with the Soviet Union, and now recently, once again supporting Taiwan as an independent democratic country that must be defended against the communists. The fact that the Chinese government has repeatedly called for a peaceful reunification of Taiwan with the mainland has been completely ignored by most Western media.

It is however undoubtedly true that China; its economic and military power having expanded hugely over the past 30 years, has become more assertive and wishes to reassert its historical territorial claims in the South China Sea and elsewhere, but there is no reason to believe that Mainland China intends to invade any country, let alone Taiwan, despite all the hype coming out of the United States and Australia.

And finally, the bizarre response to the posts from Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai about her apparent sexual abuse by a senior Chinese Communist Official. The English translation to her original post below indicates that her lover Zhang Gaoli (former Chinese government vice-president), is an unscrupulous and unpleasant man who exploits women, but that her love for him was the driving force of her distress, not a rape allegation. Given that Peng Shuai has been on Zoom video twice with the International Olympic Committee since her post, along with multiple pictures of her at social events , one wonders what it would really take for the Women’s Tennis Association to really really believe she was safe and ok. The impossibility of proving the absence of an allegation, has always been a key ploy of Western propaganda.

And now we have Washington saying they will diplomatically boycott the Chinese winter Olympics because of Uighur genocide etc. Given that the United States (along with the U.K.) is in fact guilty of the most horrendous genocide and human rights abuses of foreign populations over its 200 years of existence; including its more recent barbarities in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, with millions killed , tortured and displaced, along with its support for some of the most brutal regimes like Saudi Arabia and Israel, it is surprising that a permanent ban and sanctions on all United States’ global activities, and extradition of those multiple U.S. war criminals to the Hague , has not been launched before now.

United States government officials presumably believe they can ratchet up Western opinion sufficiently to ensure Western public do not buy Chinese goods and thereby undermine its economy. As Noam Chomsky has most recently stated: “The ‘threat’ of China is China’s existence; it exists as a major power that the United States cannot push around, cannot intimidate, and does not follow U.S. orders. That is intolerable. Any mafia don can explain that” .

In addition the United States seeks to demonise the Russians sufficiently so that they can be viewed as a constant threat to democracy. The recent demolition of Russia-gate is just one example where, while the truth of the matter is finally out and no Russians did in fact attempt to undermine any U.S. elections, the smear continues to do its work with the public.

But the world is changing; Western powers no longer have that supreme authority to dictate ‘the truth’ to other countries- much of the world sees the economic benefits of China’s Belt and Road initiative (despite the enormous environmental destruction it causes), and the Russians are a trusted intermediary in many parts of Middle East and beyond.

Nevertheless the colonial ‘white powers”; the U.K. the U.S., Canada, Australia and to a smaller extent New Zealand, will continue to cling to a past where (even if historical reality tells a different story) they are the epitome of truth, democracy, justice and human rights.

Holding on to a past that never was, is a dangerous fiction…

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Links

https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/cornering-russia:-the-on-off-russo-ukrainian-war

Will the Chinese Civil War End with a Bang or with a Whimper?
Claims of Russian Interference in Ukraine Reek of Hypocrisy

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/12/the-missing-star-athlete-peng-shuai-is-not-missing-at-all.html

Full translation of Peng Shuai’s Weibo post, accusing Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault from tennis
The most remarkable aspect of Western attacks on China over Xinjiang is the unabashed hypocrisy

https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar#:~:text=A%20report%20from%20the%20Costs,killed%20more%20than%20900%2C000%20people.

https://www.rt.com/russia/542236-european-security-balance-power/

The Usual Suspects Are Trying to Foment a Crisis With Russia
Olympolitik: Fake Peng Shuai Scandal Fuels US Effort to Boycott Beijing Olympics
“Unregulated Capitalism is a Suicide Pact”: Noam Chomsky Talks Climate, China, and More with Lowkey
https://richardfalk.org/2021/12/06/covering-up-failure-ignoring-the-record-of-regime-changing-interventions/
Robert Falk’s analysis of North- South relations

The Third Eye

Australia has just signed an agreement with the United Kingdom and the United States for the the U.K. and U.S. to provide resources and know-how for Australia to build 8 nuclear powered attack submarines. Named AUKUS, the deal means 8 nuclear powered submarines ( but currently without the nuclear weaponry), are to be built in Adelaide over the next few years using British and American technology.

This is indeed a nuclear triad based on racism., arrogance and stupidity.

While there is no mention of China in the three ‘white’ anglo-saxon allies’ press releases on the agreement; the message is clear, these very expensive submarines are not designed for coastal defence, as the now defunct diesel submarine contracted with France were going to be; these are submarines designed to stay unseen far away from Australia coastlines – and also be completely reliant on nuclear fuel from either the U.K. or the U.S.

While Australian prime minister Scott Morrison is not, as we say in New Zealand, the sharpest knife in the box , the move is a calculated one by the Australians.

Some commentators on the new AUKUS agreement have argued that Australia has been blackmailed by the U.S. into signing up for these incredibly costly, wasteful and provocative armaments; ( the U.S. ‘you are either with us or against us’ argument), and there is no doubt some truth in that.

For the short-term, the Australian’s calculations that the U.S. will remain the most powerful domineering and ruthless military on the planet is likely to hold; but for how much longer?

However in the short to medium term, Australia is also likely to lose even more of its China trade than before as a result of this deal and other China provocations ‘astutely’ managed by Scott Morrison and his team!.

Combine that with the extensive economic COVID 19 impacts in the states of New South Wales and Victoria, and the strong likelihood that devastating forest fires and heat are going to increasingly grip much of Australia in a vice; the future for Australia does not look good.

As Joseph Camilleri notes: The greatest loser in all of this is Australia. It has saddled itself with a vast military project of unknown cost and duration and dubious effectiveness. It will contribute to an ever-increasing defence budget that will divert scarce resources from urgent social and economic priorities.

Reliance on the United States for one’s salvation is certainly not the best and smartest option, as the French have now found, having been pushed out of the Australian submarine contract by the U.S., despite being America’s strongest ‘European ally’.

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s repeated rationale for U.S hostile policies to China about China’s ‘aggression’ and ‘economic coercion’, pail in comparison to the United States’ 200 years of wars for economic gain and its brutal use of its control over the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to ensure third world countries requiring loans were subject to extreme conditions that often destroyed their economies and the lives of their poorest populations.

But predominantly this is the work of ‘cunning persuasion” by the U.K. and U.S.. By using Australians well known and documented racism to non-white countries and refugees, Scott Morrison has been conned into thinking that he is protecting Australia from the ‘Yellow Peril’ hordes supposedly about to sweep down on Australia from the Asian steppes any day now.

We have seen this many many times before- the setting up by major powers of foreign bogey-men for gullible smaller nations to support. Whether it was the Chinese supposedly attempting to invade the rest of Asia via their North Korean allies in the early 1950s, or the Vietnam War . Australian officials in 1966 were noting “the determination of Communist China to establish hegemony throughout South-East Asia working in the first place through the agency of her North Vietnamese puppets.”

By being in the front line in the South China Sea when the U.S. Japan and the U.K launch more provocations to ‘protect Asian maritime routes’ (noting that 22% of all marine traffic in the South China seas actually originates from Chinese ports)

Australia is being set up as the fall guy by its ‘allies”. This is most certainly therefore, not an exercise in protecting shipping lanes or ‘free democratic institutions from the scourge of communism, this is an exercise in threat. Understand China that America is the ‘exceptional nation’ who rules the world, or face blockades of your trade routes by our ‘allies’.

In turn, as the Guardian notes, BoJo in the U.K. has been set up by the Americans to finally exhaust its colonial resources in a last-gasp farcical “Global Britain” approach, by running sitting-duck aircraft carriers through the South China Sea, in a re-run of British gun-boat diplomacy of the 19th Century when Britain really did rule the waves and could forcibly coerce the Chinese into accepting opium, and ceding ports like Hong Kong for the drug trade into China

While New Zealand (4000 kms to the east of Australia) is not (and could not afford to be ) a member of the select AUKUS group ( the new acronym would be appalling) because of its longstanding anti-nuclear policy, its prime minister Jacinda Adern has in a public statement, welcomed the agreement and commented on the importance of maintaining the ‘international ruled based order’. It is important to note that the ‘rule based order’ she mentions is not the International agreement processes of the United Nations, it is code for ‘whatever the U.S. decides, is what everyone must obey, regardless of international law’. And there was not one word from New Zealand about the AUKUS decision severely impacting New Zealand’s vision of a nuclear-free Pacific. Hence, while New Zealand is not a party to the AUKUS agreement, it is actively supporting these new threats to China.

It would be advisable for New Zealand to distance itself from these extraordinarily inept and unnecessary provocations, and to show it truly can provide leadership in a post-colonial world as a small nation.

Postscript

Indonesia, which borders Australian territory south of Papua New Guinea, is now sending warning signals about the implications of the Australian nuclear submarine sales to its security and there are clear indications of a potenital arms race in the region

France too has now called in its ambassadors to the the U.S. and Australia following the breaking of its contract for diesel submarines by Australia at the behest of the United States. Potentially this could lead to a much stronger impetus for the development of the often called for ‘European Army’.

Subsequent to this discussion, it is becoming apparent that the real reason for the AUKUS agreement is to induct Australia into the U.S. nuclear sphere as a major forward military nuclear base for the Americans in any attack on China.

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Links

70 years and several sea changes later, ANZUS Treaty serves a different world

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/15/alliance-with-australia-and-us-a-downpayment-on-global-britain

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2021/09/aukus-jacinda-ardern-welcomes-united-kingdom-united-states-engagement-in-pacific-says-nz-nuclear-stance-unchanged.html

History repeats as Morrison provokes China hostility
Declining Anglo-Saxon Powers Intensify Alliance

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/defence-and-foreign-affairs/nuclearpowered-submarines-a-terrible-decision-which-will-make-australia-less-safe/video/bc91f5690c3f4e5cc6deb68482bdada1

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/09/16/australia-continues-its-plunge-into-authoritarianism-and-military-brinkmanship/

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australia-build-eight-nuclear-powered-submarines-under-new-indo-pacific-security-2021-09-16/

How Provocative Are Australia’s Nuclear Submarines?

https://johnmenadue.com/ausuk-security-pact-a-story-of-recklessness-and-delusion/

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2021/09/22/commentary/world-commentary/aukus-geopolitical-ramifications/

A ‘Terrorist’ in New Zealand

On 3rd September 2021, a Sri Lankan refugee,  Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen, 32, living in Auckland New Zealand , stabbed 6 people with a knife he had just picked up from a supermarket shelf.

According to later reports the man had been once again seeking asylum in New Zealand for some years, but had been denied because of previous violent actions and an interest in ISIS literature, and had been released from a New Zealand prison 3 years before the attacks.

During the subsequent years from Ahamed’s release, he had been constantly followed by Police when out and about in Auckland, to monitor his actions and keep others safe.

Auckland was in lockdown 4 at the time of the supermarket attack- masks required and no less than 2 metres between people in places like supermarkets. Within hours the New Zealand prime minister was announcing that this was a ‘terrorist attack’, and that the man was known to her. However Ahamed Aathill Mohamed made no known statements about allegiance to ISIS immediately before his death, and no terrorist organization attributed the stabbings to themselves.

The terror, trauma and physical danger to those he attacked is beyond question, and this blog does not in any way endorse his or any other person’s violent behaviour to others.

With 60 seconds of his knifing of 6 people in the supermarket, he was fatally shot 7 times by Police with semi automatic weapons, who had been following him.

We might contrast his fatal shooting with the response of the Police to a knife attack by a New Zealand European in Dunedin some 4 months before, when at least 4 people were injured. The man was apprehended without injury, and is now in gaol, and has been described as having a mental health issue.

Or again the horrendous Mosque shootings in Christchurch in March 2019 where 51 people were killed and 40 injured, by a white supremacist using automatic rifles, the white male was subdued, unharmed, heroically by a police officer.

While we acknowledge that every violent incident is different and must necessarily be handled differently by Police, it does seem strange that a man in an enclosed supermarket aisle with a kitchen knife, could not be subdued without fatal consequences, by a number of police officers who were presumably wearing protective clothing.

Police subsequently noted that their policy is to shoot for the largest body surface area (i.e. the torso) so that they don’t miss the target, but clearly other options than shooting the attacker were possible, or alternatively those seven shots could have immobilised him in that enclosed space, without causing his death.

We know that Ahamed’s life history before his arrival in New Zealand as a young man was incredibly traumatic- witnessing his father being kidnapped and almost killed, and himself being tortured by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

The Spinoff notes that Ahamed ‘had been in New Zealand since 2011 when he arrived on a student visa. He made a claim for refugee status soon after, but was declined. He appealed, and was granted the status the following year. The prime minister said on Friday that his claim was based on a fraudulent document’

We also know that Ahamed had been on remand (i.e. charged with an offence but not convicted in court) in New Zealand for threatening activities for some years before his conviction – during which time he was held in prison, but was not able to access any supports that might have reduced his risk to himself or others because he had at that stage not been convicted and the government was attempting to deport him. Additionally once released from gaol after his conviction, he was constantly tailed by armed Police; actions which would not have helped his fear and paranoia.

It is clear that Ahamed was acutely distressed because of his trauma, but did not receive the necessary supports by New Zealand authorities to reduce the impacts of that trauma and distress. Instead, he was immediately labelled a ‘terrorist’ by the New Zealand prime minister and the New Zealand media after his death, and there was no call for an independent review into his death.

Is it coincidental that 3 violent attacks were handled so very differently by Police; that a dark skinned man could so easily be deemed a terrorist and shot dead, but two white males, despite the acute violence of their attacks, be subdued without fatality?

We are informed that the New Zealand government, in a knee-jerk reaction to this attack, now wants to ‘tighten’ the responses around ‘terrorist activities’. Andrew Geddis has noted that the draft legislation’s proposal, allowing for people to be prosecuted for planning an activity, but not actually executing that plan , is currently an unheard of judicial procedure in New Zealand.

Listen to the University of Otago Peace and Conflict studies debate about the ‘terrorist attack’ below.

We need to acknowledge too, that no act of violence is acceptable; whether it be in a persons’ home, a random attack in public, a terrorist attack, or violence by the state.

The terror of those 2997 killed, and the trauma experienced by those many bereaved and the first responders to the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001, are very real and still raw. However the barbaric responses to those attacks by the United States and their ‘Coalition of the Willing’, defies both logic and humanity. Millions of people in Arab nations killed, economies and environments ravaged, and thousands tortured or drone murdered, with the rationale being suppression of terrorism, rather than the reality of more arms sales and theft of foreign resources, and the resultant creation of more angry terrorists.

As Chris Hedges notes, those responses are the work of evil killers. The fact that ex President George W Bush can stand up on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and be applauded in Western media for his demonic destruction of Iraq, and Afghanistan, defies belief.

In any sane and just society, such a man ( along with the deranged Tony Blair and their other neoliberal cronies)

Tony Blair shaking hands with Mike Pompeo (ex U.S. Secretary of State)

would have long ago been locked away for their lifetimes – for the common good.

What we desperately need now is for ex-colonial states like New Zealand, to show global leadership in addressing terror threats, in the absence of leadership from the larger powers.

We need to undertake more research to explore opportunities to better respond to threats of violence, to implement strategies that reduce group and individual threats of terror; through acknowledging the genuine basis of the anger, trauma and fear that created those threats, acknowledging that often our state responses to ‘terror’ threats by ‘others with dark skins’ is a relic of our racist and colonial history, (as witnessed by New Zealand Police’s infamous ‘anti-terrorist’ raids into the Ureweras in 2007); and beginning to treat responses to terror threats as a normal and just and equitable part of our range of enforcement and judicial responses to violence, which respects everyone’s human rights, rather than something that needs to be responded to beyond the normal rule of law.

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Links

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300384815/man-shot-dead-by-police-six-injured-after-terror-attack-at-aucklands-lynnmall-countdown

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/09/auckland-terror-attack-new-zealand-reacts-in-shock-to-new-lynn-stabbing.html

https://www.dw.com/en/new-zealand-man-stabs-5-in-supermarket-knife-attack/a-57479834

https://scheerpost.com/2021/09/10/hedges-the-evil-we-do-is-the-evil-we-get/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootings

https://www.police.govt.nz/major-events/new-lynn-incident-operation-rally

The story of the Auckland terrorist

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/05/new-zealand-stabbings-officials-tried-for-years-to-deport-terrorist-prior-to-auckland-attack-jacinda-adern-says

Would harsher terrorism laws have prevented the mall attack?

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/341457/ten-years-on-from-the-urewera-raids

9/11: Why Americans Were Never Told Why They Were Attacked

Western Hypocrisy on Afghanistan

As Hollywood has noted, and later U. S. records confirm, the predecessors to the Taliban, the U.S. funded and armed brutal Afghan Mujahideen or jihadist freedom fighters were instrumental in securing the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s , who were supporting the communist secular Afghan government in Kabul. A government it should be noted, who fully supported the rights of Afghan women to be educated, to work and live a life equal to men.

After several years of extreme violence and turmoil across Afghanistan, the Taliban came to power in the late 1990s,

As Consortium News notes: The triumphant Taliban imposed harsh Islamic law on Afghanistan. Their rule was especially cruel to women who had made gains toward equal rights under the communists, but were forced by the Taliban to live under highly restrictive rules, to cover themselves when in public, and to forgo schooling.

The Taliban also granted refuge to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, who had fought with the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets in the 1980s. Bin Laden then used Afghanistan as the base of operations for his terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, setting the stage for the next Afghan War in 2001.

After the 9/11 attacks in New York by Al Qaeda, the Taliban agreed to hand over Osama bin Laden to the United States. However their offer was refused, and instead President Bush launched a war to remove the Taliban from power beginning with a brutal bombing campaign in October 2001

If the purpose of Bush’s Afghan war was not to trap Osama bin Laden – what was the purpose?

The United States had been negotiating with the Taliban for an oil pipeline to traverse Afghanistan from Central Asian oil fields, and appeared to be on relatively good terms with them.

It was only much later that the hype about a humanitarian intervention for women’s rights etc came to the fore in Western media. However this supposed human rights agenda by the United States and the United Kingdom is contradicted by their wholehearted support for the brutal Mujahideen the Saudi regime, and their unconditional support for the Israeli genocidal actions against Palestinians (amongst many other brutal regimes supported and armed by Western governments)

This was simply one more racist colonial invasion; putting more money into the pockets of U.S. war profiteers.

See below, John Pilger’s video ‘Breaking the Silence’ from 10 years ago in Afghanistan

http://johnpilger.com/videos/breaking-the-silence-truth-and-lies-in-the-war-on-terror

As a Western person I oppose discrimination against any person of any gender or race- however I also oppose the barbaric use of violence to impose one’s will on others we do not agree with- something my country New Zealand has been complicit in along with other Western white countries.

Setting up an indigenous Afghan army funded and trained and managed by foreigners to oppose local people who they may in fact know by tribe or family, and who are trying to defend their country from invasion, was always a recipe for failure. Such troops’ only motivation could be their paycheck, not patriotism for their country: so when the occupation force goes in the dead of night, the money goes with them and the local funded military disintegrate- they have nothing to fight for.

Similarly a ‘democracy’ funded and approved and beholden to an occupying power is not a democracy -it is a mockery of ‘democracy’.- and an extraordinarily corrupt one at that– why else would you pretend to lead your country whilst under an occupying power?

As Marshall Auerback and Patrick Lawrence note in ‘The Scrum’: Ashraf Ghani, (the last of the U.S. appointed Afghan ‘Presidents’) was among the more preposterous creations of the Obama administration, a man who personified our American presumption that we can go around the world making all others in our image without reference to histories, cultures, or political traditions. 

We know the colonial occupation forces killed many thousands of civilians (through bombing campaigns, drone murders, the brutal occupation and destruction of villages and people’s homes and the use of torture at Bagram airbase and other locations in Afghanistan- civilian losses that the occupying forces continue to largely deny.

New Zealand’s ex-prime minister Helen Clark’s commentary on the resurgence of the Taliban might be interpreted as disingenuous, were it not for the fact that she is a United Nations employee and knows full well the extent of the indiscriminate murder, torture and destruction, let alone the phenomenal levels of corruption by NGOs supposedly ‘re-building Afghanistan’ committed by the occupying powers in their 20 year presence in Afghanistan.

We might also note the opium and heroin rat lines from the Afghan poppy
fields which miraculously came into full bloom (Afghanistan  now supplies by  far the largest  share of opium in  the world), after the American occupation
and which will now , once again, be shut down by the Taliban. Mysteriously drug trafficking explodes in volume in those areas where Western intelligence
operatives, and particularly the CIA, are heavily involved: Colombia,
Afghanistan, Laos….

The New Zealand presence in Afghanistan is one more shameful example of our complicity in the United States’ war crimes..

While there will be many in Kabul and other major Afghan cities who have come to enjoy Western values, comforts and the easy money that came with the occupiers, there will be many many more Afghans who are thankful that the brutality and systematic racism of the Western occupying powers is finally at an end.

The lessons other vulnerable countries have learnt from Western occupying powers’ brutal occupation of Afghanistan will not be soon forgotten..

Nor will the boys coming home from that 20 year war be immune to its effects on the psyche..

“One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.”
– Booker T. Washington

That is not to say Afghanistan is going to become some liberal, rights respecting country any time soon: traditional rigid views about women’s rights and other ethnicities and belief systems -particularly in rural areas, are gong to prevail for some time to come. And Sharia law is not exactly a very forgiving dogma; but there are signs that the new Taliban leadership recognise that they will have to adapt to the modern world if they are to be accepted by the wider international community, especially investment from Chinese and  other neighbouring countries. Certainly, as of 17th August 2021, the Taliban command have so far largely behaved with honour and discipline for the defeated.

It should also be noted that the Taliban are not ‘terrorists’ and in no way resemble ISIS or the earlier Mujahideen . While they may have sheltered Al Qaeda in the past, they have no record and no stated intent of terrorist actions outside (or within) Afghanistan.

And it should also be remembered that the Taliban’s astonishing victory in the past week has been at minimal cost of human life and suffering; a victory, as Pepe Escobar notes, contrived by ” lots of persuasion, tribal deals, zero columns of tanks (and) minimal loss of blood”.

It is  time now for the new Afghan  government to  demand reparations from all those Western  occupation governments for the deaths,  torture,  trauma and misery;  and land and property losses of the last 20  years.

Perhaps Westerners could also remember, for the future, that the way for outsiders to encourage change in any other society, is to demonstrate your positive values: your generosity, your honesty, your capacity to forgive and your willingness to listen…

Postscript

As Richard Falks  and others note, what follows next in Afghanistan  will  depend not only on how the Taliban keep  their promises of greater tolerance , but also  on  the United States and its Western  occupying allies respond to the Taliban in power.  To  date Western media is hyping up  the threat  and supposed savagery of the Taliban  to extraordinary  degrees  (my local  New Zealand  TV news channel  interspersed commentary of the Taliban  with video of ISIS troops marching in uniform) and the  U.S.  withholding of Afghan federal  reserve money  and aid by  other Western countries . Without the  Western aid that  Afghanistan infrastructure has come to  rely on  over the last 20  years,  severe hardship  and starvation will  be the lot of Afghans already  brutalised by  this pointless war.

It is now likely that  further Western brutal  adventures, such  as the Afghan occupation , will not be viable options , as China particularly expands its  somewhat  more benign influence in  the region.

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Links

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/16/20-years-invasion-afghanistan-unnecessary-post-imperial-fantasy

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/126081418/utterly-surreal-and-devastating-former-pm-helen-clark-shellshocked-to-be-back-where-we-were-in-afghanistan-as-taliban-take-over

https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/08/16/diplomacy-not-bombs-anti-war-voices-say-afghanistan-shows-need-stop-any-further?

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/the-islamic-emirate-of-afghanistan-back-with-a-bang/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/08/16/afghanistan-history-taliban-collapse-504977

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/08/afghanistan-taliban-press-conference-notes.html#more

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/08/16/hollywoods-dangerous-afghan-illusion-2/

https://thescrum.substack.com/p/and-now?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/

https://scheerpost.com/2021/08/17/the-u-s-government-lied-for-two-decades-about-afghanistan/

https://scheerpost.com/2021/08/16/what-the-classroom-didnt-teach-me-about-the-american-empire/

https://original.antiwar.com/Yves_Engler/2021/08/17/what-a-waste-of-human-life-and-resources/

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/we-failed-afghanistan-not-the-other?

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/08/19/create-two-three-many-saigons/

https://www.sigar.mil/interactive-reports/corruption-in-conflict/lessons.html

As Kabul Is Retaken, Papers Look Back in Erasure

https://annebonnypirate.org/2021/08/17/afghanistan-the-end-of-the-occupation/

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/CIA_report_into_shoring_up_Afghan_war_support_in_Western_Europe,_11_Mar_2010

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1232167.shtml

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1232142.shtml

https://richardfalk.org/2021/08/23/everything-went-wrong-in-afghanistan/

John Pilger: The Great Game of Smashing Nations

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/wests-meddling-has-caused-calamity-afghanistan

Toeing the U.S. Foreign Policy ‘Line’

New Zealand has been the last 5 Eyes nation to sign up to the American ‘line’ that China is a grave threat to all us righteous white folks.

We are now informed that New Zealand is gravely disturbed by China’s actions , and particularly by its alleged ‘state-sponsored’ ‘malicious-cyber-activity” among many other sins real and constructed. While the ‘evidence’ relies on the usual ‘highly likely” scenario ( i.e. ‘we really don’t know who did it, but we know the Chinese are evil guys, so it must be their fault’), hard facts on the issue are strangely hard to come by….

And strangely too , after sitting on the fence in the ongoing confrontation between the United States and China for some time, New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Adern, after a one to one conversation with President Biden before the recent ASEAN online conference, has now confirmed New Zealand hostility to all things China. A little strong-arming of a small Pacific nation goes a long way, in U.S. eyes.

And one assumes that New Zealand’s illustrious ‘intelligence’ community has not heard of the U.S. Vault 7, where ‘cunning’ National Security Agency staffers have constructed hacking tools that can insert other national identity markers (including Russia and China) into their hijack software – to make it seem like the hijacking comes from another country, and not the squeaky-clean U.S.

We may also be puzzled why the New Zealand government and other Western nation, has not raised alarm bells about the Israeli ‘state sponsored “Pegasus” hijacking software- sold everywhere to all good tyrants who want to eliminate their political opposition?

However we can be assured that New Zealand is on the right side of justice in adhering to its good white Anglo Saxon 5 -Eyed heritage 0f the United States, U.K. Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and now the U.S. Asian colony of Japan), in condemning the heinous acts of the Yellow Peril commies in mainland China.

While mainland China certainly has many problems, and many harsh responses to internal opposition, if we were to look closely we might find that our good Anglo Saxon global community is not as squeaky clean in terms of its treatment of internal minorities, and decidedly not in its brutal treatment of people of other ‘races’ in other countries. And we might also find that the U.S security apparatus is one of the predominant sources of cyber breaches and hijacking of IT systems across the globe.

The real issue is simply that mainland China is a mortal threat to the long-standing United States’ brutal and belligerent attacks on other nations for fun and profit. Its ‘rule based order’ – where the ‘rules’ are made by the U.S. regardless of rights, freedom and justice- and the world obeys- is under threat from China as it rapidly becomes the predominant economic global power.

Every day now we see the Western mainstream press hyping up the ‘threat’ of “Communist China”. As always The Guardian is superlative in its role as a propaganda arm for Western intelligence; it’s latest article on how the devious Chinese are going to benefit from re-building Syria (after Western sponsored jihadists and Western military occupiers attempted to create a jihadist hellhole there) is a great case in point.

And just as the United States has systematically brutalised sanctioned and murdered the populations of socialist countries that prefer an independent economic and foreign policy, for fear that the socialist model would in fact prove more efficient and fairer to their populations, and thus a role model for a socialist America; so China’s ultra-efficient decision-making processes which prioritise the health and wellbeing of all of its population, and has brought millions of Chinese citizens out of poverty and hunger in a few decades, is a major threat to America’s ‘world order’.

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Links

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA2107/S00143/new-zealand-condemns-malicious-cyber-activity-by-chinese-state-sponsored-actors.htm

Vault 7 Revealed: The New Dystopian Spy and Orwellian Intrusion Network
Pegasus Spyware: What Is It? How Does It Infect Your Phone? How Can You Check if Your Phone Has Been Targeted?
US underestimates China’s economic challenge at its own peril

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/war-games-despite-pandemic-threat-great-barrier-reef

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/new-cold-war-china

Chris Hedges: Kucinich Memoir Is a Moving Account of a Battle Against Corporate Power

Britain (presumably) Keen to Start Nuclear War

The British destroyer HMS Defender was recently instructed by the British government to sail within the Crimean 12 kilometer marine boundary. Russian airforce and marine forces responded strongly to this intrusion into the disputed maritime space.

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.

As Craig Murray (an expert in maritime rulings) notes: There is certainly a right to pass to the Ukrainian port of Odessa – but that in now (sic) way requires passing close to Crimea. This is therefore not “innocent passage”.

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.

Perhaps they had hoped to provoke a shooting war with Russian forces just prior to the Nato military ‘Sea Breeze’ exercise in the Black Sea the following week? From a Russian perspective this surely looks like an attempt by NATO to completely surround Russia and attack its borders.

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…..

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Links

After Longest Day, the Longest Night of Horror Still Shadows Europe

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/06/these-uppity-brits-need-a-slap-like-lesson.html#comments

Black Ops in the Black Sea
HMS Defender: Coming With Canons Loaded, Fleeing With Latrines Filled

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/23/russian-ship-fired-warning-shots-at-royal-navy-destroyer-hms-defender-moscow-says

Russians Bombed Ahead Of British Destroyer

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57583363.amp

Warmongering British Actions in the Black Sea