Allen Dulles and his Nazi Pals in Ukraine 🇺🇦

[Paul Rigby]

Manichaeism and ‘An Ideology of Liberal Empire’ – Biden’s Forever Cosmic War Against Russian ‘Evil’

Alastair Crooke

27 February 2023

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/02/27/manichaeism-and-ideology-of-liberal-empire-biden-forever-cosmic-war-against-russian-evil/

When the U.S. begins its pivot away from Ukraine, and looks fully to Europeanise the war, the political class won’t be seen ‘for the dust’.

“Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed. Autocrats only understand one word: “No.” “No.” “No.” (Applause.). “No, you will not take my country.” “No, you will not take my freedom.” “No, you will not take my future … A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease [erase] the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free. And Ukraine — Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never”. (Applause.)

“Stand with us. We will stand with you. Let us move forward … with an abiding commitment to be allies not of darkness, but of light. Not of oppression, but of liberation. Not of captivity, but, yes, of freedom”.

Biden’s speech at Warsaw, complete with the lighting effects and dramatic backdrop reminiscent of his Liberty Hall speech in which he sought to portray his own domestic MAGA opposition as a grave security threat to America, again resorts to radical Manicheanism to depict (this time) Russia, (the external counterpoint to the related U.S. MAGA threat), as the foundation for the epic battle between light and the forces of darkness. The eternal struggle that persists – that must be fought endlessly and won crushingly.

Again, as with his Liberty Hall speech, Biden offered no concrete plan. Here in Warsaw, with the sands of time running out on his Ukraine ‘project’, and with U.S. ‘Realists’ and China ‘hawks’ gaining more traction at home, Biden elevated the struggle from the literal to the metaphysical plane.

By so doing, he is trying to cement America’s deep-seated missionary ethos to a ‘forever’ cosmic war against Russian ‘evil’. He hopes to tie the American ruling class to the metaphysical struggle for the ‘light’. Should Biden continue in office, he hopes by this means, both to ‘define’ himself, and to set this overarching global struggle as something binding Americans, for the period ahead.

Simply put, his metaphysical framing is intended to trump those Realists calling for policy change.

Manichaeism is nothing new – it is an ancient cult with deep roots in Latin Christianity (and likely, Biden at least partially subscribes to seeing Putin as the Demiurge, the ‘dark’ anti-God).

So will this work? Well, this is the struggle now playing out in U.S. politics. At the upper level, the elites are more concerned with power and money than metaphysics – so, Biden’s attempt to transcend the latter and assemble an army “not of darkness but of light; not of oppression, but of liberation; not of captivity, but, yes, of freedom”, more likely will be regarded as a reflection of Biden’s derangement syndrome – his detachment from reality; his kookiness, in other words.

If many of the overlap establishments (the ‘Uniparty’) want this war, it will not be for virtuousness, but for the enrichment of the Military Industrial Complex. If the latter élites are veering away, it is because they think the MIC needs time to refurbish –and to restock – so as to take on China.

“Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow, and forever … That’s what Americans are and that’s what Americans do”, Biden said.

But the political landscape is no longer a Team Biden monopoly. Trump responded: “World War III has never been closer”; and he laid the blame on “all the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex”. The former president singled out Victoria Nuland in particular who, he said, was “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO”.

Florida Governor DeSantis too, insists that the Biden administration has “effectively [given Kiev] a blank check with no clear strategic objective identified”. “I don’t think that it’s in our interest to be getting into a proxy war … over things like the [Ukrainian] borderlands or over Crimea,” DeSantis said.

Republican Senator Hawley a week ago gave an reflective address to the Heritage Foundation:

“It’s hard to challenge the ‘Uniparty’: They’ve gotten very good at telling their favourite story. That’s why anyone who questions them gets called “anti-American” or “Vladimir Putin’s puppet” from a hundred different quarters”.

“But today, I want to tell you something else. I want to tell the truth. And the truth is that Americans have been sold a bill of goods. Our current foreign policy isn’t working”. It’s falling apart at the seams, with the ‘Uniparty’ doing its level best to patch it together by cutting blank checks to other countries”. Simply said: “we’re over-committed, caught in the grip of an ideology of liberal empire”.

Is this enough to ‘turn the worm’? Or, to bring a senior Deep State grandee to Biden’s office to whisper: ‘Remember what happened to Nixon?’ ‘Time for you to let go of Zelensky; (such a pity should Hunter end in jail…!)’.

There is however, another aspect to Biden’s resort to metaphysical Manichaeism that brings real, palpable consequence. Again, not new. Rather, a case of old demons re-surfacing. Here was the Estonian PM, Kaja Kallas, at the Munich Security Conference, saying that ‘NATO countries must take control of Moscow and forcibly rewrite the mentality of Russian citizens’: “The entire population of Russia should be re-educated to root out any traces of imperialistic dreams’ – claiming that absent a mandated rehabilitation, “history will repeat itself” and Europe will never be safe.

German FM, Annalena Baerbock, similarly warned the 90% of the world who have not taken the U.S./EU side:

“Neutrality is not an option, because then you are standing on the side of the aggressor … take a side, a side for peace, a side for Ukraine, a side for the humanitarian international law, and these times this means also delivering ammunition so Ukraine can defend itself”.

Yes, alongside this European Manichaeism, the edging towards a new racism can be espied: an ancient rhizome that has one tendril long burrowed into radical Ukrainian nationalism and with other tendrils coiling through mainstream EU structures, as the Euro-Élites patiently debate whether Russia was insufficiently ‘pacified’ after WW2, or whether more radical ‘rehab’ is required.

The rise of this class who regard themselves as credentialled to decide whether Russian culture must be cancelled – and ‘re-wired’ – is a particularly pernicious dynamic in global politics. It has been getting worse both in the U.S. and Europe, as its culture-war leaches out into geo-politics. This sense of superiority and impunity, in itself, provokes increased tensions and the risk of war.

Wolfgang Streeck, Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, was asked for the meaning of Chancellor Scholtz’s ‘German Zeitenwende’ (turning point). He responded:

“The Zeitenwende speech was a response to intensified pressure … for Germany to fall in line with the foreign policy of the U.S. – and, in particular, with that of the Biden administration. What is clear is that Scholz’s Zeitenwende entails a promise, above all to the United States, that Germany will from now on, unlike in the past, act in line with a view of the world as divided between the West – and an evil empire, or better: several evil empires, from Russia to China to Iran…”.

(Nota Bene: This is pure Leo Strauss, channelling Carl Schmitt’s earlier explicit German Manichaeism.)

Streeck continues:

“Between [Germany and the U.S.] – and the various evil empires: Peace is possible, only temporarily and intermittently, and only as long as we enjoy military superiority. In principle, we and they are always at each other’s throats. Real peace will require regime change making an evil empire part of our virtuous one – as a result of its conversion to ‘our values’. It is legitimate to use all its political, economic, and military means to bring such conversion about.

“After the Zeitenwende, wars will always be around the corner and we must be prepared for them. What should help is that a virtuous empire’s “value-driven” or “feminist foreign policy” (Baerbock) fights only just wars – as wars against evil cannot be unjust. The underlying world view here is not social-Darwinist, history being a battle for the “survival of the fittest“, but Manichaean, in which history is a relentless struggle between good and bad, in which the forces of virtue must do their utmost to prevail over those of evil. Before they have won, there can be no real peace, only cease-fires for tactical reasons. For real peace we, the forces of virtue, must prepare for war.

“There is a strong and a weak version of Zeitenwende rhetoric. The strong version implies that the world was always like this: ontologically Manichaean. Those who in the past had a different view were either feeble-minded fools, cowards who all-too-willingly let themselves be deceived by enemy propaganda, or traitors. This essentially coincides with the world view of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party in the United States.

“The weak version, the one Scholtz obviously prefers, is that the world has recently changed: while in the past it allowed for peaceful coexistence between regimes and countries with different interests or ‘identities’ – so that life in peace could be preferred over victory in war – now the enemy has become so evil that there is no moral alternative to defeating him, cost it what it may.

“Today, American messianism seems to have migrated to Europe. At the same time, Bob Dylan is right. And times continue to be a’changing. How long the German government can remain as subservient to the United States as it has now promised to be is an open question – considering the risks that come with Germany’s territorial closeness to the Ukrainian battlefield – a risk not shared by the U.S.. There is also pressure from France for Germany to become more European and less transatlantic in outlook, and this may, with time, have an impact. Furthermore, it is likely that the U.S. at some point, will try to “Europeanise” the war and bow out, as they tried to “Vietnamise” the Vietnam war in the 1970s – hoping that post-Zeitenwende Germany can take the burden of sponsoring their proxy war from them.

“As for Europe, the United States may not object to Germany, Poland, and others continuing to help the Ukrainian government pursue its dream of a final victory over Russia, at their own cost and risk. With Germany and the EU having turned their political judgment over to Zelenskiy and Biden, and all serious discussion of the aims of the war – the terms of a settlement – being de facto precluded, this is quite a frightening prospect”.

If Streeck’s analysis is correct, the Bidenesque ideology now gripping the upper reaches of Europe suggests that the EU’s conversion to Zeitenwende makes any future relationship with Russia nigh impossible. The conviction this class has of itself as the global future, and of being on the ‘right side of history’, whereas ‘others’ (Russia and the ‘autocrats’) represent only that dark side to history, effective forecloses on mediation. Mediation with ‘evil’ is a tautology.

The reality is that the EU is gripped by the attempt to impose a ‘cultural revolution’ – in the sense that broad citizen conformity to its cultural norms and ‘emergencies’ is not enough. But rather, it is its’ thought-processes that have to be fully reflected in modes of thinking such that every citizen’s acts and thoughts reflect EU ‘right thinking’.

We see this with the war party’s poster girl, Annalena Baerbock’s, lecturing non-aligned countries that there is no space for neutrality when it comes to Ukraine: ‘You are ‘either with us or against us’; and if the former, then GIVE U.S. AMMO!’.

Well, the cultural revolution already is reversing. Today, the Civilisational States (Russia, China, Iran, etc. and link) see the future as theirs and view the woke globalists – and their financialised economic structures – as passé. This reversal increasingly is evident in the popular war in the U.S., but not in Europe.

But can the EU change? – since all the bridges by which it might reconnect to the future have long since been burned down. In essence, the EU is a steam-roller ‘offensive’ ever incrementally moving towards ‘more Europe’.

Change ultimately will come to the EU as a result of a clash of interests, factiousness, and possibly a big political implosion or two – but above all by events on the ground in Ukraine as the Russian offensive proceeds.

Reality has been so far exorcised from the Credentialled Class ‘bubble’. It is not clear how the latter will react to having their ‘Balloon’ popped. Already, we see signs of incipient hysteria.

But the bottom line is this: When the U.S. begins its pivot away from Ukraine, and looks fully to Europeanise the war, the political class won’t be seen ‘for the dust’. The latter will soon find that for all its florid language of fighting on behalf of the ‘light’, the number of Europeans willing to die so that Sevastopol can become Ukrainian will be few indeed. Baerbock will find herself alone, as the rest of world already has shifted across to Russia (see here), ignoring her taunts.

[Paul Rigby]

16 hours ago, Matthew Koch said:

Now that this idiot got Russia to do what he said wouldn't happen in the clip and due to that the world is now starting to trade off the dollar. This fool is going to go down in history next to Woodrow Wilson as one of the worst Presidents America and the West has ever had.. 

 

Not for the first time, Matthew, you have it right.

[Paul Rigby]

18 hours ago, John Cotter said:

Chris,

That Chinese article is a devastating critique of US global hegemony.

Needless to say, the two other great powers, Russia and China itself, are no angels, but as the saying goes, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

Accordingly, the unrivalled power the US has wielded since at least as far back as 1945, has corrupted the US to a degree unrivalled by any other country.

Insofar as the article is merely a factual description of this state of affairs, its contents cannot be gainsaid. What’s truly pernicious is the degree to which the majority of people living in the shadow of this US hegemony are oblivious or resigned to their servitude.

The latter – those who are resigned to the servitude – are typically self-styled highly “educated” high status well-paid liberals who rationalise their obsequious mentality by such arguments as “It would be worse if we had to kowtow to the Chinese or the Russians rather than the Americans”.

This means that for these “liberals”, servitude, or more precisely “kissing up and kicking down”, is the only mode of existence they envisage for themselves. They have traded their freedom for their high salaries.

In other words, they have sold their souls – the ultimate corruption.

Seconded & thanks, Chris, for posting - saved me the trouble of looking it up!

[Matthew Koch]

2 hours ago, Paul Rigby said:

Not for the first time, Matthew, you have it right.

 

[John Cotter]

2 hours ago, Paul Rigby said:

Manichaeism and ‘An Ideology of Liberal Empire’ – Biden’s Forever Cosmic War Against Russian ‘Evil’

Alastair Crooke

27 February 2023

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/02/27/manichaeism-and-ideology-of-liberal-empire-biden-forever-cosmic-war-against-russian-evil/

When the U.S. begins its pivot away from Ukraine, and looks fully to Europeanise the war, the political class won’t be seen ‘for the dust’.

“Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed. Autocrats only understand one word: “No.” “No.” “No.” (Applause.). “No, you will not take my country.” “No, you will not take my freedom.” “No, you will not take my future … A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease [erase] the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free. And Ukraine — Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never”. (Applause.)

“Stand with us. We will stand with you. Let us move forward … with an abiding commitment to be allies not of darkness, but of light. Not of oppression, but of liberation. Not of captivity, but, yes, of freedom”.

Biden’s speech at Warsaw, complete with the lighting effects and dramatic backdrop reminiscent of his Liberty Hall speech in which he sought to portray his own domestic MAGA opposition as a grave security threat to America, again resorts to radical Manicheanism to depict (this time) Russia, (the external counterpoint to the related U.S. MAGA threat), as the foundation for the epic battle between light and the forces of darkness. The eternal struggle that persists – that must be fought endlessly and won crushingly.

Again, as with his Liberty Hall speech, Biden offered no concrete plan. Here in Warsaw, with the sands of time running out on his Ukraine ‘project’, and with U.S. ‘Realists’ and China ‘hawks’ gaining more traction at home, Biden elevated the struggle from the literal to the metaphysical plane.

By so doing, he is trying to cement America’s deep-seated missionary ethos to a ‘forever’ cosmic war against Russian ‘evil’. He hopes to tie the American ruling class to the metaphysical struggle for the ‘light’. Should Biden continue in office, he hopes by this means, both to ‘define’ himself, and to set this overarching global struggle as something binding Americans, for the period ahead.

Simply put, his metaphysical framing is intended to trump those Realists calling for policy change.

Manichaeism is nothing new – it is an ancient cult with deep roots in Latin Christianity (and likely, Biden at least partially subscribes to seeing Putin as the Demiurge, the ‘dark’ anti-God).

So will this work? Well, this is the struggle now playing out in U.S. politics. At the upper level, the elites are more concerned with power and money than metaphysics – so, Biden’s attempt to transcend the latter and assemble an army “not of darkness but of light; not of oppression, but of liberation; not of captivity, but, yes, of freedom”, more likely will be regarded as a reflection of Biden’s derangement syndrome – his detachment from reality; his kookiness, in other words.

If many of the overlap establishments (the ‘Uniparty’) want this war, it will not be for virtuousness, but for the enrichment of the Military Industrial Complex. If the latter élites are veering away, it is because they think the MIC needs time to refurbish –and to restock – so as to take on China.

“Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow, and forever … That’s what Americans are and that’s what Americans do”, Biden said.

But the political landscape is no longer a Team Biden monopoly. Trump responded: “World War III has never been closer”; and he laid the blame on “all the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex”. The former president singled out Victoria Nuland in particular who, he said, was “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO”.

Florida Governor DeSantis too, insists that the Biden administration has “effectively [given Kiev] a blank check with no clear strategic objective identified”. “I don’t think that it’s in our interest to be getting into a proxy war … over things like the [Ukrainian] borderlands or over Crimea,” DeSantis said.

Republican Senator Hawley a week ago gave an reflective address to the Heritage Foundation:

“It’s hard to challenge the ‘Uniparty’: They’ve gotten very good at telling their favourite story. That’s why anyone who questions them gets called “anti-American” or “Vladimir Putin’s puppet” from a hundred different quarters”.

“But today, I want to tell you something else. I want to tell the truth. And the truth is that Americans have been sold a bill of goods. Our current foreign policy isn’t working”. It’s falling apart at the seams, with the ‘Uniparty’ doing its level best to patch it together by cutting blank checks to other countries”. Simply said: “we’re over-committed, caught in the grip of an ideology of liberal empire”.

Is this enough to ‘turn the worm’? Or, to bring a senior Deep State grandee to Biden’s office to whisper: ‘Remember what happened to Nixon?’ ‘Time for you to let go of Zelensky; (such a pity should Hunter end in jail…!)’.

There is however, another aspect to Biden’s resort to metaphysical Manichaeism that brings real, palpable consequence. Again, not new. Rather, a case of old demons re-surfacing. Here was the Estonian PM, Kaja Kallas, at the Munich Security Conference, saying that ‘NATO countries must take control of Moscow and forcibly rewrite the mentality of Russian citizens’: “The entire population of Russia should be re-educated to root out any traces of imperialistic dreams’ – claiming that absent a mandated rehabilitation, “history will repeat itself” and Europe will never be safe.

German FM, Annalena Baerbock, similarly warned the 90% of the world who have not taken the U.S./EU side:

“Neutrality is not an option, because then you are standing on the side of the aggressor … take a side, a side for peace, a side for Ukraine, a side for the humanitarian international law, and these times this means also delivering ammunition so Ukraine can defend itself”.

Yes, alongside this European Manichaeism, the edging towards a new racism can be espied: an ancient rhizome that has one tendril long burrowed into radical Ukrainian nationalism and with other tendrils coiling through mainstream EU structures, as the Euro-Élites patiently debate whether Russia was insufficiently ‘pacified’ after WW2, or whether more radical ‘rehab’ is required.

The rise of this class who regard themselves as credentialled to decide whether Russian culture must be cancelled – and ‘re-wired’ – is a particularly pernicious dynamic in global politics. It has been getting worse both in the U.S. and Europe, as its culture-war leaches out into geo-politics. This sense of superiority and impunity, in itself, provokes increased tensions and the risk of war.

Wolfgang Streeck, Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, was asked for the meaning of Chancellor Scholtz’s ‘German Zeitenwende’ (turning point). He responded:

“The Zeitenwende speech was a response to intensified pressure … for Germany to fall in line with the foreign policy of the U.S. – and, in particular, with that of the Biden administration. What is clear is that Scholz’s Zeitenwende entails a promise, above all to the United States, that Germany will from now on, unlike in the past, act in line with a view of the world as divided between the West – and an evil empire, or better: several evil empires, from Russia to China to Iran…”.

(Nota Bene: This is pure Leo Strauss, channelling Carl Schmitt’s earlier explicit German Manichaeism.)

Streeck continues:

“Between [Germany and the U.S.] – and the various evil empires: Peace is possible, only temporarily and intermittently, and only as long as we enjoy military superiority. In principle, we and they are always at each other’s throats. Real peace will require regime change making an evil empire part of our virtuous one – as a result of its conversion to ‘our values’. It is legitimate to use all its political, economic, and military means to bring such conversion about.

“After the Zeitenwende, wars will always be around the corner and we must be prepared for them. What should help is that a virtuous empire’s “value-driven” or “feminist foreign policy” (Baerbock) fights only just wars – as wars against evil cannot be unjust. The underlying world view here is not social-Darwinist, history being a battle for the “survival of the fittest“, but Manichaean, in which history is a relentless struggle between good and bad, in which the forces of virtue must do their utmost to prevail over those of evil. Before they have won, there can be no real peace, only cease-fires for tactical reasons. For real peace we, the forces of virtue, must prepare for war.

“There is a strong and a weak version of Zeitenwende rhetoric. The strong version implies that the world was always like this: ontologically Manichaean. Those who in the past had a different view were either feeble-minded fools, cowards who all-too-willingly let themselves be deceived by enemy propaganda, or traitors. This essentially coincides with the world view of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party in the United States.

“The weak version, the one Scholtz obviously prefers, is that the world has recently changed: while in the past it allowed for peaceful coexistence between regimes and countries with different interests or ‘identities’ – so that life in peace could be preferred over victory in war – now the enemy has become so evil that there is no moral alternative to defeating him, cost it what it may.

“Today, American messianism seems to have migrated to Europe. At the same time, Bob Dylan is right. And times continue to be a’changing. How long the German government can remain as subservient to the United States as it has now promised to be is an open question – considering the risks that come with Germany’s territorial closeness to the Ukrainian battlefield – a risk not shared by the U.S.. There is also pressure from France for Germany to become more European and less transatlantic in outlook, and this may, with time, have an impact. Furthermore, it is likely that the U.S. at some point, will try to “Europeanise” the war and bow out, as they tried to “Vietnamise” the Vietnam war in the 1970s – hoping that post-Zeitenwende Germany can take the burden of sponsoring their proxy war from them.

“As for Europe, the United States may not object to Germany, Poland, and others continuing to help the Ukrainian government pursue its dream of a final victory over Russia, at their own cost and risk. With Germany and the EU having turned their political judgment over to Zelenskiy and Biden, and all serious discussion of the aims of the war – the terms of a settlement – being de facto precluded, this is quite a frightening prospect”.

If Streeck’s analysis is correct, the Bidenesque ideology now gripping the upper reaches of Europe suggests that the EU’s conversion to Zeitenwende makes any future relationship with Russia nigh impossible. The conviction this class has of itself as the global future, and of being on the ‘right side of history’, whereas ‘others’ (Russia and the ‘autocrats’) represent only that dark side to history, effective forecloses on mediation. Mediation with ‘evil’ is a tautology.

The reality is that the EU is gripped by the attempt to impose a ‘cultural revolution’ – in the sense that broad citizen conformity to its cultural norms and ‘emergencies’ is not enough. But rather, it is its’ thought-processes that have to be fully reflected in modes of thinking such that every citizen’s acts and thoughts reflect EU ‘right thinking’.

We see this with the war party’s poster girl, Annalena Baerbock’s, lecturing non-aligned countries that there is no space for neutrality when it comes to Ukraine: ‘You are ‘either with us or against us’; and if the former, then GIVE U.S. AMMO!’.

Well, the cultural revolution already is reversing. Today, the Civilisational States (Russia, China, Iran, etc. and link) see the future as theirs and view the woke globalists – and their financialised economic structures – as passé. This reversal increasingly is evident in the popular war in the U.S., but not in Europe.

But can the EU change? – since all the bridges by which it might reconnect to the future have long since been burned down. In essence, the EU is a steam-roller ‘offensive’ ever incrementally moving towards ‘more Europe’.

Change ultimately will come to the EU as a result of a clash of interests, factiousness, and possibly a big political implosion or two – but above all by events on the ground in Ukraine as the Russian offensive proceeds.

Reality has been so far exorcised from the Credentialled Class ‘bubble’. It is not clear how the latter will react to having their ‘Balloon’ popped. Already, we see signs of incipient hysteria.

But the bottom line is this: When the U.S. begins its pivot away from Ukraine, and looks fully to Europeanise the war, the political class won’t be seen ‘for the dust’. The latter will soon find that for all its florid language of fighting on behalf of the ‘light’, the number of Europeans willing to die so that Sevastopol can become Ukrainian will be few indeed. Baerbock will find herself alone, as the rest of world already has shifted across to Russia (see here), ignoring her taunts.

Thanks for posting this article, Paul. 

It depicts with deadly accuracy the greatest danger facing the world today - the Manichean insanity of Biden, the US "Uniparty" and their lapdog political leaders in Europe.

 

[Matthew Koch]

I found another Putin puppet.. 

 

[W. Niederhut]

Putin’s Invasion Foretold

• by Greg Palast
• for Buzzflash
• February 24, 2023

As Russian tanks rolled across the border, some of our fellow progressives called it a justified attack in response to a threat from Western military imperialists.

The year was 1939.

That year, some on the Left, a minority for sure, bent themselves into moral pretzels to justify the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Russian-German murder-drenched conquest of Poland.

As a New York Tribune columnist, the abolitionist Karl Marx, wrote before the US Civil War, when some Britons supported the slavers: “History speaks twice; the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

Indeed, there is a nauseating, horrifying humor watching one-time fighters against injustice, self-proclaimed “anti-war” activists, dancing cheek to cheek with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson and fascist pin-up Silvio Berlusconi sharing their love, or at least, their sad excuse-making, for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

At its core, these strange bedfellows’ sympathy for the Russian invasion rests, ultimately, on the canard that it was NATO’s expansion that provoked Putin to attack.

Pay attention to Putin’s own words.

On July 12, 2021, months before his tanks rolled, Putin issued a detailed statement of his casus belli, his justification for total seizure of Ukraine, not just the Donbas, in a 21-page-long essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” No one should speak of this war unless they have read this, Putin’s Mein Kampf.

Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere in his essay does Putin say one word about NATO expansion.

The meandering screed boils down to two points: First, Ukraine has always been an inseparable part of Russkiy Mir, the soul and body of Mother Russia, for more than a thousand years.

But it’s not true. Putin’s phantasmic claim reaches back to the 10th century, to Volodymyr, Grand Prince of the Kievan-Rus principality — founded, not by the Slavs they conquered, but as an extension of the Viking Empire. The rulers of Ukraine and this proto-Russia were Swedish. Volodymyr (namesake of both Zelensky and Putin), ruled from the metropolitan capital of Kiev over a vast land including the swampy little village of Moscow.

Volodymyr put to the sword those who would not worship the giant icons he erected to Thor and Loki — until, in 988AD, he converted to Christianity and put to the sword to those who would not destroy the old icons and swear to the new one, the Crucifix.

Thus was founded the Orthodox Church, based in Kiev, not in a “Rus-sia” that did not exist. Nevertheless, here is the germ of Putin’s second casus belli, reason for invasion: religion, specifically, restoration of the one and true Orthodox Church.

It would be a deep misunderstanding to call Putin’s once and future Russia a dictatorship. It is a theocracy, ruled now and forever, in Putin’s mind, by the one and only Holy Muscovite Patriarch. Today, that crown, to which Putin bows, is the Moscow-based Patriarch Kirill, the ultimate source of Putin’s political power and Putin’s hold on rural believers.

It was Kirill who taunted and demanded Putin “save” the Muscovite faithful in the Donbas who side with Kirill in the Orthodox schism — and blesses what the Patriarch sees as a Crusade to restore the rightful church and cast out the heretics, the Ukraine and Greek Patriarchs.

Putin’s and Kirill’s quest is medieval, truly a new Crusade to restore the Church and its Empire. NATO? Putin only gives passing mention at the end of his anti-historical fever dream as a new locus of attack against the values of the true church. More on this later.

Putin’s tale of the unbroken, Christ-blessed rule of Ukraine by Russia has a problem. It’s bullshit. The Kievan-Rus empire shredded and disappeared in the pinwheel of history nearly a millennium ago, in 1242.

For most of the vast expanse of centuries between, Ukraine was an independent and voluntary member of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It is a great shame that this huge empire, often called the Golden Freedom, has little mention in history books because its member states ruled in peace by consensus, a proto-democracy that elected its leader and whose constitution demanded only peaceful coexistence among its states and religious freedom.

History prefers its conquistadors, as does Putin, who picks up the tale of Ukraine as Russkiy Mir when Catherine The Great conquers its Eastern edge in 1793. (I’ve an inkling Putin takes note that “The Great” is only bestowed on those who grab territory by blood. Does he look in the mirror each morning and whisper, “Vlad the Great”?)

Ukraine, in Putin’s fantasy, was overjoyed to be occupied, given as a gift to Prince Potemkin, Catherine’s lover, a fiction worthy of the happy “Potemkin villages” the Prince created to hoodwink his visiting randy Empress. (When the Russians fled Kherson, they abandoned some of their soldiers to die — but carefully carted away Potemkin’s skeleton.)

Kiev was devoured by the Hapsburgs and spit out after World War I. It was never part of Russia. But that truth is niggling detail to Putin.

In Putin’s essay, his bloviating fury is not aimed at NATO, but at “the Bolsheviks,” those Commie traitors who, from day one of the 1917 Revolution, recognized Ukraine as an independent nation. Indeed, in 1945, Ukraine won its own seat at the United Nations based on Soviet insistence that Ukraine is a sovereign state.

Now to Putin’s casus belli #2: the existential threat to Russia from the West. The West, says Putin, will not rest until Russia is destroyed. The threat is not from NATO’s cruise missiles, but from NATO’s homosexuals.

Like the Ayatollahs of Iran, to Putin and Kirill, the poison of cultural, moral decay reaches its zenith in the vile desecration of the nuclear family and all the intellectual freethinking, freakery and vices that come from it.

Putin defenders in Washington, D.C. at a Rage Against The War Machine rally holding Russian flags with the Russian Empire emblem favored by white nationalists.
Photo: © Zach D. Roberts, February 19, 2023.

The Lord and his Patriarch are threatened — and indeed they are — by heretical freethinking that leads from liberty to libertinism. And like the prior restorers of the faith Grand Inquisitors and their armed wing, the Crusaders, there can be no vote, no newspaper chit-chat, when the word of God is defied and threatened. The post-Gorbachev orgies are over. Pussy Riot must be jailed. It is why Putin is the pin-up for the Christian fascist parties of the West, from Golden Dawn in Greece, Marine Le Pen in France, to the Proudboys and US Christian fascists, including Holocaust denier, January 6 suspect and Trump dinner guest Nicholas “Nick” Fuentes.

How odd, how tragic that some of my friends on the US Left, who will who rightly demand respect for appropriate pronouns, defend Putin who made simply advocating for LGBTQ rights a crime and empowers “gay-hunting” pogroms.

Putin accuses the West of poisoning Russians with the “monstrosity…that a boy can become a girl and reversely, [that] they can play five or six gender roles.”

Read carefully Putin’s declaration of the invasion of Ukraine and the his true cause is declared:

“[The West] sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration because they are contrary to human nature.”

Putin, at his grand ceremony annexing Ukraine provinces, linked it directly to his war on Western-inspired transgender rights which he termed, “pure Satanism.”

I suppose that is provoked by NATO as well.

 

* * * In theocracies, the will of the people is not so important as the purity of the people. How strange to me, how sad, that some of my readers, rightly enraged at my revelations of vote suppression in Georgia, think nothing of Putin’s unique method of electioneering.

 

His presidential opponent, Alexei Navalny, after Putin’s bumbling assassins failed to kill him with the poison Novichok, is now in the IK-6 penal gulag commonly known as the ‘Torture Prison.’ Putin’s prior challenger, Boris Nemtsov, was shot in the back of the head, right in front of the Kremlin.

In 2018, I exposed GOP Gov. Brian Kemp’s vicious suppression of the Black vote in Georgia, denying Stacy Abrams the governorship. But, Kemp didn’t shoot her in the back of the head. How can anyone decry Kemp and excuse Putin?

And if Putin’s panzers had succeeded in occupying Kyiv and installing his puppet, would that not be the ultimate in “vote suppression”?

 

* * * Let me quickly dispose of the remnants of the canard that NATO expansion threatened Russia’s very existence, that Putin’s cause is justified. Yes, Ukraine sought to enter NATO. That was two decades ago. And NATO turned them down.

 

And how is NATO’s presence in Hungary, led by Putin’s boy-toy Viktor Orban, an existential threat to Russia?

But what about NATO in Poland? I’ve searched and searched, and I cannot find evidence that Poland launched its missiles into Russia. And when Poland was part of Russia’s Warsaw Pact, would that have justified NATO’s invasion of Russia?

And if the threat is NATO, why is Russia bombing Ukraine? Why not bomb Poland? You know why.

Russia’s killing 130,000 in Ukraine because of a chimerical threat from Poland is like me having a shouting match with the guy in Apartment 2 so I knife the daughter of the guy in Apartment 4.

How can too many of my fellow progressives, who marched against Bush’s “preemptive” war in Iraq, now find preemptive war by Putin justified by “NATO provocation.” Thankfully, Putin has few such useful idiots.

 

* * * In 1939, after the Munich “peace” accord, when the Germans and Russians invaded Poland, they hunted down those who supplied weapons to the Polish Army.

 

They found my great-uncle Solie who supplied horses to the Polish cavalry, horses that fought the Panzer tanks. You know how that ended. The National Socialists gathered the locals, and shot Uncle Solie in the head. Some cheered. He was, after all, like Zelensky, a Jew.

At the Dachau Concentration Camp is a plaque that says simply: Never again.

And today, it seems, some of my once-comrades have added an asterisk: Well, maybe, sometimes.

Zach D. Roberts and Leni Badpenny von Eckardt-Manzoni, who have reported from Kyiv and Kherson, contributed research for this article.

•  

[Matthew Koch]

 

[Matthew Koch]

@Bob Ness@Lance Payette @W. Niederhut@Matt Allison@Pat Speer

 Oof💯  That awkward moment when the people who were trying to tell you that you were supporting (N)azis.. Where actually right all along.. 

https://www.newsweek.com/nato-says-it-didnt-notice-ukraine-soldiers-apparent-National Socialist-symbol-tweet-1686523

NATO Says It Didn't Notice Ukraine Soldier's Apparent National Socialist Symbol in Tweet

An official of the U.S.-led NATO alliance has told Newsweek that the coalition did not notice what appeared to be a symbol associated with National Socialistsm on the uniform of a Ukrainian soldier featured in a since-deleted photo on NATO's official Twitter account.

Make sure you watch the videos😉😝!! We tried to warn you💯

[Pat Speer]

2 minutes ago, Matthew Koch said:

@Bob Ness@Lance Payette @W. Niederhut@Matt Allison@Pat Speer

 Oof💯  That awkward moment when the people who were trying to tell you that you were supporting (N)azis.. Where actually right all along.. 

https://www.newsweek.com/nato-says-it-didnt-notice-ukraine-soldiers-apparent-National Socialist-symbol-tweet-1686523

NATO Says It Didn't Notice Ukraine Soldier's Apparent National Socialist Symbol in Tweet

An official of the U.S.-led NATO alliance has told Newsweek that the coalition did not notice what appeared to be a symbol associated with National Socialistsm on the uniform of a Ukrainian soldier featured in a since-deleted photo on NATO's official Twitter account.

Make sure you watch the videos😉😝!! We tried to warn you💯

So by your logic Trump is a National Socialist, because some of his supporters are National Socialists. Interesting. 

[Guest]

31 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

So by your logic Trump is a National Socialist, because some of his supporters are National Socialists. Interesting. 

That’s a very clear case of false equivalence, Pat. 

[Pat Speer]

2 hours ago, Chris Barnard said:

That’s a very clear case of false equivalence, Pat. 

No if anything it's an understatement. Some jerk in the Ukrainian military is a National Socialist-sympathizer, and that besmirches the cause of Ukrainian independence from its Russian aggressor? While at the same time Trump coddled hordes of brain-damaged white power trash, but we shouldn't hold that against him?

Get real. 

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

No if anything it's an understatement. Some jerk in the Ukrainian military is a National Socialist-sympathizer, and that besmirches the cause of Ukrainian independence from its Russian aggressor? While at the same time Trump coddled hordes of brain-damaged white power trash, but we shouldn't hold that against him?

Get real. 

Do you want me to show why it’s false equivalence, laying out a rationale argument? You’re digging a hole. 

[W. Niederhut]

 

Putin's Puppet Lukashenko Sends Nobel Laureate to the Gulag

Belarus Sentences Nobel Peace Prize Winner (politicalwire.com)

March 3, 2023

[Leslie Sharp]

On 1/25/2023 at 12:39 PM, James DiEugenio said:

I got a second and third for my suggestion.

Plus William cleverly put up a gif of the Three Stooges pie fight.

I agree that Lori's original comments did relate to the JFK case.

But that is long gone.  What the last few pages of this thread have to do with JFK's murder escape me.

So, I repeat my request.

So I would suggest it be removed from the JFK debate section.

Rather than remove this thread from the JFK debate section, why not get it back on track? Decades of obsession with the Cuban angle of the assassination of President Kennedy detracted from serious consideration that the plot was international in scale. Lori's thread provides a unique opportunity to consider the assassination in Dallas in context of current global events, the continuity of the coup. 

' . . . Interviewed twice by author [H. P.] Albarelli, [Spas] Raikin said that he didn’t tell the Oswalds that he held a high-ranking position with the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. The ABN was strongly supported by[General Charles] Willoughby since its formation in Munich, Germany in 1946. 

            Confirming that SS Otto Skorzeny and General Charles Willoughby were at the very least aware of one another prior to Willoughby’s trips to Spain that began in the early 1950s, was their mutual associations with radical far right Ukrainians. During WWII, leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Yaroslav Stetsko and Stepan Bandera had been held in the central Berlin prison at Spandau from September 15, 1941 to January 1942. In June 1941, Stetsko had announced the formation of a Ukrainian state which was intended to align itself closely with the N a z i s. Said Stetsko: “We will closely cooperate with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler, which is forming a new order in Europe and the world.” By April 1944, Otto Skorzeny had sought out both Stetsko and Bandera “to discuss plans for diversions and sabotage against the Soviet Army.” The two were released by the German authorities in September, and as planned with Skorzeny, began organizing the native populace to fight the advancing Soviet Army. 

            According to historian Stephen Dorril, by 1946, the OUN-B’s secret police was conducting an assassination campaign in western Germany. Ultimately, the OUN comprised the largest contingent within the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which enjoyed significant support of General Charles Willoughby from its founding in 1946 in Munich. 

            As may be suspected by some readers, the ABN was also strongly supported by the CIA whose files are extensive on the group, as is correspondence between Allen Dulles and ABN leaders. In fact, according to CIA documents dated 1957, Raikin was a contract agent for the CIA, having been cleared for hire by the Office of Security. The initial use of Raikin was in service of a project utilizing unwitting agents, but by 1960 Raikin was fully aware of his attachment to the Agency. 

            In the minds of fascist-leaning politicians and power brokers in the US, Ukraine was the geographical bulwark against renewed Soviet aggression. (emphasis added.) Ultraright Ukrainians Bandera and Stetsko were the human face of that rabid anti-Communism. 

            On October 15, 1959, which coincidentally was the day Lee Oswald boarded a train from Helsinki to Moscow on the final leg of his defection, a twenty-eight-year-old KGB assassin, Bohdan Stashynsky is alleged to have assassinated Ukraine Nationalist Stepan Bandera in Munich. On trial in Munich in 1962, prosecutors presented the most persuasive version of the murder: Stashynsky had used a spray gun to dispense a lethal but undetectable poison which induced symptoms that mimicked heart attack. On Tuesday, September 12, Pierre makes a note SPRAY-GUN 2 WILLOUGHBY-SHAW? The sheets from a ledger that author Albarelli gained access to further indicate the significance of “spray guns” in Pierre Lafitte’s world in 1963. As mentioned previously, in one ledger entry, Lafitte notes, “Walker team - spray guns - at least 5...” Another reads, “ . . . Rothermel says no on gas [strike through] guns but T says ok (Stash)... Walker says yes spray guns. Willoughby? “ 

            According to a recent book by Professor of Ukrainian History Serhii Plokhy, "The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story," Stashynsky’s career as a triggerman for the KGB played out against the backdrop of the fight for Ukrainian independence after the Second World War. “. . . Bohdan was a member of the underground resistance against the Soviet occupation, but was forced to become an informer for the secret police after his family was threatened. After he betrayed a resistance cell . . . [he] was ostracized by his family and was offered the choice of continuing his higher education, which he could no longer afford, or joining the secret police.”

            Bohdan said later, “It was [only] a proposal, but I had no alternative to accepting it and continuing to work for the NKVD. By now, there was no way back for me.” Stashynsky received advanced training in Kyiv and Moscow for clandestine work in the West and became one of Moscow’s most prized assets.”

            Professor P. D. Scott was also the first to draw attention to the significance of the death of OUN’s Stepan Bandera in context of the assassination of President Kennedy. Bandera died at the hands of Soviet agent Bohdan Stashynsky. Scott notes that the assassination of Bandera was exploited by Ukrainian Nationalists and ABN spokesmen to demonstrate the importance of the opposition of the OUN and the ABN to any rapprochement between the American and Soviet governments which was being advanced during the Kennedy administration, especially the president’s perceived conciliatory policies following the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

            Just two weeks before the assassination of President Kennedy, one of those American pro-Ukrainian spokesmen, former Representative Charles Kersten of Wisconsin who had served as a member of the Steering Committee of the World Anti-communist League (WACL), “began to develop the picture of a Soviet assassin conspiracy.” Kersten had been researcher and assistant in the office of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy during the hearings.

            Scott also tells us that “while in New Orleans in [the late spring and summer of] 1963, Oswald was linked to Americans who were in touch with the Latin American elements of Kersten’s Steering Committee of the WACL, including Maurice B. Gatlin who was involved with a right-wing group at the address used by Oswald for his ‘Fair Play for Cuba Committee.’” Gatlin, in 1958, had attended a Congress that included the chairman of the American Friends of the ABN, Nestor Procyk. Two years later, Dr. Procyk, a physician practicing in Buffalo New York, was in direct communication with (Ret.) General Charles Willoughby. In his September 2, 1960 letter, Dr. Procyk tells Willoughby that he and “…Mr. Stetsko [Ukrainian rightist leader of the ABN and OUN] fully appreciated the retired general’s noble efforts…” A month later, Stetsko writes to Willoughby directly under the letterhead of the Central Committee of the ABN, Süddeutsche Bank, A.G, Branch Munich.' (emphasis added.) — Coup in Dallas:The Decisive Investigation into Who Killed JFK by H. P. Albarelli Jr. with Leslie Sharp and Alan Kent.

***

A little known fact is that Stetsko arrived in the US in October 1963 with the stated agenda to relocate his headquarters from Munich to DC.