THE RAPE OF RUSSIA BY THE USA/CIA and ''west" and why they HATE PUTIN and SOVEREIGN RUSSIA

[teddytennisfan]

thesaker.is
Chubais – The Next Neoliberal Head to Roll in Russia?
The Saker
By F. William Engdahl for the Saker blog

I venture that few outside the Russian Federation will even know the name of Anatoly Chubais, today the CEO of a Russian high-tech company called Rusnano. Following the high-profile November 15 arrest of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s Minister of Economics, Alexei Ulyukaev, on charges of accepting at least $2 million in bribes in a state privatization involving Rosneft and Bashneft energy companies, the spotlight has turned to the company of Anatoly Chubais, Boris Yeltsin’s 1990s privatization czar, today CEO of state-owned Rusnano,.[1] If charges are formally brought against Chubais–undeniably one of the most hated of the Yeltsin-era kleptocrat “reformers” who worked with the CIA during the 1990’s to plunder Russian state assets worth hundreds of billions for just pennies–it will signal that Putin feels in a strong enough position to purge the pro-free market liberal mafia that still holds a lock grip on the development of the Russian economy.

On 16 November, the day after the dramatic arrest of Ulyukaev, state prosecutors and police raided the offices of Chubias’ Rusnano. [2] Notable about the reports of the prosecutors’ questioning Chubais and other top officers at Rusnano, is the fact that several have fled Russia in recent months to avoid prosecution.[3] To the present, Chubais remains, and vehemently claims innocence.

In my view, there is vastly more at stake here than the innocence or guilt of Chubais. This move, if combined with the arrest of Ulyukaev, signals a major cleanup of corrupt elements who, beginning even before 1991, organized to sell Russia to the CIA and Western speculators like George Soros. Some history that has generally been blacked out in the West about the true role of Anatoly Chubais and the Yeltsin Presidency are instructive to also understand the irrational rage of Washington and US banks and oligarchs directed at Putin and at everything he does to re-establish Russian sovereignty and stability.

CIA’s Yeltsin ‘Democracy’ Coup

The rape of Russia–the Russian nation, the Russian state, the Russian people–beginning the end of the 1980’s, was a coup d’état engineered by the US Central Intelligence Agency along with rogue and not so rogue networks directed by former CIA Director, then President, George Herbert Walker Bush and continued by Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton. Western accounts of what took place inside the Russian Federation during the Yeltsin years of the 1990’s speak of “Russian mafia,” or “Russian Organized Crime.” Never do they mention or even hint that those Russians who plundered their own country were organized and paid, made rich by the West, to be more precise, by the Old Boy CIA networks loyal to former CIA Director and then US President, George Herbert Walker Bush.

What took place in the 1990’s under the Russian Presidency of Boris Yeltsin was described by one knowledgeable US insider, Mortimer Zuckerman, a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations and owner of US News & World Report as, “the largest giveaway of a nation’s wealth in history.” The giveaway or more precisely said, theft, was done through outright theft, currency war and a fraudulent loans-for-company stock shares program that Anatoly Chubais directed. [4]

The Bush Sr. Administration’s attack on post-communist Russia, dubbed “Operation Hammer,” had four distinct covert elements. The CIA would secretly finance the August 1991 Generals’ coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. They would use their secret financial war-chest to destabilize the Ruble. They used corrupted Russian Gosbank national bank officials to organize the theft of the country’s official gold reserves, most all of it. Then they began a systematic takeover of strategic energy, raw materials and military state industries in the Soviet Union via IMF-dictated privatization operations that were run by Yeltsin’s Finance Minister, Yegor Gaidar and his close associate responsible for state privatization, Anatoly Chubais. Gaidar and Chubais worked in league with Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs and other friends of billionaire hedge fund speculator, George Soros in the literal rape of Russia as one insider described it.[5]

As the rogue ex-KGB generals and their hand-picked protégés looted the gold reserves of the now defunct Soviet Union, as well as the significant financial assets of the now-banned Communist Party, all with the blessing and complicity of Boris Yeltsin and his inner circle, the Bush CIA Old Boys were ready to launch the next phase, systematic takeover of strategic energy, raw materials and military state industries in the Soviet Union via IMF-dictated privatization operations that were run by Yeltsin’s Finance Minister, Yegor Gaidar, and his accomplice, Anatoly Chubais.

In November 1991, Chubais became a minister in the Yeltsin Cabinet where he managed the portfolio of Rosimushchestvo–the Committee for the Management of State Property, which Yeltsin decreed to be the agency responsible for devising Russia’s privatization of the state companies. Gaidar and Chubais worked in league with George Soros, the Wall Street speculator and funder of the CIA front, National Endowment for Democracy. Soros in turn brought Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, architect of the Polish “economic shock therapy,” and other American “friends,” to the Yeltsin circles.

George Soros and his Open Society Foundations had been linked to the CIA by Chinese intelligence and others. His Open Society institutions “coincidentally” appeared in every situation where the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy front and the US State Department sought regime change to a pro-Washington government. Already back in 1987, while Gorbachev still headed the Soviet Union, Soros took advantage of the regime’s efforts to reform and open cautiously to the West by founding his Open Society Institute in Moscow. There he could give money to key researchers and others to support “market economy” research. [6]

All actions of Yeltsin were guided by his CIA and rogue KGB handlers, notably KGB Generals Filipp Bobkov, Alexei Kondaurov and Yeltsin’s personal bodyguard, General Alexander Korzhakov–the cabal who, in coordination with George Bush Sr. and his CIA Old Boys described, staged the phony KGB “coup” attempt against Gorbachev that propelled Yeltsin, with support of mainstream Western media, as the “champion of democracy.” In December 1991, four months after, Yeltsin, then President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the largest federated “republic” within the Soviet Union, met with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus and signed what was called the Belavezha Accords declaring the dissolution of the USSR that had formally existed since 1922. It was the key note in the US-backed coup to open up the rape of Russia. By then Gorbachev had been utterly discredited and resigned.

Russia’s Shock Therapy, Harvard and CIA

As part of the dissolution agreement, Russia took title to all state assets of the former USSR, now non-existent, as well as assuming all foreign debts of the USSR. Yeltsin was told to make a 32-year-old friend of George Soros named Yegor Gaidar his Economics Czar. Gaidar, who formally was made Finance Minister of the new Russian Federation in February 1992, made another young economist, Anatoly Chubais, his privatization head.

Gaidar was taken to Poland to study the Polish “Shock Therapy” model, the process that had been introduced by George Soros’ young Harvard economist protégé, Jeffrey Sachs. Back in Moscow, Yegor Gaidar, using the Polish example of Sachs, convinced Yeltsin to “let prices rise to increase supply and to scrap trade barriers so that foreign commodities could begin to fill store shelves.”

It was a lie. The Soviet economy was self-sufficient in everything except perhaps bananas and coffee. The shops were full until Yeltsin announced in November 1991 the exact date when price controls were to be lifted, December 31 of that year. Shop-owners hid their goods waiting for the announced profit bonanza of price decontrol. Shops were suddenly empty. Within a week of the Yeltsin speech, rationing was imposed on Muscovites. [7]

Gaidar was instructed by the US Treasury from the new Clinton Administration that took office in January 1993. The key person at Treasury for the ensuing Gaidar-Chubais looting of Yeltsin’s Russia was a former Harvard economist named Lawrence Summers. Summers used the powerful influence of the US Treasury Department to get International Monetary Fund dollars to the cash-hungry Yeltsin government, telling Yeltsin and Gaidar that Russia must open itself to unrestricted imports if they wanted to receive IMF and other Western loans.

Gaidar soon delivered a policy that served the demands of Washington and of the KGB’s new banking oligarchs around Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Menatep Bank and others. Under the Gaidar decrees, Russian manufacturing was to go bankrupt in the face of unrestricted foreign competition, but domestic banking, such as Menatep, controlled by the rogue KGB generals and the CIA-tied Western banks, was to be protected from competition. [8]

After the November 1992 US election victory of Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, the new US Treasury Deputy Secretary responsible for Russia “reforms,” also a former Harvard economics professor, brought a group of his former Harvard colleagues including George Soros’s Polish Shock Therapy adviser, Jeffrey Sachs, and economics professor, Andrei Shleifer, to Moscow under the auspices of their Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID). The Sachs-Schleifer-Summers triangle essentially orchestrated all key aspects in the implementation of Gaidar-Chubais “shock therapy” in the early 1990’s Yeltsin years. [9]

In 1991, Summers had been chief economist at the World Bank, where Summers named his former Harvard student, Schleifer, a Russian-American, as World Bank “adviser” to the Yeltsin government. Soon after Summers became Deputy Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration in 1993, Schleifer would join Jeffrey Sachs’ Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) as the head of their Moscow operations.

HIID was cleverly chosen by Summers as the key advisory agency to work with Gaidar and Chubais to organize the colossal looting known as Russian privatization. Summers, from his Washington Treasury office, named all key actors in the Chubais privatization rape of Russia in the early 1990’s. They were what could be called a Harvard mafia. Summers hired David Lipton from Harvard, a former consulting partner of Jeffrey D. Sachs & Associates, to be his Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Sachs was named Director of HIID in 1995. His HIID received USAID grants for the institute’s “work” in Russia. [10]

The USAID was known as a CIA front agency, keeping the CIA role of regime change and such hidden behind the veil of a charitable US Government agency spending for economic development. It was a key money link for the directing of every step of the Chubais privatization operations through the Summers-Sachs Harvard Boys. [11]

Harvard was a clever choice to be the CIA hands-on operator for the Chubais privatization. CIA monies via a Harvard University front gave an aura of impartial academic respectability and of plausible deniability that the CIA was responsible. Shleifer, a Russian-born émigré, and protégé of Summers, was already a tenured professor of economics at Harvard in his early 30s. He became Sachs’ head of HIID’s Russia project, based in Moscow. Then Summers brought in yet another Harvard Boy, another former World Bank consultant for Summers named Jonathan Hay. In 1991, while at Harvard Law School, Hay had also become a senior legal adviser to the Chubais GKI state privatization agency. In the following year 1992, Hay was made HIID’s general director in Moscow. Hay assumed vast powers over contractors, policies and program specifics. He not only controlled access to the Chubais circle but was its spokesperson. [12]

Both Jonathan Hay and Andrei Schleifer were identified later as CIA agents.

Vladimir Putin in an April 2013 annual dialogue with Russian citizens, though he discreetly did not name the names, referenced Hay and Schleifer as identified CIA agents working with Chubais and Gaidar in the criminal Russian privatization. Putin said: “We learned today that officers of the United States’ CIA operated as consultants to Anatoly Chubais. But it is even funnier that upon returning to the US, they were prosecuted for violating their country’s laws and illegally enriching themselves in the course of privatization in the Russian Federation. ” [13]

In 2006 US District Court in Boston had fined Hay and Schleifer them personally $2 million and Harvard University $26.5 million for fraud and embezzlement of government funds for private enrichment. That same year 2006 Summers–who by then had become Harvard President was forced to resign on revelation of his role in the Moscow HIID scandals. Berofr he had managed to get Schleifer an endowed Harvard Professor chair. Hay later resurfaced as founder of the Ukraine branch of the Polish “free market” Centre for Social and Economic Research (CASE) during the CIA coup d’etat in Kiev in 2014. [14]

The criminal Russian privatization of invaluable state assets that Hay and Schielfer created together with Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar after 1992 was done to the last detail by Chubais in cooperation with his new American advisers. When the announcement of the proposed “vouchers-for-shares” privatization received cold response from Russians, already reeling from the economic shock of price liberalization, Hay and Schleifer arranged for slick US Public Relations experts from Burston-Marsteller and the Sawyer Miller Group to devise an ad campaign to be aired on the TV channels of the newly-created Russian oligarchs to convince Russians to accept the program.

Chubais as head of the state GKI state property agency issued 150 million “vouchers” to each and every citizen. In turn, they could invest their voucher in a small share in a Russian privatized state company or shop, or sell it at an established market price pegged to the US dollar, of course. As most Russians were then concerned when if ever the next pension payment would be paid, or where jobs could be found in the collapsing industrial economy that was a predictable result of the Sachs-Harvard-Chubais Shock Therapy, millions simply sold their vouchers for some cash. It was an insane idea if Chubais and Gaidar cared about the economic future of the Russian Federation. It was brilliant if they wanted to create billionaire dollar oligarchs, which is just what they did.

Vouchers could be bought or sold on every street corner in Russia at the start in June 1992. They were traded at the new unregulated Moscow commodity exchanges set up by Harvard’s Jonathan Hay with the USAID monies channeled via HIID. Unregulated (deliberately a decision of Gaidar, Chubais and their Harvard CIA advisers) voucher investment funds sprung up everywhere to gather citizens’ vouchers in the millions. The ruble was domestically made convertible to the US dollar on the advice of the Sachs HIID team. In the twenty months the voucher-for-shares program lasted, the price swung from a high of $20 to a low of $4 a voucher. As they were made freely tradeable, it was ripe for the billionaire oligarchs around Yeltsin who already had huge cash hoardes to buy them up, just what they did. [15]

Nearly six hundred voucher funds obtained 45 million vouchers. The largest, calling itself First Voucher, collected 4 million vouchers. [16]

At the stated price for the vouchers, Chubais and his Harvard Boys had valued the entire Russian economy–which included the world’s largest nickel company, some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies including Sibneft and Gazprom, RUSAL, the world’s largest aluminum company–at a total that was less than the market value of the US General Electric company. The face value of each voucher was 10,000 rubles which Chubais promoted by lying to the public, stating one voucher would be sufficient to buy two or even three Volga cars.

Because they had been allowed by the Bush CIA networks that controlled the financial side of the Yeltsin mafia to be the first Russians with big money, the select Yeltsin oligarchs were able to buy up hundreds of thousands of vouchers and redeem them for entire industries, which would later be stripped and sold. Although they were supposedly acting on behalf of the state, the bank auctioneers of oligarch-owned banks rigged the process. This was how Bank Menatep’s Mikhail Khodorkovsky got a 78 percent share of ownership in Yukos, worth about $5 billion, for a mere $310 million. It was how Boris Berezovsky got Sibneft, another oil giant, worth $3 billion, for about $100 million. [17]

Using his connections, Khodorkovsky was able to purchase several factories in investment tenders, and large blocks of shares in timber, titanium, pipe, and copper smelting. In total, he gained control of more than one hundred companies before getting Yukos. In the auctions, based on the number of total vouchers that were circulated, the entire Russian industrial system, mines, oil companies, factories, had a total value of under $12 billion. [18]

Under pressure from Parliament, Chubais agreed to prohibit voucher sale of state companies to foreign investors. There were, however, two notable exceptions Chubais made. In 1995, in the wake of the Yeltsin Referendum victory financed by Soros, the Harvard Management Company (HMC), which invests the university’s large endowment, and George Soros, who brought Harvard’s Sachs to Chubais, were the only foreign entities allowed to participate. Both HMC and Soros became major shareholders in Novolipetsk, Russia’s second-largest steel mill, and Sidanko Oil, with reserves exceeding those of Mobil. HMC and Soros also invested in Russia’s high-yielding, IMF-subsidized domestic GKO bond market. And in 1997 he bought 24% of Sviazinvest, the telecommunications giant, together with Uneximbank’s Vladimir Potanin, the nominal spokesman of the new Russian oligarchs. At one point Soros stated he had invested $2.5 billion in such Russian assets for the dirt-cheap prices Chubais had deliberately set. [19]

Soros to the Yeltsin Rescue

This left many Russian citizens feeling cheated, royally screwed, furious as their dreams of a promised share in “capitalist private property” vanished, along with their savings, during the Central Bank hyperinflation money printing, another part of George H W Bush’s Operation Hammer. By 1993 the pressures from all sides including the Duma were dramatically rising. The population was demanding action. The Supreme Soviet, the upper house, was drafting a bill that would freeze the entire privatization process.


The opposition was becoming so great that Chubais ultimately had to rely largely on Yeltsin’s presidential decrees, not parliamentary approval, for implementation. The Harvard HIID’s Moscow man, the CIA’s Jonathan Hay and his HIID associates, drafted many of the decrees. USAID’s Walter Coles, whose office funded the Chubais privatizations via HIID admitted, “If we needed a decree, Chubais didn’t have to go through the bureaucracy.” [20] Russia’s nascent efforts to establish some form of parliamentary democracy or even checks on dictatorial Presidential power were of little interest to Washington officials or to Chubais and his cabal around Yeltsin.

The Soros Yeltsin Referendum

At that point, as opposition threatened to get out of hand, Yeltsin felt forced to agree to a national referendum on the entire privatization process. The date was to be April 25, 1993.

The referendum contained four yes/no questions: (1) do you support Yeltsin, (2) do you support Yeltsin’s economic policy, (3) do you want early elections for President, and (4) do you want early elections for parliament? [21]

Facing sure defeat, Chubais, likely on advice from his Harvard mentors, arranged to secretly meet with US billionaire George Soros. Soros agreed to finance on behalf of Yeltsin the Referendum campaign. Soros funneled $1 million, a huge sum on Russia at the time, to offshore accounts set up for Chubais to use to buy media exposure. Yeltsin survived by a slim 52% and privatization of major Russian industrial companies went forward. [22] Yeltsin was giving the Crown Jewels and much more to a cabal of CIA-backed Russian oligarchs as well later to Soros himself.

From Washington, Summers at Treasury architected the Chubais-Gaidar privatization with Jeffrey Sachs and Andrei Schleifer serving to directly convey the plans to their Yeltsin economic advisers. The Chubais-Washington privatization of Russian assets was a theft on a scale unprecedented in any nation, even in wartime. From 1992 to 1994, ownership of 15,000 firms was transferred from state control largely to the new billionaire oligarchs such as Khodorkovsky and Berezhovsky via the Chubais-Washington voucher program.

Oligarchs Buy Yeltsin Re-election

By 1996, with the Russian economy deep into hyperinflation, Yeltsin faced certain defeat in scheduled elections. The head of the Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov, promising a return to stability, was far ahead in the polls. Some of Yeltsin’s close advisers ever suggested canceling the elections and declaring a de facto dictatorship. By then Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Borisovna Yumasheva, had become her father’s closest adviser, together with Berezhovsky, Guzinsky and the other USAID and CIA-made oligarchs. Russian media labeled the clique controlling Russia, especially after Yeltsin’s heart attack that year, “The Family,” as in mafia family, not blood family, though with daughter Tatyana the de facto Capo di tutti capi of the family owing to her influence over the President. [23]

Following the Russian Communist Party success in the December 1995 parliamentary or Duma elections, the International Monetary Fund made an extraordinary $10.2 billion loan to the Yeltsin government in which $1 billion was secretly intended by Washington for the campaign to keep Yeltsin President in the 1996 elections. Tape recordings of conversations between Clinton and Yeltsin later made public, showed that in return, among other favors, Yeltsin would exempt longtime Clinton supporter and campaign donor, Arkansas-based Tyson Chicken’s exports to Russia–then a $700 million annual business–from a threatened 20% tariff increase. [24]

Berezhovsky and Guzinsky, the Washington-backed new Russian oligarchs, fearing loss of their stolen billions to the opposition communists, formed what they called the “Group of Seven,” which included Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Khodorkovsky, Potanin, Vinogradov, Smolensky, and Friedman. With aid of US Madison Avenue spin doctors, the Group of Seven–which owned the two major TV stations with the third still state owned, and as well major press– ran a US-style media campaign assault, at the same time blocking Zyuganov from buying media time. Yeltsin posters carried the slogan, “Choose with Your Heart.” Another ad featured Yeltsin family photos, while Yeltsin in TV spots recalled events in his childhood: as an athlete, a rebel, a father, and a grandfather. All the while, sentimental music… [25]

The oligarchs hired Anatoly Chubais, the man responsible for creating their fortunes, as Yeltsin’s campaign manager. He created a private fund called the Center for the Protection of Private Property and received $5 million from the Group of Seven for the campaign. Fake newspapers were created and printed stories claiming discovery of secret minutes of a Communist Party leadership meeting where Zyuganov was alleged to have said, “We will not be able to give the people anything that we promised.” Gaidar’s re-election fund also funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars, a fortune in the time of hyperinflation of the ruble, to major journalists to write fraudulent articles in praise of Yeltsin and discrediting Zyuganov. [26]

The fact that the oligarchs had a near monopoly on Russian TV and print media made it possible to tilt the vote to Yeltsin 54%. The Russian Corporate Politburo was now firmly in the saddle, with Yeltsin and Chubais their horses. [27]

The human cost of the US-imposed Russian Shock Therapy brought by Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar together with George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs and a stable of CIA-linked financial and legal operators such as Jonathan Hay and Andrei Schleifer, was beyond belief. Between 1991 and 1997, Russian GDP – the value of all goods and services that Russia produces – collapsed by 83%. Farm production declined 63% as state support for agriculture ended and cheap US imports such as Tyson chickens replaced their domestic production. Industrial and other investment decreased 92%. More than 70,000 factories were closed down. That led to Russia producing 88% fewer tractors, 76% fewer washing machines, 77% less cotton fabric, 78% fewer TV-sets and on and on. In a country without unemployment under the Soviet era, 13 million people lost their jobs. Those who still had work had their wages cut in half. The average life span for men had been shortened by six years, down to the same level as in India, Egypt or Bolivia. Alcoholism became epidemic as depression and unemployment spread among the population. It was a shock indeed, the kind of shock a country experiences only in a major war. The average life span had decreased, in just a few years, to the same level as in India, Egypt and Bolivia. [28]

The fact that Anatoly Chubais is now under enormous pressure and likely to be prosecuted is about far more than corruption of a corporate director. It goes to the heart of the corrupt circles that have tried since the ascent of Vladimir Putin in December 1999 to resume the Wall Street rape of Russia, so far without success. For them Putin is the symbol of that defeat. For the vast majority of Russians who lived through the rape of their country in the 1990’s, Anatoly Chubais is the symbol of that devastation and destruction.

Endnotes:

1. 
   
2. The Moscow Times, Fearing Criminal Prosecution, Chubais Allies Flee Russia, The Moscow Times, 29 November, 2016, www.themoscowtimes.com ↑
3. RAPSI, Police raid Moscow office of Rusnano corporation, 16 November, 2016, http://rapsinews.com/news/20161116/277151707.html. ↑
4. Fearing Criminal Prosecution Chubais Allies Flee Russia – Report, July 22, 2015 , https://themoscowtimes.com/news/fearing-criminal-prosecution-chubais-allies-flee-russia-report-48465. ↑
5. Mort Zuckerman, cited in email from Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the author, 14 August, 2011. ↑
6. E.P. Heidner, Collateral Damage US Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, https://wikispooks.com/w/images/d/db/Collateral_Damage_-_part_1.pdf. ↑
7. Sebastian Mallaby, More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of the New Elite, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, 2010, p. 212. ↑
8. Anne Williamson, Testimony Before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the United States House of Representatives September 21, 1999, http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Oth...eddling/BankstersInRussiaAndGlobalEconomy.htm. ↑
9. Ibid. ↑
10. Janine R. Wedel, The Harvard Boys Do Russia, The Nation, May 14, 1998 , https://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia/ ↑
11. Ibid. ↑
12. Mark Ames, The murderous history of USAID– the US Government agency behind Cuba’s fake Twitter clone, April 8, 2014, https://pando.com/2014/04/08/the-mu...nment-agency-behind-cubas-fake-twitter-clone/. ↑
13. Janine R. Wedel, op. cit. ↑
14. Ibid. ↑
15. Vladimir Putin, Direct Line with Vladimir Putin April 25, 2013 , http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/17976. ↑
16. David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia, New York, Public Affairs Press, Chapter 8, p. 193. ↑
17. Ibid., p. 197. ↑
18. Marshall I. Goldman, Putin and the Oligarchs, Foreign Affairs, November/December, 2004, http://www.cfr.org/world/putin-oligarchs/p7517 ↑
19. David E. Hoffman, op. cit., p.202. ↑
20. Janine R. Wedel, op. cit. ↑
21. Ibid. ↑
22. David E. Hoffman, op. cit., p.202. ↑
23. Ibid. ↑
24. Wikipedia, Tatyana Yumasheva. ↑
25. Anne Williamson, Testimony…,op. cit ↑
26. David E. Hoffman, op. cit., p. 345. ↑
27. Ibid, p. 345. ↑
28. Ibid., p. 327. ↑
29. Dan Josefsson, Shock Therapy: The Art of Ruining a Country, 1 April, 1999, http://josefsson.net/artikelarkiv/51-shock-therapy-the-art-of-ruining-a-country.html ↑

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[teddytennisfan]

OF COURSE THE USA CIA CONTINUES ITS RAMPAGE OF RAPE ACROSS THE WORLD...but ................not without being TOLD enough...........and it has begun.................

 

[teddytennisfan]

The human cost of the US-imposed Russian Shock Therapy brought by Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar together with George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs and a stable of CIA-linked financial and legal operators such as Jonathan Hay and Andrei Schleifer, was beyond belief. Between 1991 and 1997, Russian GDP – the value of all goods and services that Russia produces – collapsed by 83%. Farm production declined 63% as state support for agriculture ended and cheap US imports such as Tyson chickens replaced their domestic production. Industrial and other investment decreased 92%. More than 70,000 factories were closed down. That led to Russia producing 88% fewer tractors, 76% fewer washing machines, 77% less cotton fabric, 78% fewer TV-sets and on and on. In a country without unemployment under the Soviet era, 13 million people lost their jobs. Those who still had work had their wages cut in half. The average life span for men had been shortened by six years, down to the same level as in India, Egypt or Bolivia. Alcoholism became epidemic as depression and unemployment spread among the population. It was a shock indeed, the kind of shock a country experiences only in a major war. The average life span had decreased, in just a few years, to the same level as in India, Egypt and Bolivia. [28]

The fact that Anatoly Chubais is now under enormous pressure and likely to be prosecuted is about far more than corruption of a corporate director. It goes to the heart of the corrupt circles that have tried since the ascent of Vladimir Putin in December 1999 to resume the Wall Street rape of Russia, so far without success. For them Putin is the symbol of that defeat. For the vast majority of Russians who lived through the rape of their country in the 1990’s, Anatoly Chubais is the symbol of that devastation and destruction.

Endnotes:

1. 
   
2. The
   ===========================

IT SHOULD BE CLEAR BY NOW TO HONEST PEOPLE...

ALL -- ALL THE ''NEWS" ABOUT ''bad russian economy, starvation, empty shelves...etc"

about russia and the USSR -- WERE CREATED BY THE WESTERN RAPISTS AND THE TRAITORS INSIDE RUSSIA -- DURING THE 1990'S AND PLANNED SINCE THE LATE 1980'S when they saw their 'chance' to insert themselves...

NOT a result of RUSSIA AND THE USSR ''failures".

this is the SAME AS CAN BE SEEN ACROSS THE ENTIRE ''former soviet'' space -- including countries like Yugoslavia, today's Serbia, Romania, ukraine, -- and the TEETERING POLAND right now...and the baltics...under the 'tutelage" of ''western privatization" ...

anyone that says otherwise is either UNEDUCATED, IGNORANT or just plain stupid .

but never mind that -- ITALY that has been reeling under THE SAME ''tutelage" evne as ONE of the pillars of the western ''economic space" -- not only has been reeling under the effects of american induced ''sanctions'' against russia -- by LOSING BILLIONS in lost trade and business --

but is now practically BEGGING FOR RUSSIA to ACCEPT ITALY AS A MEMBER OF THE THRIVING EURASIAN ECONOMIC UNION created by Russia , Belarus and Kazakhstan...where

NO ''WESTERN TUTELAGE" WILL EVER AGAIN BE PERMITTED. as it also INTEGRATES EURASIA WITH THE RUSSIA/CHINA led SHANGHAI COOPERATION COUNCIL to which ASEAN NATIONS are requesting membership . roflmao.
AND THAT is a GOOD THING!!

 

[britbox]

^Plenty of grey area there to discuss not just the binary "West is bad, Russia/USSR is great" option.

 

[mrzz]

^Yep, the article is interesting, though.

I was particularly interested in the recordings mentioned just before reference [24]. Unfortunately, the reference itself is just a wikipedia link of Yeltsin´s daughter.

 

[teddytennisfan]

^Plenty of grey area there to discuss not just the binary "West is bad, Russia/USSR is great" option.

that may be -- but NOT in this case.

teh USA, UK, FRANCE, EU, NATO are DEMONSTRABLE CREATORS AND SUPPORTERS AND SHILLS FOR TERRORISTS.

that is WITHOUT question now.

RUSSIA - WHICH HAS experience in being attacked by terrorists -- KNOWS the experience far more than these ''oh -- we are attacked by terrorists"!! westerners after THEIR centuries of adventurism in the middle east and islamic lands whose consequences are EXACTLY what is happening today across the world BECAUSE the USA primarily -- in cahoots with its imperialist other western vassals (need THAT be discussed at all anymore? only idiots will insist european capitals have actually been independent) - HAVE created and actually PROMOTED conditions for terrorism AS A TOOL to destabilize countries and therefore REMAP them at will - exactly as they are STILL trying to achieve in syria and the middle east.

RUSSIA -- CRYSTAL CLEAR is the EXACT opposite position -- TRULY fighting terrorist PRECISELY because it is NOT russia that created them BUT is as much a victim for its sovereignty PUSHED towards it by the USA.

the single, in fact, ACKNOWLEDGED - even by tHE authors THEMSELVES (completely wihtout a sense of irony) --thing that this phenomenon springs from is

as just ONE example:

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI'S -- ''MISTER president (carter) i am happy to report that we have just given the USSR her very own vietnam -- by FUNDING AND TRAINING -- with th ehelp of saudi arabia -- in the 1980's - the outfits that gave BIRTH TO AL QAEDA -- the MOTHER LODE of everything that is seen today in all their manifestations -- to engage russia and the USSR IN its ''soft underbelly" --

out of PURE MALICE and his OLD desire to - in his own words :"SLICE UP RUSSIA INTO SMALLER MANAGEABLE PIECES THAT WE CAN CONTROL"...

from HIS own ideological POLISH ''noble" bitterness at some centuries ago FAILURES of his ''GREAT poland" to conquer russia (they attempted it 3 SEPARATE TIMES and each time were kicked out, including putting in the russian throne some PRETENDER claimant to the throne and taking Moscow into a polish garrison) --

and WHICH HE ALSO got HIS inspiration from an EARLIER FASCIST POLISH general named PILSUDSKI -- who comported with HITLER thinking poland will get a piece of russia before hitler TRAMPLED on poland -- (a little known DARK SECRET of poor , poor poland the perennial victim) --

which FURTHER back was all inspired by BRITISH IDEOLOGIST HAROLD MACKINDER WITH HIS:

"who RULES the east peripheries of europe (eastern countries) rules the Heartland (russia) -- who rules the Heartland rules the World Island (eurasia)
"who rules the world island -- rules the world"

which HE also took from another BRITISH ''poet" centuries before that i just forget right now -- but almost the EXACT same words...

so are WE TALKING HERE ABOUT sameness OF RUSSIA AND USA/WEST IN AGGRESSION across the world =-- INCLUDING THE USE OF TERRORISM AS A PROXY tool to destabilize in order to CONQUER?

you are trying to play the game of ''all are EQUALLY GUILTY OF ATROCITIES"

they ARE NOT.

 

[teddytennisfan]

FURTHERMORE - regardless of what assad or syria's ''governance" and social order is -- IT IS NONE OF THE WEST'S BUSINESS TO EVEN *THINK*i of

'\ssad must go" -- and it is RUSSIA THAT HAS BEEN CONTINUOUSLY brining REAL FOOD, MEDICINE, CLOTHES -- WEEK AFTER WEEK AFTER WEEK --

WHILE THE CROCODILE TEARED WEST ''humanitarians" send NOTHING -- !! BUT THEIR BOMBS AND THEIR TERRORISTS where they HAVE NO PERMISSION from the syrian sovereign country and ITS LEGITIMATE government -- whatever ELSE ANYONE -- INCLUDING YOU - say.

and that alone PUTS RUSSIA AND SYRIA IN THE SIDE OF WHAT IS RIGHT AND MORAL -- AND IN WAR -- IN DEFENSE OF SYRIA and her people to EXIST as the country they HAVE BEEN since ancient times when the europeans were mere SAVAGES with lice on their skin --

NOT SUBJECT TO TUTELAGE by the WESTERN TERRORIST STATES (BECUSE THAT *is* WHAT THEY ARE BEHIND their facades of ''civilization ")

bad things will happen -- including that which the DEFENDERS of THEIR COUNTRY from the westerners and their terrorists have to commit to RID their country of the SCOURGE that the WEST has brought to syria and other countries ...

but athT DOES NOT PUT SYRIA AND RUSSIA defending what is RIGHT -- THE STATE OF SYRIA with its ONCE PEACEFUL AND PROSPEROUS people of MANY faiths -- in the WRONG or evne ''EQUALLY CULPABLE"
with the atrocities OF THE WEST and their terrorists that YOU are suggesting out of ''gray areas".

there is NO gray area here.

THE USA, UK, FRANCE, GERMANY, NATO, EU, AND THEIR ALLIES IN TERRORISM -- are THE ONES that have committed GREAT EVIL. .

IT IS RUSSIA AND SYRIA that are FORCED to defend FROM IT!!

PERIOD!

I frankly find it OFFENSIVE that you or anyone will even suggest THERE IS SOME ''GRAY AREA" here. there is NONE.

 

[teddytennisfan]

^Plenty of grey area there to discuss not just the binary "West is bad, Russia/USSR is great" option.

WELL DUH -- THE BINARY THEM 0

THAT YOU talk about is the MASTERPIECE BY THE WEST -- so now that you read or hear of the idea that in the HISTORY ITSELF -- IT IS russia that has been on the defensive from CENTURIES of attempts by the west -- AS FAR AWAY AS THE ATLANTIC COASTS -- of FRANCE AND NAPOLEON --

OR THE ITALIANS IN CAHOOTS WITH THE BRITISH AND FRENCH AND OTTOMAN TURKS in turn - or the BRITISH - or the americans ...etc...

and STILL AT PLAY today WITH the tool of TERRORISM ''on the march to moscow"

becuse moscow WILL NOT KNEEL LIKE some tiny frightened little colony...

so now you are talking about how ''binary -- russia good, west bad" is not so acceptable...

when THAT has been the SPECIALITY of the west for CENTURIES.

YOUR VERY OWN JOHN MILTON more than half a millenia ago started THAT with HIS ''reports' to the crown of his ''visit to barbaric, savage, unlettered, uncouth russians" ...

when the russians INVITED emissaries from the british crown which goes to show WHO have been the ones FULL OF THEMSELVES -- and it is the WEST .

WHO -- by RUSSIA'S AND SYRIA'S actions TODAY against TERRORISM THAT THE WEST has unleashed upon the world as its PROXY -- BY THE DAY BEING EXPOSED by THEIR own lies and deceits --

are the ones who BEHAVE IN THE MOST UNCIVILIZED , BARBARIC, SAVAGE WAYS.

SO YEA -- if we have to argue FOR REAL?

th'at damn right -- the WEST IS *BAD* - the REST OF THE WORLD PALES in comparison to badness!

if one had to forgo POLITENESS. AND CALL "A THING ITS PROPER NAME" as the ancient chinese would say.

OPIUM SMUGGLERS as means of conquering china? the brits? savaging russia BY PROXY -- with WINSTON CHURCHILL, THE LONDON financial lords, the rockefellers, the BUSH CLAN and their banks etc, etc, etc SUPPORTING HITLER in his political rise KNOWING where they WANTED it to lead \\TOWARDS THE EAST? SO THEY COULD MARCH IN AND CLAIM VICTORY over the SPOILS?

BRITAIN HELPING create the WAHHABIST, TAKFIRIT SAUDI CLAN TERRORIST BRUTAL STATE AND funders of global terrorism?

attacking some country like SERBIA FOR WANTING to preserve HER indpendence -- and NOW literally forcibly changing SERBIA'S educational system so as to ERASE their CULTURE and turn them into 'ENGLISH AND LATIN ALPHABET" users ? and turn THEM against THEIR own fellow slavs?

i mean -- i can go on all month just listing!

WHO'S KIDDING WHOM HERE, BRITBOX?

 

[teddytennisfan]

AND AS for YET another example of WESTERN degeneracy

===============================

sputniknews.com
Obama Out Not With a Bang, But a Whimper
Sputnik
Columnists
13:39 12.12.2016Get short URL

Queen of War Hillary “

We Came, We Saw, He Died
” Clinton’s campaign – fully supported by President Obama — spent a whopping $1.2 billion and floundered ignominiously at the US presidential election. So Obama decided that the consolation “prize” is to order the “intelligence community” – a contradiction in terms – to conduct a “full review” of how the evil Russians handed out the Big Prize to Donald Trump.

Queen of War famously insisted throughout the campaign that “17 US intelligence agencies” confirmed Russian hacking of the Podesta emails, then slow-dripped – Chinese torture-style – day after day by WikiLeaks, revealing the slimy inner workings of the DNC. In fact there was no damning 17 intel agencies verdict, just a dodgy comment by further disgraced Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper offering no evidence whatsoever.

Now Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ two-bit neocon-infested rag The Washington Post – once upon a time a decent newspaper – piles up, mouthing a sensationalist CIA spin according to which Langley has proof the Russians did maneuver to install their Manchurian, Trumpian candidate.

© Sputnik/ Alexei Filippov

And this right after the same rag went the full McCarthy, promoting a

long black list
remix of websites/news agencies, Sputnik included, denounced as fifth columnists and/or propaganda ops. Further enhancing its already negative credibility – constantly boosted by the neocon/neoliberalcon ravings of its editorial pages — the Post to this day has not retracted its infantile, bogus “report”.

The intersection of The New McCarthyism and the CIA at the Post couldn’t be more predictable; after all Bezos’ Amazon is a major contractor with the CIA, thus configuring the Post as a key US deep state asset. So welcome to Washington’s alleged newspaper of record regurgitating a US government (USG) blacklist of American and foreign journalists.

One false flag too many

As for the CIA’s intel breakthrough, it amounts to the proverbial “senior US official” reassuring US public opinion that the “consensus view” of the “intelligence community” is that “individuals with connections with the Russian government” provided WikiLeaks with the Podesta emails. WikiLeaks had already debunked this narrative way back in October.

Now picture Langley hacks “secretly” briefing senators on Capitol Hill last week, breathlessly reassuring them the Russians did it. Yet even the Post’s shoddy report was forced to acknowledge the proverbial “senior US official” saying “there were minor disagreements…about the agency’s assessment” – as in no solid evidence of “the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks”.

So this is essentially old debunked news repackaged – with no supporting facts — as a powerful indictment, planted by the CIA on Washington’s alleged paper of record. No wonder the Trump transition team – under White House chief strategist Steve Bannon – duly punctured the CIA strategic balloon; “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Case closed. Go back to play with your plastic toys.

Even kindergarten hopefuls know, based on the historical record, that the USG as well as the CIA are specialized in lying non-stop. Sometimes the lies are cumulative, sometimes they contradict each other. Take the sarin gas attack in Ghouta in August 2013 – which propelled the USG to the brink of a renewed Shock and Awe on Syria.

US intel at the time was sure that Jabhat al-Nusra – a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria (or “moderate rebels”, according to the Beltway “consensus”) – was capable of producing sarin gas. And yet Obama insisted Bashar al-Assad had done it, thus violating Obama’s silly self-proclaimed red line. Straight out of the neocons-do-Iraq playbook, Obama picked intel to justify what would have been a war on Syria.

The fact was that the

sarin gas
was transferred to al-Nusra under the influence of notorious Bandar Bush – then tasked by the House of Saud to provoke regime change in Damascus by all means necessary. Bandar in fact was even more influential than the CIA; he was directly coordinating the handout of tons of cash and weaponizing to jihadists in Syria, as well as concocting false flags such as Ghouta. And all this after Obama himself had ordered, in early 2012, the CIA rat line through the Turkish-Syrian border of Libyan weapons destined to supply the “moderate rebels”.

The bottom line is that Nobel Peace Prize Obama – lying through his teeth like a lowly neocon – had been on the brink of launching a full-scale war on Syria for a “crime” about which there was no evidence.

And the lies accumulate as the Obama administration’s elaborate Syrian plans flounder in the East Aleppo cauldron. This (in Arabic) is how the “moderate rebels” were expelled – revealing, in parallel, how Damascus profited from inside intel as myriad “rebel” outfits were fighting among themselves. This is about actual facts on the ground – not the relentless USG propaganda/psy ops campaign about evil Russians bombing hospitals.

The whimpering Obama administration is not over yet. Expect more sensational CIA exploits; more demonization of Russia; more weaponizing of “moderate” Syrian “rebels”; and even the odd false flag.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.

 

[britbox]

Late here in Oz... too late to debate the points but I'll respond in full tomorrow. Not disagreeing with everything you say... but too binary without discussion. Speak tomorrow @teddytennisfan

 

[teddytennisfan]

Late here in Oz... too late to debate the points but I'll respond in full tomorrow. Not disagreeing with everything you say... but too binary without discussion. Speak tomorrow @teddytennisfan

fine with me -- but if you want to go on -- substantiate it with exact examples..

i can assure you i can list TEN more for the ''west" for every single one you list of russia's atrocities ''towards others" ...

 

[mrzz]

Teddytennisfan, Britbox comment was directed toward the article cited. A lot of information there, and a lot of interpretation (it could not be otherwise), so, a lot of grey area by definition.

Even if you take a position that one nation has a higher moral ground than the other -- there is always grey areas. As the own article says, there are (and were) corrupt people in position of power in Russia. There are (and were) people in the west that cry out against corruption and imperialism. So, as Britbox said, even if you take the articles´ position as an absolute truth, the binary good/bad binomial does not apply.

I, for one, appreciate a lot the fact that you bring out a lot of "no mainstream" (or whatever people may call them) information (even if sometimes you could just post the links rather than pasting the entire content. This has one obvious plus: the reader actually goes to the web site you want him to read, and he could well explore other links from there. People here in general read what other posters say, so I do not need to shout or recur to repetition.

By the way, thanks for the link of the UN panel.

 

[Billie]

Honestly as somebody who belongs to a nation that was demonized and attacked by the USA for no GOOD reason, I am always compelled to seek more information and look at more sources when they start their attack on somebody else. Although I know where teddy is coming from, reading and hearing how bad Russians are, what they are accused of, it can get a bit tiring and frustrating for us that know it is not exactly so.

 

[teddytennisfan]

Teddytennisfan, Britbox comment was directed toward the article cited. A lot of information there, and a lot of interpretation (it could not be otherwise), so, a lot of grey area by definition.

Even if you take a position that one nation has a higher moral ground than the other -- there is always grey areas. As the own article says, there are (and were) corrupt people in position of power in Russia. There are (and were) people in the west that cry out against corruption and imperialism. So, as Britbox said, even if you take the articles´ position as an absolute truth, the binary good/bad binomial does not apply.

I, for one, appreciate a lot the fact that you bring out a lot of "no mainstream" (or whatever people may call them) information (even if sometimes you could just post the links rather than pasting the entire content. This has one obvious plus: the reader actually goes to the web site you want him to read, and he could well explore other links from there. People here in general read what other posters say, so I do not need to shout or recur to repetition.

By the way, thanks for the link of the UN panel.

fine comments. thanks.

of course i am awarethat in this WORLD there are what we like to call ''grey areas".

no one knows that better than the russians themselves. let us talk about THAT habit of ours nowadays to appeal to this usage of 'grey areas" when there are subjects that need CLARITY .

is it not - well - it is - the USA and the west that have for decades inthe modern era of nations used the 'black and white' paradigm? it is the USA htat abrogated to itself the claims of ''we are the good guys- the west, - " it is europe that has gone about acting and behaving as if it is the navel of the world -- the suppository of ''advancement" in civilized behavior inorder to justify its colonizing far, far, far beyhond the confines of its VERY SMALL region where no other continent compares in the amount of internal wars, conflicts, jealousies, that SPILL out of its own confines and are exported

from its own ''domestic european politics" as colonizing towards others...

and based on an ABSENCE of that very notion some of you call ''grey areas".
in other words:

"west -- enlightened, bright, leader, moral, civilized -- must TEACH east and south white man's burden on how to behave because THEY are barbaric, backward, uncivilized".

i can give plenty of example of direct statements but will not waste time on that here....but a few examples will suffice:

AMERICAN STATEMENTS on the colonizing of the philippines 148 years ago - still occupier..
as wonderful letters written home by soldiers to their wives, families, parents BRAGGING about their adventures;

"oh -- it is so much easier and exciting here -- AS WE teach these brown filipino savages our white civilized ways...it is easier than shooting rabbits in the prairie".

"kill all males 10 years and older -- burn the village -- we shall show these undisciplined brown monkeys that the white man shall be their superior".
"is it not good that the fire of war runs in our veins? for these natives do not even understand it -- but we can show them the NOBLE way of war"...

water torture? there is NO grey area there -- first perfected by the americans IN my country -- the philippines - in full view of villagers to 'teach them who their masters are".

i use that as example to merely demonstrate that when one applies it to today -- where RUSSIA and USA/WEST are concerned -- the application of the reasoning about the human condition of having ''grey areas" (which is true in many cases) -- IS NOT SO in this matter.

RUSSIA -- to a lareg extent in her history has BEEN the recipient of vicious malice, jealous envy and resentment at her vast territory, attempts at conequest and invasions BY the west - all the way from the british ISLAND NATION ..to america - the littoral state of france that are hundreds , thousands of miles away where they were NOT threatened by russia THAN the other way around.

whatever challenges , upheavals, mistakes, atrocities russia committed were largely wtihin her own borders - including her own wars of conquest in the creation of her state -- which themselves were also the result of natural conflicts arising out of civilizations that eventualy bump into each other..

the TATARS for instance are basically ethno-cultural descendants of the empire of the MONGOLS - who had once ruled russia in moscow when the mongols practically nearly reached the shores of the atlantic -- today TATARSTAN is one of the largest regions or republics just southwest of moscow as a vestige of that relation -- while under the reclaimed russian federation orthrone or USSR -- separatelyfrom the mor ''turkic'' tatars in the island of crimea --

enjoys - has enjoyed from within the USSR and last czars -- the most prosperous , highly industrial and technological and intellectual center in all of russia. infact MANY of their highest level officials are of tatar blood.
but you WON'T hear that in the ''black and white - no grey area" STORIES of your west. would you?

let us talk about 'grey area"

the SLAVIC people range across europe -- believe it or not -- as differentiated from the CELTICS who are/were ''littoral" peoples (shores of regions) - from deep in central europe where today's northern ITALY , austria, the southern regions of germany, all the way to the east.

one might even say -- europe was people by varieties of SLAVS who TODAY are ''reduced" in their 'proper place'' as 'eastern-southern" peoples by who else but the ''westerners?" and are supposed to be seen as 'inferior" according to the last few centuries written by WHO again? that's right -- the westerners...

the 'creation' of russia originated because the various rival SLAVIC peoples approached a northern slavic tribe -- the varangians who detached themselves as nomads and coquerors in those times but displayed a fine quality of organization...

to UNITE all the slavic peoples long ago - and thus was born the original russia - transfered by that same varangian group from north russia of novosibirsk TO kiev -- WHERE as part of that 'unification of the slavic peoples" and as a defense from the WESTERN tribes - commanded that 'henceforth all slavs shall become christians" ..and that was the real ''official birth" of the russian 'state'.

the grey areas are where the Russians are different from their other slavic cousins - such as bulgarians, romanians, moldovans, serbs, etc...but as ''black and white" -- they are NOT of the celtic /littoral - ''westerners".

it is also why from time to time - some would refer to the russians as the ''big serbs" (becuse of the big land, presumably) - and the serbs as the ''little russians" (also for the same reason -)

or a serbian young volunteer fighting in donbass in ukraine to fight the fascists supported by the west in kiev --

"russians and serbians are ONE spirit in two bodies".

and THIS ''GREY AREA" THE USA, NATO, WEST has tried to decapitate into ''good and bad" -- that is: SERBS are bad if they REMAIN loyal to their being SLAVIC and with their brethren to the east..they are GOOD if they OBEY the west...

so -- yes -- i understand QUITE well what ''grey areas" are..i do not need anyone to be lecturing me about that.

and what i am insisting is the point here - is it is INappropriate to apply that kind of reasoning ind ealing with the fact of history -- that whatever RUSSIA'S own mistakes were (and they had many of their own) - there is NO ''grey area" , if that is the suggestion - as to WHICH SIDE aggressed AGAINST RUSSIA and the slavic peoples of which russia stands as the ''big one" that must be taken down -- the BETTER to ROB the slavic peoples of THEIR identity and independence -- which IS what the west has been attempting to do to slavic peoples one aftr another.



shall i go on ?

 

[teddytennisfan]

Honestly as somebody who belongs to a nation that was demonized and attacked by the USA for no GOOD reason, I am always compelled to seek more information and look at more sources when they start their attack on somebody else. Although I know where teddy is coming from, reading and hearing how bad Russians are, what they are accused of, it can get a bit tiring and frustrating for us that know it is not exactly so.

EXACTLY.

transfer tht experience of SERBIA --

PAINTED as this and that bad bad bad society and peoples -- or at best , inferior tht needs tutelage from teh west -- the GOOD leader of the world , free , brave west --

to russia, to bulgaria, to romania, to greece, to ukraine, to russia, to central asia, to turkey, to middle east, to syria, to iraq, to yemen, to iran, to india, to china, to philippines, to south america...to australia, to new zealand..to korea,

and what do we see?

THE WEST TALKING ABOUT THE WORLD IN BLACK AND WHITE...

but when it is pointed out that the BLACK and white they like to talk about puts THEM as the 'evil blacKK"

the argument suddenly brings in the reasoning about ''grey areas" .

THE USA WEST have tried this , and still do -- about the TERRORISTS they brought and created , fudned, armed, provided political cover for AT THE UNSC itsel f-- in their fascistic totalitarian FAKE news they call BBC, wasington post, new york times who are now so FRIGHTENED of the exposure of their DECDES of fraudulent ''TRUTH" -- THEY now resort TO WANTING TO BAN what THEY call 'FAKE NEWS" OF RT , SPUTNIK, PRESS OF IRAN, FARS OF IRAN, ALTERNATIVE MEDIA, ETC...

they do this by calling their TERRORISTS ''moderate rebels" who DO NOT EXIST.

so forgive me -- but what are we talking about Here? about ''grey areas?"

ther eis NO grey area that the USA WEST ARE INVADERS and occupiers in the middle east -- were NOT invited or permitted by ANY proper law - international or by syria's OWN sovereignty -- yet there they are

practicing ''grey area" arguments about why the USA SENDS 200 ADDITIONAL TROOPS TO ''join our other 300 in syria"

AS IF THAT WAS THEIRS to make...when in fact -- the grey area on that matter does NOT EXIST:

THE USA/WEST/NATO AND ALLIES are NOT LEGAL presence inside syria, inside iraq, inside yemen, inside egypt, inside tunisia, they only TWISTED matters to obtain their APPEARANCE of legitimacy as the authors of the chaos for their western empire.

RUSSIA IS PROPERLY invited by the sovereign syria -- and russia is the ONE that legitimizes itself many more times by bringing not JUST the necessary fight against the terrorists of the WEST -- AS SYRIA desperately needs -- but SIMULTANEOUSLY brings the REAL humanitarian needs of the destroyed country that the WEST PLAYS ITS ''grey area" games of DECEIT

with NOT A ''single crumb of bread, or medicine pill, or warm blanket" as the russians have reminded them - DESPITE the repeated humanitarian corridors prepared for THEM by the russians and syrians and iranians AND hezbollah...

AND WHY/ because THEY -- the west are not happy that elsewhere RUSSIA AND SYRIA KEEP FIGHTING AND BOMBING AND DEFEATING THE TERRORISTS and regain syria!!

so -- who is kidding whom?

when the story is about ''BLACK AND WHITE -- GOOD AND BAD GUYS"

the west has been the MASTER at that so long as BAD GUYS are russia, syria, china, anhyone that does NOT BOW to the 'good guys"

USA, UK, FRANCE, WEST, NATO, EU and their vassals and accomplices the BASTARD SAUDIS! and their terrorists!!

BUT when the table is turned in its PROPER direction that exposes that it is the WEST that are the BAD ONES -- using all tools of TERROR at their disposal with their DECEIT -- nad layers upon layers of pretense and lies --

suddenly it is about ''grey areas".

i consider that somehwat dishonest at the least -- and TYPICAL and recognizable as a ''western characteristic"

it is EXACTLY what the native american peoples immediately noted about ''the white man who speaks with a forked tonque".

HOW WOULD WESTERNERS who abrogate to themselves the claim of high righteousness to rule the world and shape it ''according to our ways" -- and ''our values" (as obama insists russia must be punished - and of course along with it IMPLYING the rest of the slavic peoples who share russia's world-views and history and culture and BLOOD) -

HOW WOULD they like it -- if the world -- beyond europe and the west AGREES with russia and PUTIN'S definition or description when he was asked

mister putin what is the difference (no grey area question) between the russian/slav AND the americn /west?

PUTIN ANSWERED QUICKLY:

"to me the difference is this: the americans and west (note that he CLEARLY does NOT have a grey area as to who is WEST and that russia is NOT west)

believe or build their society based on the glorification of the individual over society..
"we russians and slavs and easterners believe in a united society and we are a COLLECTIVE society in our thinking - we live and die for each other".

THERE IS A REASON why despite the DEEP CLAWS of the west with their colonialism on ASIANS -- country after country is reaching OUT to russia -- and IN THAT reaching out - it is becuse the ASIANS and THEIR collective society -- feels KINSHIP with the collective society of the SLAVIC world AS most powerfully represented by russia.

THAT IS BLACK AND WHITE -- no grey area there.

 

[teddytennisfan]

Honestly as somebody who belongs to a nation that was demonized and attacked by the USA for no GOOD reason, I am always compelled to seek more information and look at more sources when they start their attack on somebody else. Although I know where teddy is coming from, reading and hearing how bad Russians are, what they are accused of, it can get a bit tiring and frustrating for us that know it is not exactly so.

recently-- though he did not want to FURTHER EMBARRASS the culprits by NAMING them --

he made a report to the russian ministers saying:

"u know recently i was confronted by some of our western colleagues -- personally -- who complained to me that we are interfering in their affairs - such as this recent american elections and things happening in europe".

"when i asked what about? they told me we were hacking and influencing their population...

|"i told thme this: do you know I have BEEN READING YOUR INSTRUCTIONS to certain russians with influence -- exactly on how to DESTABILIZE russia? Your people may not have realized it but some of these russians you tried to coerce came to me with the ORIGINAL documents from you...so who is talking about trying to interfere and destabilize?"

"do you think this is still russia in 1990?"

and addressing the russian ministers and press -- "we will never again allow them to sabotage our sovereignty as they did in the 1990's".

he said that just last week.

 

[Billie]

Teddy I think it is hard for ordinary people, even if they are educated, to sometimes believe that their own governments would do terrible things and meddle in somebody else's affairs in the most destructive ways. Even if it turns out that it did happen, they would rather pretend and not think about that. It's much easier to think that the "other side" is bad.

First friend I made here in Canada was a girl from Iran. She belongs to Bahai religion and after the revolution in 1979 they had to go, the whole family. It was a prosperous country back before Shah was brought to power in 1953, nothing like now. One of her sisters still has a son in Tehran and goes to see him from time to time, but it is a torturous process for her. Interventionism with horrific consequences in many of these countries: http://www.fff.org/2016/12/08/horrific-consequences-u-s-interventionism/

 

[teddytennisfan]

Teddy I think it is hard for ordinary people, even if they are educated, to sometimes believe that their own governments would do terrible things and meddle in somebody else's affairs in the most destructive ways. Even if it turns out that it did happen, they would rather pretend and not think about that. It's much easier to think that the "other side" is bad.

First friend I made here in Canada was a girl from Iran. She belongs to Bahai religion and after the revolution in 1979 they had to go, the whole family. It was a prosperous country back before Shah was brought to power in 1953, nothing like now. One of her sisters still has a son in Tehran and goes to see him from time to time, but it is a torturous process for her. Interventionism with horrific consequences in many of these countries: http://www.fff.org/2016/12/08/horrific-consequences-u-s-interventionism/

this IS the result of western meddling.

decades of it. and its legacy.

the revolution came about because the iranian people had ENOUGH of the shah of iran - who was the equivalent of what in the 1990's in russia were their TRAITOR oligarchs who helped themselves to russia's public assets in cahoots with the USA/UK, FRANCE primarily -- THE SAME TRIO that we see right now in the middle east --

the inevitable result is some ''minorities" will be insecure in a newly ''revolutionary" ''tyranny of the majority" whose PRIORITIES are to preserve its sovereignty as a country..everything ELSE is secondary when it comes to the existence of a country against what the USA/UK, did .

which was their installation of the SHAH in the 1950's AT THE BEHEST OF THE BRITISH and their british petroleum that had been leaching IRAN'S natural resources -- and the CIA OF THE ''new superpower" from the aftermath of the world war gave them that assistance -- and everything else is history -- LEDING TO

today's continuing sanctions by the USA (illegal and an act of war in itself) - on iran -- and iran aiding SYRIA AND IRAQ -- TOprevent the spread of more terrorism in the region

which is terrorism USED by the USA, UK, FRANCE and NATO AND GULF ARAB OIL STATES so they can continue their western capitalist corporate PLUNDERING.

what is happening in syria BROUGHT TO IT BY THE USA, UK, FRANCE, and to some extent italy and germany as accomplices in the UNSC or UN or ''global propaganda" that they call ''news" --

is the SAME as what they did TO russia in the 1990's - fortunately russia and putin came up just in time to prevent total dismemberment -
and what they did in world war two by INITially supporting the RISE OF FASCISM AND NAZISM in europe to instigate war -- AGAINST russia and the slavic peoples.

what they did to SERBIA and yugoslavia, what they did to vietnam, what they did to the korean peninsula, what they did to cuba, what they did to african countries, what they did to iraq, what they did to libay, what they did to china, what they did to philippines, what they did to australia, what they did to the NATIVE PEOPLES OF AMERICA..

they are plunderers, mass murderers, racist imperialist capitalist corporatist invading occupiers from a few SMALL RESOURCE POOR ''original' countries who were once nothing more than SAVAGES AND BARBARIANS who could not count beyond their digits until some arabs brought them al-gebra from the east...



THAT is what it boils down to.

CREEPS AND SLEAZEBALLS that they really are.

and -- look at ''them" -- their OWN policies and economics and schemes bite them back , unemployment -- (an increasing number of young europeans, particularly italians have no jobs) --look at what they did TO greece with their financial ''magic" - look at what their OWN imperialist policies in the middle east has done - from libya, to yemen, to near east, to syria, iraq, so that the miserable , jobless, homeless people whose national infrstructures were DESTROYED by american /western 'coalition"

''DEMOCRACY" -- PRODUCED PEOPLE VULNERABLE TO radicalism by Wahhabist , takfirie saudi financed -- ALLY OF THE USA AND UK - who are now TERRORISTS! because , after all -- THESE were once ordinary people. \shopkeepers, police, army, businessmen, workers, laborers, who have to EARN a WAGE as mercenaries to feed THEIR families AND THEREFORE easily turned to wahhabism with 500 dollars a month ''wages". and arms and the sense of POWER. with the BEAST in them unleashed.

and WHO MADE THAT HAPPEN? THERE IS NO GREY AREA THERE.

it is NOT russia, it is NOT serbia, it is NOT china, IT IS not IRAN,

IT IS THE USA, UK, FRANC,E NATO, EU, GOLDMAN SACHS, CITIBANK, DEUTSCHE BANK, FRANCE TOTAL, BRITISH PETROLEUM, EXXON MOBIL, BLACK WATER , CIA, PENTAGON, STATE DEPARTMENT, WHITE HOUSE, BRITISH PARLIAMENT, BBC, WASHINGTON POST, NEW YORK TIMES, SOROS, ROTHSCHILDS, ROCKEFELLERS, DUPONTS, etc. ec. etc.

and their SLEEPING - DELUDED - SELF-DECEITFUL POPULATIONS who swalow their OWN notions of ''primacy'' as civilizations -- when in fact

they are living their ''prosperity" on MOUNTAINS of dead people from elsewhere!!

SO -- NO ONE from the west is IN A POSITION to talk about the ''bad russians, or iranians, or chinese or syrians, or assad, putin, rouhani, serbia, etc. etc.".

it is NOT their place to issue any kind of condemnations -- MERELY TO LISTEN to a LITANY OF THE SINS of their own ''western" civilizations towards others -- and that they NEED TO PIPE DOWN ADN SHUT THE HELL UP...while russia, syria, iran CLEAN UP THE MESS the west has brought!

because most especially -- when their GAME is UP and their EXPOSURE for the centuries of deceit and lying and - as their OWN otto-von bismarck said of their own fellow ''westerners" BRITISH:

"beware of them -- for they are DEALERS AND TRADERS IN HUMAN FLESH".

well -- duh -- that goes for ALL the sorry lot of them -- these ''LEADERS" of ''WESTERNERS".

they all need to be taught , first of all -- how to be REAL christians THAT THEY CLAIM themselves to be civilized according to such 'values" - while THEY created the wahhab terrorists (the USA, CIA have bene in cahoots with the muslim brotherhood -- the CORE of wahhabism itself -- from egypt long ago SINCE the 1950's -- ONE OF THE VERY FIRST PROJECTS of the cia THAT recently was the CAUSE of the FAKE ''arab awakening" they STAGED that created the MESS in libya!!) -

next they need to be taught by the south and east -- what REAL MORALITY AND ETHICS, HONOR AND RESPONSIBILITY really means!

 

[teddytennisfan]

informationclearinghouse.info
Andre Vltchek: How to Fight Western Propaganda : Information Clearing House

By Andre Vltchek
May 15, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - First they manufacture monstrous lies, and then they tell us that we should be objective!

Is love objective; is passion?

Are dreams defendable, logically and philosophically?

When a house is attacked by brigands, when a village is overran by gangsters, when smoke, fire and cries for help are coming from every corner, should we award ourselves with the luxury of time to calculate, analyze and aim at complete logical, ethical, holistic and objective solutions?

I strongly believe no! We are obliged to fight those who are burning our dwellings, to hit with full force those who are attempting to rape our women, and to confront fire with fire when innocent beings are slaughtered.

When the most powerful and the most destructive force on earth employs all its persuasive might, utilizing everything from the mainstream media to educational facilities, in order to justify its crimes, when it spreads its poisonous propaganda and lies in order to oppress the world and suppress hope, do we step back and begin endless and detailed work on precise and objective narratives? Or do we confront lies and propaganda with our own narrative, supported by our intuition, passion and dreams for a better world?

***

The Empire lies continuously. It lies in the morning, during the day, in the evening, even at night, when most of the people are sound asleep. It has been doing it for decades and centuries. For grand deceits it relies on countless numbers of propagandists who pose as academics, teaches, journalists and “public intellectuals”. Perfection in the art of disinformation has been reached. Western advertising (so much admired and used by the German Nazis) has some common roots with propaganda, although propaganda is much older and “complete”.

It appears that even some leaders of the Empire now believe in most of their fabrications, and most of the citizens certainly do. Otherwise, how could they sleep at night?

The western propaganda apparatus is enormously efficient and effective. It is also brilliant in how it ensures that its inventions get channeled, distributed, and accepted in all corners of the world. The system through which disinformation spreads, is incredibly complex. Servile local media and academia on all continents work hard to guarantee that only one narrative is allowed to penetrate the brains of billions.

The results are: intellectual cowardice and ignorance, all over the world, but especially in the West and in its client states.

***

What are we, who oppose the regime, supposed to do?

First of all, things are not as hopeless as they used to be.

This is not the morbid unipolar world that we experienced in the early 90’s. Now Venezuela, Russia, China, and Iran support large media outlets that are opposed to the Empire. Powerful television stations emerged: RT, Press TV, TeleSUR and CCTV. Huge English language Internet-based magazines and sites in the United States, Canada and Russia are also exposing the lies of the official Western propagandists: Counterpunch, Information Clearing House, Global Research, Veterans News, Strategic Culture, New Eastern Outlook quickly come to mind. And there are hundreds of important sites doing the same in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese and French languages.

The fight is on: the fight for an intellectually multi-polar world. It is a tough, mortal fight! It is a crucial battle, simply because the metastases of the Western propaganda cancer have spread everywhere, contaminated all continents, and even some of the most courageous countries and brains that are earnestly fighting against the Western imperialism and fascism! No one is immune. To be frank, all of us are contaminated.

Unless we win this battle, by first clearly identifying and proving “their narrative” as fraudulent, and later by offering humanist and compassionate perceptions, we cannot even dream about the revolution, or about any significant changes in arrangement of the world.

***

How do we achieve victory? How do we convince the masses, those billions of people? How do we open their eyes and make them see that the Western regime is dishonest, toxic, poisonous and destructive? Most of humanity is hooked on the Empire’s propaganda; that propaganda which is not only spread by mainstream media outlets, but also by pop music, soap operas, social media, advertisement, consumerism, ‘fashion trends’ and by many other covert means; cultural, religious and media junk that leads to total emotional and intellectual stupor and is administered like some highly addictive narcotic, regularly and persistently.

Do we counter the tactics and strategy of the destructive and ruthless Empire with our honesty, with research, with telling and writing meticulously investigated facts?

The Empire perverts facts. It repeats lies through its loudspeakers and tubes. It shouts them thousands and thousands of times, until they sink into the sub conscious of people, penetrate the skin, spread all through their brains.

Good will, naive honesty, “speaking truth to power”, could this change the world and the power itself? I highly doubt it.

The Empire and its power are illegitimate, and they are criminal. Is there any point of speaking truth to a gangster? Hardly! Truth should be spoken to people, to masses, not to those who are terrorizing the world.

By talking to villains, by begging them to stop torturing others, we are legitimizing their crimes, and we are acknowledging their power. By trying to appease gangsters, people are putting themselves at their mercy.

I absolutely refuse to be in such position!

***

To win over billions of people, we have to inspire them, to fire them up. We have to outrage them, embrace them, shame them, make them laugh and make them cry. We have to make sure that they get goose bumps when they see our films, read our books and essays, listen to our speeches.

We have to detox them, make them feel again, wake up natural instincts in them.

Simple truth as a detox agent will not work. The poison of our adversaries has sunk too deeply. Most of the people are too lethargic and too immune to simple, quietly stated truths!

We have tried, and others have tried as well. My acquaintance (but definitely not my comrade) John Perkins, former US apparatchik educated by the State Department, wrote a detailed account of his horrid deeds in Ecuador, Indonesia and elsewhere – “Confession of An Economic Hitman”. It is a meticulous, detailed account of how the West destabilizes poor countries, using corruption, money, alcohol, and sex. The book sold millions of copies, worldwide. And yet, nothing changed! It did not trigger a popular revolution in the United States. There were no protests, no demands for regime change in Washington.

In the recent past, I wrote and published two academic, or at least semi-academic books, packed with great details, quotes and tons of footnotes: one on Indonesia, a country used by the West as a model horror scenario for the rest of the world, after the 1965-US-sponsored military coup. The coup killed 2-3 million people, murdered all intellectualism, and lobotomized the 4th most populous country on earth. The book is called “Indonesia – Archipelago of Fear”. The second book, unique because it covers an enormous part of the world – Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia (“Oceania – Neocolonialism, Nukes and Bones”), showed how the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and France, literally divided and destroyed the great South Pacific island cultures and the people. Now classes are being taught using my books, but only a very limited number of people are influenced by the facts exposed in them. The elites in both Indonesia and Oceania made sure that the books are not widely read by the people.

I have spent years and years compiling facts, researching, investigating. The revolutionary effectiveness of my academic work is – I have to admit – nearly zero.

It is easy to see the contrast: when I write an essay, a powerfully crafted, emotional essay, demanding justice, accusing the Empire of murder and theft, I get millions of readers on all continents, as well as translations to dozens of languages!

Why do I write this; why do I share this with my readers? Because we should all be realistic. We have to see, to understand, what people want – what they demand. The people are unhappy and scared. Most of them don’t know why. They hate the system, they are lonely, frustrated, they know that they are lied to and exploited. But they cannot define those lies. And academic books, exposing the lies are too complex for them to read since the masses have no time to read thousands of indigestible pages or the necessary education to allow them to understand what they are reading.

It is our duty to address those people, the majority, otherwise what kind of revolutionaries are we? After all, we are supposed to create for our brothers and sisters, not for a few researchers at the universities, especially when we realize that most of the universities are serving the Empire by regurgitating official nomenclature and supporting demagogues.

***

The Empire speaks, writes and then repeats some outrageous lies, about its benevolence, and exceptionality of its rule, or about the “evils” of the Soviet Union, China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea or Cuba. This is done daily. In fact it is designed so that almost every human being gets his or her dose of the toxin at least several times a day.

We feel we have to react – we begin spending years of our lives, meticulously proving, step by step, that the Empire’s propaganda is either one big fat lie, or exaggeration, or both. After we compile our arguments, we publish the results in some small publishing house, most likely in the form of a slender book, but almost nobody reads it because of its tiny circulation, and because the findings are usually too complex, too hard to digest, and simply because the facts do not shock anybody, anymore. One million more innocent people were murdered somewhere in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia; what else is new?

Researching and trying to tell the truth, fully and honestly, we feel that we are doing great, professional, scientific work. All the while the propagandists of the Empire are dying of laughter watching us! We are representing little danger to them. They are winning effortlessly!

Why is that? Doesn’t the detailed truth matter?

It does – from the point of higher principles it matters. Ethically it matters. Morally it matters. Philosophically it matters.

But strategically, when one is engaged in an ideological war, it does not matter that much! The truth yes, always; the truth matters! But simplified, digestible truth, presented powerfully and emotionally!

When immorality is ravishing the world, when it is charging mercilessly, when innocent millions are dying, what matters is to stop the slaughter, first by identifying the murderous force, then by containing it.

Language has to be strong, emotions raw.

When facing murderous hordes, poetry, emotionally charged songs, and patriotic odes have always been more effective than deep academic studies. And so were political novels and films, passionate documentaries, even explicit cartoons and posters.

Some would ask: “Just because they are lying, should we lie as well?” No! We should try to be as truthful as we can. But our message should be often “abridged”, so the billions, not just those selected few, could understand it.

It does not mean that the quality of our work should suffer. Simplicity is often more difficult to achieve than encyclopedic works with thousands of footnotes.

Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” is short, just a pamphlet, straight to the point. And so is the “Communist Manifesto”, and ‘J’accuse!”

Our revolutionary work does not have to be necessarily brief, but it has to be presented in a way that could be understood by many. I am constantly experimenting with the form, while never compromising on substance. My recent book, “Exposing Lies of the Empire” has more than 800 pages, but I made sure that it is packed with fascinating stories, with testimonies of people from all corners of the globe, with colorful description of both victims and tyrants. I don’t want my books to collect dust in university libraries. I want them to mobilize people.

***

I truly believe that there is not much time for “objectivity” in any battle, including those ideological ones, especially when these are battles for the survival of humanity!

The lies of the enemy have to be confronted. They are toxic, monstrous lies!

Once the destruction stops, millions of innocent men, women and children will cease being sacrificed, and we can return to our complex philosophical concepts, to details and to nuances.

But before we win our final battles against imperialism, nihilism, fascism, exceptionalism, selfishness and greed, we have to fully and effectively utilize our most powerful weapons: our visions of a better world, our love for humanity, our passion for justice. Our determination and our beliefs have to be presented in a loud, potent, even “dogmatic” manner, our voice should be creative, artistic, powerful!

The house is on fire, comrades! The entire town is turning to ashes. The entire planet is plundered, devastated, lobotomized.

We cannot confront bigots with nukes and battleships. But our talents, our muses, and our hearts are here, with us, ready to join the battle.

Let us outsmart our enemies; let us make sure that the world begins laughing at them! Have you seen them, those pathetic losers, the buffoons – the CEO’s? Have you listened to those Prime Ministers and Presidents, those servants of the “market”? Let us convince the masses that their tyrants –the imperialists, the neo-colonialists and all their dogmatic preachers – are nothing more than pitiful, greedy, poisonous fools! Let us discredit them! Let us ridicule them.

They are robbing and murdering millions. Let us begin by at least pissing on them!

Let us fight Western propaganda by first exposing those who are really behind it. Let’s get personal.

Let’s turn this revolution into something creative, hilarious, truly fun!

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

 

[teddytennisfan]

counterpunch.org
No Pasaran, Comandante Fidel!
by
Many years ago, Fidel declared: “Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour.”

It did; destiny shaped them all, los Barbudos, and threw them right into the center of the whirlpool of world history. As they fought for the freedom of Cuba, of Latin America and the entire oppressed world, they actually managed to defy their own words: in the end they irreversibly shaped the fate of our Planet, of the entire humanity.

Fidel stood firmly at the forefront of the struggle, from the very outset to his last breath. As always, when the giants get reunited with mother Earth, the entire world shook and the ground trembled on all continents.

For several moments, everything stopped, got frozen.

I was driving through Central Vietnam when the message of Fidel’s death arrived on my phone screen. For several minutes there was absolute emptiness and silence inside me.

Then, on a wide and beautiful river I spotted several marvelous ships belonging to an ancient Vietnamese fishing fleet, and a boat proudly flying both the Communist red flags with yellow stars, as well as several desolate black flags – symbols of mourning.

In a remote place in Asia, Fidel’s death managed to disturb the calm, to stir the serene surface of the river.

Later everything fell back to where it was supposed to be, and the sounds returned. The emptiness inside me also evaporated. A great man has left, but the revolution has not stopped. It can never stop, as the very existence; the very survival of humanity now depends on it.

***

What was Fidel’s gift to the world and what did his Cuba achieve?

Results do not always have to be material. Although yes, of course, we could talk for days about the great education, culture, creativity, medical care and equality.

Socialist Cuba gave more, much more than that.

It gave hope, where hope was fading.

It gave strength, where only resignation reigned.

It gave heart to those places where only vulgar mercantile interests were recognized.

It gave optimism to counter the deadly embrace of nihilism.

Once Fidel shouted: “They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?”

Cuba, under the leadership of Fidel and his comrades, fought wars of independence in the most devastated parts of Africa; it stood by Vietnam during its most testing moments; and it offered its intellectual and ideological leadership and skills to the latest wave of Latin American revolutions, from Venezuela to Bolivia.

Cuban doctors and teachers were sent to some of the most remote parts of our planet, in order to offer unconditional internationalist help. I saw them in action in places such as Kiribati, Timor Leste, and post-apartheid South Africa. They fought for human lives in the poorest countries, and in those places devastated by natural calamities. They fought with courage and dignity, and also with kindness and respect, learning to communicate in local languages and valuing local cultures.

Fidel’s Cuba never broke down, never surrendered under the pressure. It defended itself when attacked by the mightiest nation on earth. It survived a brutal embargo, ideological propaganda and even biological warfare.

It inspired the world with its determination and its valor, just as it inspired millions worldwide with its music, cinema and poetry.

“Patria no se vende!” – “One does not sell the Fatherland!” This is one of the greatest slogans of this marvelous country: a slogan which brought a clear message to all the countries humiliated and plundered by the Western Empire: ‘Not everything is lost. It is worth standing tall. It is better to die than to lose one’s pride and dignity!’

When Hugo Chavez was standing in the rain, bald after chemotherapy, clenching his fist in heroic defiance, and shouting at the enemies of the revolution “Here no one surrenders!” it was clear and obvious where his inspiration had come from: Cuba, and from his mentor Fidel.

Color-blind, passionately internationalist, resentful of all forms of racism and imperialism, Cuba gave itself fully to Latin America and to the world. She did not do it as some sort of sacrifice, but as a revolutionary obligation. She did it with simplicity and humanism, asking for absolutely nothing in return. To quote the closest comrade of Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara:

“The sacrifices that one makes should not be exhibited as some ID card, instead they ought to be seen as the completion of one’s duty.”

***

Fidel Castro was very well aware of the fact that “a revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.”

Decisions one has to make when changing history are tough. A revolution is not a discussion club, or a charity gala concert, or a managerial meeting of some human rights NGO.

The main adversary, imperialism, has murdered hundreds of millions of people all over the world, and it would not hesitate to slaughter further multitudes.

Any show of weakness is often synonymous with defeat, and defeat means further suffering, hopelessness and humiliation for the masses, which have often for the first time tasted both the sweetness and intoxication of hope. That is why a true revolutionary has no right to show weakness, to back up, or to betray principles. He or she has to always stand at the vanguard, to lead his or her troops into battle, to risk everything, even his or her own life, unconditionally.

Both Fidel Castro and his closest comrades were made exactly of such pure revolutionary stuff: they had both guts and hearts.

They were no saints, definitely not … because sainthood was not what Latin American people truly needed. Saints only pray and periodically sacrifice themselves. Fidel and his comrades were expected to fight and to win, not for themselves and for their personal interests, but for the hundreds of millions of the wretched of this world.

On 1st May 2004, when it appeared that the United States might once again attack Cuba, President Castro spoke in Havana, addressing the then President, G.W. Bush:

“You have neither the morality nor the right, none whatsoever, to speak of freedom, democracy and human rights when you hold enough power to destroy humanity and are attempting to install a world tyranny, side-stepping and destroying the United Nations Organization, violating the human rights of any and every country, waging wars of conquest to take over world markets and resources and installing decadent and anachronistic political and social systems which are leading the human race into the abyss.”

At the end, Fidel declared that if Cuba was attacked, he would do what he was expected to do, and what he had already done on several previous occasions – he would go and fight! And none of us had any doubt that he would. But he had one regret in regard to President Bush:

“My only regret is that I would not even see your face because in that case you would be thousands of miles away while I shall be on the frontline to die fighting in defense of my homeland.”

***

While Cuba is mourning the departure of its great national hero, the President-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, is overjoyed:

“Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights … I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.”

Just to refresh readers’ memories: Brigade 2506 (Brigada Asalto 2506) was a CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles/terrorists, formed in 1960. Its mission was the overthrow of the Cuban revolutionary government headed by Fidel Castro. It carried out the abortive Bay of Pigs Invasion landing on 17th April 1961.

The scum that terrorized the Island is now celebrating in Miami and elsewhere. At the same time, the true friends of Cuba and Latin American revolutions have been in deep mourning.

As Xinhua reported:

“Chinese President Xi Jinping said Saturday that history and people will remember Fidel Castro, calling the Cuban revolutionary leader “a great figure of our times.”

Fidel Castro, founder of the Communist Party of Cuba and Cuba’s socialist cause, was a great leader of the Cuban people, Xi said, adding that he has made immortal historic contributions and devoted all his life to the Cuban people’s great cause of struggling for national liberation, safeguarding state sovereignty and building socialism.

The late Cuban leader has also made immortal historic contributions to the world socialist development,” Xi added.

“The death of Fidel Castro has made the Chinese people lose a close comrade and sincere friend. His glorious image and great achievements will go down in history,” Xi said.”

President Xi then concluded: “The Chinese people have lost a good and true comrade. Comrade Castro will live forever.”

From Uganda to Chile, Kenya to Moscow, people have been writing to me that their nations are in deep shock.

The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, remembered Fidel with warmth and respect:

“Fidel Castro was a sincere and reliable friend of Russia. He embodied the high ideals of a politician, a citizen and a patriot sincerely, convinced of the rightness of the cause to which he dedicated his whole life. His memory will forever remain in the hearts of the citizens of Russia.”

Nicolás Maduro, President of Venezuela, parted with his friend by sending a revolutionary message to all corners of the world:

“To all the revolutionaries of the world, we have to continue his legacy and his flag of independence, of socialism, of homeland.”

***

Here in Vietnam, Fidel Castro is remembered with admiration, love and great respect. Like two brothers, shoulder-to-shoulder, the two countries fought against Western imperialism and colonialism, for many years and decades.

Trân Đai Quang, President of Vietnam, declared:

“For all Vietnamese, Fidel was a great friend, a comrade and a very close brother.”

On November 15th 2016, President Trân Đai Quang was one of the last world leaders to see Fidel, during what was seen as a warm and symbolic encounter.

Now walking through the ancient towns of Central Vietnam, I felt overwhelmed by sadness and an irreversible feeling of loss. But despair did not last for long.

Deep inside I was convinced that Maduro was correct: the revolution has to continue, under those flags, exactly under those flags that were raised by Fidel and his comrades in Cuba and all over the world.

Precisely now, when Western imperialism is showing its horrific fangs, when it is ready to lead its soldiers and mercenaries into the final battle for global domination, there is no time for weakness, for respite, for hesitation.

Fidel has departed, but the revolution goes on!

Instead of mourning, we should celebrate an exemplary, heroic life. A man is mortal, but his great works, his struggle, his victories, can be eternal.

In Vietnam, I recalled a poem by Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, one of the ‘Cuban 5’ patriots who were imprisoned brutally in Miami, for infiltrating US anti-Cuban intelligence operations.

In this stunning poem written in a Miami prison, Rodriguez argues that love that can pass is not really love. That true love could resist even death itself and is, like nature, eternal.

So is true revolution, comrades. Like true love, true revolution cannot be broken, or extinguished, even by death itself.

Comrade Fidel Castro has just departed … But millions of his sons and daughters are still here, damn it! Therefore nothing is lost. Therefore, everything is just beginning!

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.