Something remarkable is taking place in Russia, and it’s quite different from what we might expect. Rather than feel humiliated and depressed Russia is undergoing what I would call a kind of renaissance, a rebirth as a nation. This despite or in fact because the West, led by the so-called neo-conservatives in Washington, is trying everything including war on her doorstep in Ukraine, to collapse the Russian economy, humiliate Putin and paint Russians generally as bad. In the process, Russia is discovering positive attributes about her culture, her people, her land that had long been forgotten or suppressed.
Today, some two decades later, Russia is again confronted by a western enemy, NATO, that seeks to not just humiliate her, but to actually destroy her as a functioning state because Russia is uniquely able to throw a giant monkey wrench into plans of those western elites behind the wars in Ukraine, in Syria, Libya, Iraq and well beyond to Afghanistan, Africa and South America.
Rather than depression, in my recent visits to Russia in the past year as well as in numerous discussions with a variety of Russian acquaintances, I sense a new feeling of pride, of determination, a kind of rebirth of something long buried
Take the sanctions war that the Obama administration has forced Germany, France and other unwilling EU states to join. The US Treasury financial warfare unit has targeted the Ruble. The morally corrupt and Washington-influenced Wall Street credit rating agencies have downgraded Russian state debt to “junk” status. The Saudis, in cahoots with Washington, have caused a free-fall in oil prices. The chaos in Ukraine and EU sabotage of the Russian South Stream gas pipeline to the EU, all this should have brought a terrified Russia to her knees. It hasn’t.
As we have earlier detailed, Putin and an increasing number of influential Russian industrialists, some of the same who a few years ago would have fled to their posh London townhouses, have decided to stand and fight for the future of Russia as a sovereign state. Oops! That wasn’t supposed to happen in a world of globalization, of dissolution of the nation-state. National pride was supposed to be a relic like gold. Not in Russia today.
On the first anniversary of the blatant US coup in Kiev that installed a hand-picked regime of self-professed Neonazis, criminals, and an alleged Scientologist Prime Minister Andriy Yansenyuk, hand-picked by the US State Department, there was a demonstration in downtown Moscow on February 22. An estimated 35,000 to 50,000 people showed up—students, teachers, pensioners, even pro-Kremlin bikers. They protested not against Putin for causing the economic sanctions by his intransigence against Washington and EU demands. They protested the blatant US and EU intervention into Ukraine. They called the protest “Anti-Maidan.” It was organized by one of many spontaneous citizen reactions to the atrocities they see on their borders. Internet satirical political blogs are making fun of the ridiculous Jan Paski, until last week the fumbling US State Department Press Spokesperson.
Not even an evident False Flag attempt in the London Financial Times and Western controlled media to blame Putin for “creating the climate of paranoia that caused” Boris Nemtsov’s murder is being taken seriously. Western “tricks” don’t work in today’s Russia.
And look at US and EU sanctions. Rather than weakening Putin’s popularity, sanctions have caused previously apolitical ordinary Russians to rally around the president, who still enjoys popularity ratings over 80%. A recent survey by the independent Levada Center found 81 percent of Russians feel negatively about the United States, the highest figure since the early 1990s “shock therapy” Yeltsin era. And 71 percent feel negatively about the European Union.
The renaissance I detect is evident in more than protests or polls, however. The US-instigated war in Ukraine since March 2014 has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, one which the US-steered German and other western media have blocked out of their coverage. More than one million Ukrainian citizens, losing their homes or in fear of being destroyed in the insane US-instigated carnage that is sweeping across Ukraine, have sought asylum in Russia. They have been welcomed as brothers according to all reports. That is a human response that has untold resonances among ordinary Russians. Because of the wonders of YouTube and smart phone videos, Russians are fully aware of the truth of the US war in eastern Ukraine. Russians are becoming politically sensitive for the first time in years as they realize that some circles in the West simply want to destroy them because they resist becoming a vassal of a Washington gone berserk.
Rather than bow to the US Treasury’s Ruble currency war and the threat that Russian banks will be frozen out of the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) international interbank clearing system, something likened to an act of war, on February 16, the Russian government announced that it had completed its own banking clearing network in which some 91 domestic credit institutions have been incorporated. The system allows Russian banks to communicate seamlessly through the Central Bank of Russia.
The following day after Russia’s “SWIFT” alternative was announced as operational, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cheng Guoping said China will build up its strategic partnership with Russia in finance, space and aircraft building and “raise trade cooperation to a new level.” He added that China plans to cooperate more with Russia in the financial area and in January Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said that payments in national currencies, de-dollarization, were being negotiated with China. China realizes that if Russia collapses, China is next. Failing empires try desperate measures to survive.
Russians also realize that their leaders are moving in unprecedented ways to build an alternative to what they see as a morally decadent and bankrupt American world. For most Russians the disastrous decade of poverty, chaos and deprivation of the Yeltsin era in the 1990’s was reminder enough what awaits should Russia’s leaders again prostitute themselves to American banks and corporations for takeover, Hillary Clinton’s infamous “reset” of US-Russian relations she attempted when Medvedev was President. Russians see what the US has done in neighboring Ukraine where even the Finance Minister, Natalia Jaresko, is an American, a former State Department person.
Russia and its leaders are hardly trembling behind Kremlin walls. They are forging the skeleton of a new international economic order that has the potential to transform the world from the present bankruptcy of the Dollar System. Moscow and Beijing recently announced, as I discussed in a previous posting, their project to create a joint alternative to the US credit rating monopoly of Moody’s, S&P and Fitch. President Putin’s travel agenda in the past year has been mind-boggling. Far from being the international paraiah Washington and Victoria Nuland hoped for, Russia is emerging as the land which has the courage to “just say No!” to Washington.
Now because of the brazen open savagery of Washington policies against Russia, this generation is looking at what was valuable. They realize that the stultifying bureaucratic deadness of the Soviet Stalin heritage was deadly in the USSR years. And they realize they have a unique chance to shape a new, dynamic Russia of the 21st Century not based on the bankrupt model of the now-dying American Century of Henry Luce and FD Roosevelt.
Ironically, Washington’s and now de facto NATO’s “undeclared war” against Russia has sparked this remarkable renaissance of the Russian spirit. For the first time in many years Russians are starting to feel good about themselves and to feel they are good in a world of some very bad people. It may be the factor that saves our world from a one world dictatorship of the bankers and their military.
Is this the end of the last great run for the U.S. stock market? Are we witnessing classic “peaking behavior” that is similar to what occurred just before other major stock market crashes? Throughout 2014 and for the early stages of 2015, stocks have been on quite a tear. Even though the overall U.S. economy continues to be deeply troubled, we have seen the Dow, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq set record after record. But no bull market lasts forever – particularly one that has no relation to economic reality whatsoever. This false bubble of financial prosperity has been enjoyable, and even I wish that it could last much longer. But there comes a time when we all must face reality, and the cold, hard facts are telling us that this party is about to end. The following are 7 signs that a stock market peak is happening right now… (Read More....)
In yet another crass attempt to register its anger at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s courageous and truthful speech on Iran to a joint session of Congress last week, the Obama administration promoted an Israel basher to serve as the Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region. His name is Robert Malley, who most recently has been serving as National Security Council (NSC) Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Gulf States. Effective April 6, 2015, he will, in his new position, have responsibility for an area encompassing Israel, Palestinian territories, North Africa and the Persian Gulf.
National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice, who publicly blamed Prime Minister Netanyahu for conduct “destructive” of the historic relationship between the United States and Israel, made the appointment announcement last Friday. She called Malley “one of my most trusted advisers” and “one of our country’s most respected experts on the Middle East.”
After Malley’s stint in the Clinton administration, he served as director of the Middle East Program at the International Crisis Group, which has received funding from the leftwing, George Soros-supported Open Society Institute. Malley felt free to go into full gear with his Israel bashing. In 2001, for example, Malley co-authored with a Palestinian activist and former advisor to Yasser Arafat, Hussein Agha, an op-ed piece for the New York Times presenting their view of the reasons for the breakdown of the Camp David talks. They refused to lay the principal blame where it belonged, on the terrorist Yasser Arafat. Instead, Malley and his Palestinian co-author claimed that Israel had not been sufficiently flexible in what it was willing to offer the Palestinians. President Clinton, who was personally involved in the summit negotiations, begged to differ. As Clinton explained during a 2004 PBS interview with Jim Lehrer: “So a couple of days before I leave office, Arafat says, calls to tell me what a great man I am. And I just said, ‘No, I’m not. On this I’m a failure, and you made me a failure.’”
Malley did not stop with his defense of Arafat. For years he has written positively about Hamas. A Hamas-Fatah reconciliation unity government is a good idea, he opined, which the United States should support “regardless of whether Hamas recognizes Israel or formally renounces violence.” Though Malley stated in another article co-authored in 2012 with Hussein Aghathat Hamas has “never truly deviated from its original view—the Jewish state is illegitimate and all the land of historic Palestine is inherently Islamic,” he and his co-author did not see that as a problem. They claimed that “the Islamists alone offer a familiar, authentic vision for the future.” Hamas’s “true calling,” they wrote, is “its social, cultural, and religious agenda.”
Malley walked the walk, so to speak, by engaging in his own discussions with Hamas. Such actions help legitimize the jihadist terrorist group, whose “true calling” is genocide against the Jewish people and the destruction of Israel. Here is the “true” Hamas in the words of its founding charter, which it has refused to revoke:
“…our fight with the Jews is very extensive and very grave, and it requires all the sincere efforts. It is a step that must be followed by further steps;…”(Hamas Charter, Preamble)
“The Prophet, Allah’s prayer and peace be upon him, says: “The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’ except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.” [Recorded in the Hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim]. (Hamas Charter, Article Seven).”
In a televised 2011 rally, Hamas’ Al Aqsa TV broadcast the following exhortation to Palestinians to kill the Jews:
“You [Allah] have made our killing of the Jews an act of worship through which we come closer to you….our beloved Prophet Muhammed, You have made your teachings constitutions for us…the fire with which we harvest the skulls of the Jews.” (translated by MEMRI)
In addition to engaging with the Hamas jihadists whom Malley thinks are really not so bad after all, he believes that there is nothing to really worry about if Iran does get a nuclear bomb. He believes that a viable option is to simply contain them. He wrote in a 2012 Foreign Policy article that “Israelis, not for the first time, likely are exaggerating the Iranian threat and its imminence.” He expressed disdain for what he called “Netanyahu’s 15-year obsession” with Iran. And he praised President Obama for having “by far the better of the argument” with Prime Minister Netanyahu over how best to deal with Iran. Ignoring the Iranian regime’s long record of state-sponsored terrorism all over the world, its killing of American military forces directly or through proxies in Iraq and Lebanon, its repeated threats to annihilate Israel, and its record of deceptions regarding its nuclear program, Malley put himself in the regime’s shoes. He said that, as seen through the regime’s eyes, its “stubbornness is easy to understand.”
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