Maria Zakharova: “On September 21 the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, presented awards from the Atlantic Council, a well-known American analytical center under NATO that promotes the ideas of Euro-Atlanticism and also specializes in generating Russophobic, anti-Russian ideas.

One of this year’s laureates is Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Von der Leyen gave a rather remarkable speech. She praised the head of the Japanese government for supporting the Kiev regime and the fight against Russia. She remembered that his family was from Hiroshima, and during the nuclear bombing in 1945, his relatives died there. Not a word about the United States and the Washington executioners who dropped bombs on the Japanese cities and civilians. But the defendant in the largest corruption scandals in the history of the EU went further – she blamed the tragedy of Hiroshima… on Russia.

Here are her words verbatim: “Many of your relatives lost their lives when the atomic bomb razed Hiroshima to the ground. You’ve grown up hearing the stories of the survivors and wanted us to listen to the same stories, to face the past and learn something about the future… when Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons once again. It’s heinous, it’s dangerous, and in the shadow [in the context of] Hiroshima, it’s unforgivable.”

It’s disgusting and dangerous how Ursula Von der Leyen lies».

Michael Morell*: “The Iranians must pay for Syria and the Russians must pay..

Charles Rose: “What do you mean? Kill them?”

MM: “Well, yes. But covert killing. You don’t need to tell the world about it. The Pentagon doesn’t have to admit it. If only Moscow and Tehran knew about it.

I want to hit what Assad considers his stronghold. I want him to tremble with fear. Bomb his house at night. Destroy his guards, plane, helicopter. Let him see that we are following him. I am not campaigning for his murder, let him see that his stronghold is destroyed, and he needs to survive. Let him think it will end badly for him.

I want to put pressure on him, on the Iranians, on the Russians, to come to a diplomatic solution.”

* ex. first deputy director of the CIA.

Source

In the last half-century, 67 military coups have occurred in 26 countries on the African continent, instigated by France. Among these, 16 countries still maintain French influence.

There exists a “colonial tax” in 14 African countries, which were formerly French colonies, resulting in substantial annual payments to France, amounting to around $500 billion.

These countries were under French oppression until 1958, after which they gained independence. However, nations such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon are still burdened with paying colonial taxes.

These 14 countries have a combined population of 174 million and a nominal total GDP of $196 billion, with a PPP GDP of $411 billion.

Formally, France has halted its colonization policy, but its economic colonization of these African states persists. A portion of the colonies’ budget continues to flow to the French central bank under various names and categories.

This process allows France to appropriate approximately 85 per cent of the former colonies’ annual income. As a result, African countries face financial difficulties, and they are forced to borrow back their own money from the French central bank as debts.

To reclaim their funds, African countries are limited to applying for no more than 20 per cent of the transferred amount. If they seek a larger sum, the former colonizer has the authority to veto it. France argues that it is merely repaying the money it spent on buildings and infrastructure constructed over a century ago.

Any refusal by an African ruler to pay the colonial tax often leads to a coup.

This was the case prior to the arrival of Russian forces, particularly the PMC Wagner. Now, the dynamics may change.

by Richard KNIGHT via Unz Review

Congo slave caravan, 1888

White people commonly respond to demands for reparations for slavery and slave trading by pointing out that it was whites who abolished these things.[1] I don’t know whether they notice that this doesn’t get them the credit from their antagonists that they seem to expect; they certainly don’t appear to see why this is.

The reason they get no credit is that black people don’t see the abolition of slavery and slave trading as quite the boon for humanity that white people do. If Africans had wanted slavery and slave trading to be abolished, they could have abolished them themselves very easily, just by ceasing to indulge in them. Instead, they met white attempts at abolition with fierce resistance. This was quite natural. Slavery was their way. As for slave trading, it gave them a good profit, and they saw nothing wrong with it.

No, the reason black people go on about slavery and slave trading is not that they deplore them but that they see that white people deplore them, who might therefore be made to feel so guilty about their forefathers’ involvement as to give black people large amounts of money in restitution.

Indeed, if we set the white record on slavery and slave trading against the black record, it stands out as a shining example. The transatlantic slave trade lasted only a fraction of the time that Africans spent selling each other to Arabs, and the number of slaves bought by whites — perhaps ten or 12 million — was a fraction of the number bought by Arabs. As for the length of time Africans spent selling each other to other Africans, and the numbers involved, these were much greater still. The intra-African slave trade still predominated in the nineteenth century, when a European explorer reported that slave-hunting in Africa went on far more to supply the domestic than the foreign market.[2]

I am no expert on slavery in the Americas, but I get the impression that it could have been worse. Although Frederick Douglass mentions slaves being flogged, he doesn’t say that he was flogged himself.[3] Rather, as a boy he had to help look after farmyard animals, which can be quite an agreeable task, and he was later transferred to a mistress for whom he had nothing but praise. Olaudah Equiano was abducted as a child by Africans in his home country before being bought and sold by other Africans, then shipped to America, where he was bought by an English couple, who treated him like their own son. He wrote that he was “very warmly attached” to his master, who was in the Navy, and told him that “if he left me behind it would break my heart.”[4]As for Twelve Years a Slave, according to the historian Simon Webb this was written not by Solomon Northup, who could hardly write his name, but by a white abolitionist named David Wilson, who wanted to make slavery sound as bad as possible.[5]

Coming to the treatment of slaves in Africa, according to Herbert Ward, a nineteenth-century English explorer, in the Congo it was customary for feuding chiefs to mark the settling of their scores by buying a slave, breaking his bones, and burying him with just his head sticking out so that all could see him slowly starve to death. The same fate lay in store for anyone who gave him food or water.[6] The Portuguese explorer Francisco Valdez reported that when the chief of a certain tribe died, no one was allowed to mention the fact for a month or two on pain of being immediately decapitated and his family sold into slavery.[7] If no buyer could be found for his family, they too would be decapitated. The King of Dahomey had to honor his ancestors. To do this, he periodically killed a few hundred slaves so that their blood could be poured on his forebears’ graves. As the victims were slaughtered, the crowd shouted out in delight.[8]

To give two more examples, according to the adventurer Hugh Murray, writing in 1853, after the King of Coomassie died 200 slaves were sacrificed each week for three months.[9] Another writer stated that at the death of a King, large numbers of his favorite wives and slaves were put to death to keep him company.[10] We hear nothing comparable about the treatment of slaves in America.

According to two independent estimates by nineteenth-century Scottish explorers, about three-quarters of the sub-Saharan African population were slaves.[11] Another observer put the proportion at four in five.[12] The slave was the unit of currency in Africa. Fines were paid in slaves, wives were bought in slaves. All the way from the coast to the remotest point in the interior, wrote the French-American anthropologist Paul Du Chaillu, the commercial unit of value was the slave. “As we say dollar, as the English say pound sterling, so these Africans say slave.”[13]

Africans did not object to slavery or slave trading, and this included slaves. In the 1800s the English explorer Richard Lander was surprised to see “the most perfect indifference” in Africans as they lost their liberty.[14] In the 1820s, a Frenchman who passed a group of women being put up for sale in the street noted that they “did not appear in the least mortified at being exhibited” for this purpose.[15] Male slaves, although shackled at the ankle, laughed, wrote two authors in 1826, and the females sang with the utmost glee as they worked in the fields.[16]

When an African slave obtained his liberty, he saw it as no cause for celebration. The naturalist Samuel Baker wrote that abolition only proved that Africans did not appreciate the blessings of freedom, nor did they show the slightest gratitude to the hand that broke the rivets of their fetters.[17] An African might even seek to become a slave, since then he would not have to fend for himself.[18] It was not unknown for former slaves in America to petition to be reenslaved.[19] In 1901, the black nationalist Booker T. Washington wrote that many emancipated slaves returned to their former owners asking to be taken back.[20]

It was only white people, with their elevated concept of the rights of man, who disapproved of slave trading, such as Francisco Valdez, who found it “detestable,”[21]and James Bruce, another explorer, who found it a “horrid practice.”[22] White people proceeded to impose their high-flown concept on those in whose minds it had never appeared.

Black people’s affinity for slavery can still be seen today, as in the many African countries where it still flourishes. For a second example, the Black Lives Matter activist Sasha Johnson reportedly said, “We don’t want to be equal, we want white people to be our slaves.”[23] Consistent with this, when I lived in a black part of London, I was quite often treated by the sort of young black man who in Africa would have been a slave owner as though I might be his slave. Finally, a senior black police officer was recently found guilty of, among other things, telling junior officers that he owned them and bellowing at them to make his porridge.[24] To many black people, today as in the past, the urge to enslave appears irrepressible.

According to Francis Moore, a Briton writing in 1738, a certain African King would amuse himself by going out with some troops from time to time to set fire to parts of the town. As people ran out of their burning huts, the troops caught them, tied them up, and took them off to be sold as slaves.[25] In 1870, Samuel Baker reported that when a slave hunt in East Africa netted some old women who could not keep up on the return march, they were clubbed to death.[26]

Nothing satisfied an African like witnessing a brutal killing. A missionary observed a group dancing round the mangled corpse of a beheaded female slave “at the very zenith of their happiness.”[27] In 1857, an explorer wrote that Africans appeared to take pleasure in cruelty: “The sight of suffering seems to bring them an enjoyment without which the world is tame.”[28] According to Sir Richard Burton, an English traveler, during fires in Zanzibar in the 1860s black people were seen adding fuel and singing and dancing, wild with delight.[29] In 1867, Paul Du Chaillu recalled seeing a young African woman’s corpse covered in lacerations into which red peppers had been rubbed, a “common mode of tormenting with these people.”[30] He could only hope that the woman, who had presumably been accused of witchcraft, had died of her wounds and not had to endure “the slower process of agonized starvation to which such victims are left.”

When I was at college, a lecturer told us that when he had staged Shakespeare’s tragedies in Soweto, the audience had laughed at the grimmest scenes. He thought that they were expressing pleasure at not being the victims. It seems possible that they were simply enjoying the sight of human suffering.

When Herbert Ward witnessed Africans walking among the putrefying bodies of victims of a mass human sacrifice, appearing to think nothing of it, he commented that the white man would never be able to conquer his repugnance at the callous indifference to human suffering found everywhere in Africa.[31] To us this seems strange, for we have been brought up to believe that no one’s indifference to human suffering could be more callous than a white person’s.

Yet, the old explorers thought that the life of a child could have intrinsic and not just economic value. Africans were different. In 1847, John Duncan wrote, “So little do they care for their offspring, that many offered to sell me any of their sons or daughters as slaves.”[32]. Sir William Cornwallis Harris wrote in 1843 that Africans would sell their children for the sordid love of gain.[33] All over Africa, according to Mungo Park, writing in 1815, parents might sell their children.[34]

Also in 1815, John Campbell wrote of seeing a child of about eight standing in the dust weeping and looking almost like a skeleton:[35] “Neither the men, women, nor children present seemed by their countenances to express the least sympathy or feeling for this forsaken, starving child”; instead, they laughed and told Campbell that he was welcome to take her with him if he wished. He felt sure that in London the sight of the girl would have excited pity in the hearts of thousands.[36] Think of that: White people feeling sorry for a strange black girl! But perhaps Campbell was right.

What a shame it is that our intellectuals have made such a thorough job of suppressing facts such as those mentioned above, leaving us to seek moral instruction from black people as we ask them how much money they require! They peddle their tales in the name of the idea of racial equality, yet this is not the idea that they drive at, which is one of extreme racial inequality, where blacks, pure and innocent, are being incessantly mistreated by their psychopathic white persecutors.

I wonder what it will take to set the record straight.

Notes

[1] For example, the point is made that from the early nineteenth century until the end of the British Empire 250 years later, the British expended vast resources attempting to wipe out slavery and slave trading. In the 1830s or 1840s, a full 13% of the manpower of the Royal Navy was devoted to stopping slave ships leaving West Africa for the Americas, quite apart from stopping slavery elsewhere. (Triggernometry, March 26, 2023, “The Truth About Colonialism with Nigel Biggar.”)

[2] This note and others below refer to Hinton Rowan Helper (“HH”), compiler of The Negroes in Negroland (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868). Helper’s notes give abbreviated references, such as her, to Barth’s Africa, Vol. I., page 12. Where possible these references have been expanded to give the author’s full name and the title and date of the book presumably referred to. In this case, on page 40 HH quotes Johann Barth, 1857, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, Vol. I, p. 12, stating that slave-hunting went on “not only for the purpose of supplying the foreign market, but, in a far more extensive degree, for supplying the wants of domestic slavery.”

[3] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: Penguin, 1986). Originally published 1845.

[4] History Debunked, Nov. 1, 2020, “An authentic account of slavery in West Africa.” The book is available here.

[5] See History Debunked (1), July 24, 2020, “Multicultural Education,” and (2) March 13, 2022, “The Twelve Years a Slave hoax revisited.”

[6] Herbert Ward, Five Years with the Congo Cannibals (Ostara Publications, 2019), p. 73. Originally published 1891.

[7] On page 31 HH quotes Francisco Valdez, Six Years of a Traveller’s Life in Western Africa, Vol. 2, 1861, p. 331.

[8] On page 19 HH quotes Hugh Murray, The African Continent: A Narrative of Discovery and Adventure, 1853, p. 199.

[9] On page 20 HH quotes Hugh Murray 1853, op. cit., p. 204.

[10] On page 21 HH quotes “Wilson’s Africa,” p. 219.

[11] On page 87 HH quotes Mungo Park, The Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa in the Year 1805, 1815, p. 216. On page 39 he quotes Sir William Cornwallis Harris, Major Harris’s Sports and Adventures in Africa, 1843, p. 314.

[12] On page 109 HH quotes “Lander’s Africa,” Vol. I, p. 377, which could be The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa (1836) by Robert Huish or Lander’s Travels in Africa by Richard Lander.

[13] On p. 44 HH quotes Paul Du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa or A Journey to Ashango-Land, 1867, p. 380.

[14] On page 37 HH quotes “Lander’s Africa,” op cit, p. 208.

[15] On page 43 HH quotes René Caillié, Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo, Vol. II, 1830, p. 63.

[16] On page 38 HH quotes Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton, Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa, Vol. IV, 1826, p. 184.

[17] On page 123 HH quotes Samuel White Baker, Great Basin of the Nile, 1870, p. 197.

[18] On page 40 HH quotes “Wilson’s Africa,” p. 156, saying that the African “not infrequently by his own choice places himself in [the] condition” of slavery.

[19] HH gives several examples of freed slaves petitioning to be reenslaved in his book Nojoque: A Question for a Continent (New York: George W Carleton, 1867), available here, p. 195.

[20] In “The Day Freedom Came” (1901), Booker T. Washington wrote of the feeling of gloom that descended on many emancipated slaves when they realised that freedom meant that they would have to provide for themselves. “Gradually, one by one, stealthily at first, the older slaves began to wander from the slave quarters back to the ‘big house’ to have whispered conversations with their former owners as to the future” (quoted by Christopher Ricks and William A. Vance [eds.], The Faber Book of America[London: Faber and Faber, 1994], pp. 198-99).

[21] On page 43 HH quotes Valdez 1861, op. cit., p. 293.

[22] On page 15 HH quotes James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768–73, Vol. I, 1790, p. 393.

[23] The New Culture Forum, April 26, 2022, “The War on Whiteness & The West: Murray’s Brave New Book Exposes How We’re Taught to Hate Ourselves.”

[24] MailOnline, Jan. 17, 2022. “Two senior police officers are kicked out of Met after Commander shouted at juniors, called pregnant colleague a ‘f******* nutter’ and approved £5,500 of his own invalid expenses, including alcohol and flight upgrade.”

[25] On page 80 HH quotes Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa, 1738, p. 87.

[26] On page 34 HH quotes Baker 1870, op. cit., p. 405.

[27] On pages 21-22 HH quotes “Freeman’s Africa,” op cit., p.47.

[28] On page 29 HH quotes Thomas Henry Hutchinson, Impressions of Western Africa, 1858, p. 283.

[29] On page 142 HH quotes “Burton’s Africa,” p. 493, which could be any of Burton’s books about Africa, most of which were published in the 1860s.

[30] On page 57 HH quotes Paul Du Chaillu, 1867, op. cit., p. 156.

[31] Ward 2019, op. cit., p. 186.

[32] On page 39 HH quotes John Duncan, 1847, Travels in Western Africa, Vol. I, p. 79.

[33] On page 39 HH quotes Harris 1843, op. cit., p. 314. Also, on p. 153 he quotes Richard Lander noting that an African parent would sell his child for the merest trifle (“Lander’s Africa”, p. 348. This could be Robert Huish, The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa, 1836, or there could be a book by Richard Lander himself.)

[34] On page 87 HH quotes Park 1815, op. cit., p. 216.

[35] On page 93 HH quotes John Campbell, Travels in South Africa, 1815, p. 266.

[36] This racial difference has been described in terms of “r/K theory.” Animals with an “r” strategy, such as rabbits, have many offspring after a short gestation and put little effort into looking after them. Those with a “K” strategy, like kangaroos, have fewer offspring after a longer gestation and invest more time in raising them. Compared to white and Asian people, people have an “r” strategy. (The gestation period in black women is slightly shorter than in others.) This was illustrated by the Scottish explorer Robert Moffat, who in 1842 wrote that African children “cease to be the objects of a mother’s care as soon as they are able to crawl about in the field.” (On page 92 HH quotes Robert Moffat, Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa, 1842, p. 49, quoting Kicherer.)

(Republished from Counter-Currents Publishing by permission of author or representative)

…….Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.

I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.

I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.

George Orwell, Looking back on the Spanish War, Chapter 4.

“It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” – Kissinger

Spokeswoman of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova commented on the highly promoted video of Lindsey Graham’s visit to Zelenskyy:

“U.S. Senator from South Carolina Lindsey Graham said with a satisfied smirk in a meeting with Zelensky: “Russians are dying. We have never spent money so well.”

During the Nuremberg Tribunal, the Minister of Economics of Nazi Germany, Hjalmar Schacht, stated that sponsorship of the Third Reich also came from abroad and named the two largest American corporations: Ford and General Motors. An unspoken deal was made with him – freedom in exchange for silence. Despite the protests of the Soviet representatives, he was released and lived to be 93 years old.

Let me remind you that the embodiment of the American dream, the same legendary Henry Ford was a holder of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the German Eagle. His factories in Germany not only produced up to 70 thousand trucks a year for the needs of the Wehrmacht, but also used the labor of prisoners, including Auschwitz, for that .

And the German icon of the automotive industry, Opel, belonged to… General Motors. Researcher Bradford Snell describes the role of the corporation as follows: “General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than the Swiss banks. Switzerland was just a repository of stolen money. General Motors was an integral part of the German war effort. The Third Reich could have invaded Poland and Russia (USSR) without the help of Switzerland. But they couldn’t have done it without the help of General Motors.

The Kodak company at its plant in Germany manufactured fuses for aerial bombs, not disdaining to use even the labor of prisoners of war.

The Coca-Cola plant in Cologne, even before its nationalization by the German government, regularly supplied soda to German soldiers. And the famous “Fanta” was actually invented by the Nazis.

The oil giant Standard Oil, through its subsidiary companies, helped Hitler with the shortage of petroleum products, participated in developing synthetic rubber and synthetic fuels. And IBM, beloved by IT people all over the world, produced accounting and control devices for the Nazis, including for oil production. Among other things, the equipment of this company helped to keep track of train schedules to death camps…

And we have to mention banks: JPMorgan Chase & Co also had a hand, and then Chase National Bank, through which multibillion-dollar transactions were carried out, and Berlin had the opportunity to buy dollars and carry out financial transactions overseas. “Chase” cooperated with the German bank “Alliance” even in such a matter as … insurance of property and life of the guards of the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

Senator Graham definitely has some material to draw comparisons. One of their investments led to World War II and the Holocaust.

Now, billions of US dollars are pouring into the insatiable throat of the neo-Nazi Kiev regime. In this regard, I would like to remind the senators and all American beneficiaries how the previous adventure ended”.

Guess who was the UN Peace Envoy to Yugoslavia in 1994? It was Thorvald Stoltenberg, father of Jens Stoltenberg.

by Martin Sieff via Strategic-Culture
First published February 13, 2021

The potential consequences from Stoltenberg’s ridiculous, appalling NATO policies and infantile wet dreams will be horrible, Martin Sieff writes.

Why was the storming of the Capitol “Shocking and Unacceptable” to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg when the violent coup toppling democracy in Ukraine with the open shameless support of the United States and the European Union was not?

“Shocking scenes in Washington, DC,” Stoltenberg tweeted on January 6. “The outcome of this democratic election must be respected.”

Yet hardly more than a month later, Stoltenberg personally welcomed with open arms at NATO headquarters in Brussels the prime minister of Ukraine, head of a government and political system that was established in 2014 with full NATO, European Union and United States support by toppling the genuinely democratic government of President Viktor Yanukovych.

Eager to stoke up thermonuclear tensions between East and West, and not caring at all if nuclear weapons fall on London, New York and Washington as a result, let alone Moscow, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyha proudly declared on February 9 that two new NATO naval bases would open on the Black Sea before the end of this year.

Yet the Black Sea has historically been a crucial defensive a region against invasion for Russia for the past quarter of a millennium since before the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The shocking Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014 was accompanied by a wave of killings and out of control mob violence that dwarfed the tiny, embarrassing protest that spilled over into the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and that has now been cynically rewritten in the liberal totalitarian Newspeak of the 21st Century West as an Assault of Huns and Nazi White Supremacist Hoards on All That is Holy and True.

The Democratic Party leaders of Congress – always eager to make further exceptional asses of themselves, now mindlessly record the riot as an “Insurrection.”

By contrast, in the 2014 Kiev real insurrection, President Yanukovych and his family fled Kiev in genuinely fear of their lives. Veteran U.S. Senator John McCain and serving Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland openly prowled the streets of Kiev loudly calling for revolution and the immediate and violent toppling of the constitutional government. Nuland handed out cookies to assure the rioters and revolutionaries that the U.S. government supported them. President Barack Obama and his then-vice president, one Joseph Biden, Jr. kept her in office.

On May 2, 2014, Ukrainian nationalists locked protesters in Odessa’s House of Trade Unions before setting the building on fire. Almost 50 people died and around 250 others were injured in clashes between demonstrators and radicals and the fire, according to the UN figures. No heartfelt tributes in the United States Congress for them! –

Later that same year, Stoltenberg, the former prime minister of Norway, was propelled to be Secretary-General NATO. His only previous experience in a military or any kind of security crisis was letting scores of innocent teenagers in his own ruling Labor Party to be massacred by a single crazed gunman on a supposedly safe island retreat near Oslo on July 22, 2011.

Since then, this ridiculous little “Napoleon of the North” has reveled in the empty pomp and glory of being applauded at a Joint Session of Congress and being acclaimed as a favorite puppet – sorry “statesman” by successive U.S. presidents.

Now, Stoltenberg appears especially focused on pushing the United States and Russia torwards a catastrophic collision over the Black Sea region by maniacally stating:

“I think we have to understand that the Black Sea is of strategic importance for NATO and the NATO allies — our littoral states, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. And then we have two close and highly valued partners in the region, Ukraine and Georgia,” he proudly proclaimed on February 9.

Not to be outdone, U.S. General Tod Wolters, NATO supreme allied commander (SACEUR), head of U.S. European Command and the latest American four star commander to pull Stoltenberg’s strings added substance to Stoltenberg’s regularly worthless rhetoric.

“Recently … we have strengthened our maritime posture with superb support from Georgia and Ukraine,” Wolters said.

Deeds do follow words, just as the great 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine warned us. The U.S. Sixth Fleet destroyers Porter and Donald Cook have been operating with allies and with Ukraine’s navy in the Black Sea since January. On February 8, the day before Stoltenberg greeted Shmyha in Brussels, both warships, along with a P-8A reconnaissance plane, joined with two Turkish frigates and F-16 fighters in an integrated surface, air and subsurface warfare drill.

Yet as Stoltenberg relentless pushes the United States and NATO towards a crazy head-on clash with Russia, in the only serious life-or-death security crisis he ever had to face, the Napoleon of the North and his then-government proved utterly worthless.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a hate crazed young Norwegian neo-Nazi, singlehandedly paralyzed the national security services by setting off a bomb near the prime minister’s house in Oslo that killed eight people.

Amid the confusion, Breivik then traveled out to a youth camp of Stoltenberg’s own ruling Labor Party on a nearby island where he massacred 69 people, almost all of them teens or in their early 20s. There was not a single armed security guard on the island. It was the worst mass killing in Norwegian history.

Stoltenberg had been prime minister for seven years: The appalling state of the security services and of security for the summer camp for the children of his own followers were his responsibility as national chief executive and party leader. He was even due to give a speech at the camp the next day and was preparing it while the young people were being slaughtered. He was never held responsible for his shameful bungles.

The idea that such a man could be raised up only two years later to lead the largest and most wide-reaching military alliance in European history is mindboggling. Nothing Stoltenberg has done in his years running NATO has done anything to unboggle the idea.

Once head of NATO, Stoltenberg underwent a predictable transformation: The lifelong anti-war dove who had protested the Vietnam War in his youth, overnight became an armchair war hawk.

Today, Stoltenberg is all for sucking both Ukraine and Georgia – weak, unstable and violent states lastingly destabilized by U.S. and Western coups – into his (supposedly) mighty NATO.

Stoltenberg’s raving ego and vanity have just been fed by the witless ovations of Congress and his successive American handlers, much as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a century ago reveled in the adulation of the crowds of Europe as his own mad, megalomaniacal policies sold them down the river for 30 more years of war, poverty, fear, conquest and death.

In this thermonuclear 21st century, the potential consequences and (literal radioactive) fallout from Stoltenberg’s ridiculous, appalling NATO policies and infantile wet dreams will be infinitely worse.

Poland and Lithuania became a joint kingdom in 1386 with the marriage of the Polish queen Jadwiga and the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila, so most of the land that is now Belarus ended up under Polish rule anyway. Although Poland and Lithuania at the time of their union were equal (on paper anyway), in reality Poland, by having perhaps a larger population and more wealth, and a 300-year headstart in being a Catholic Christian country (with the benefits implied), ended up the dominant partner. The Lithuanian elites melted into the Polish aristocracy (szlachta) and lost their Lithuanian identity and culture, and Lithuanian farmers and artisans (who came under the Catholic Church) ended up no better off than other groups of people including Orthodox Eastern Slavs under Polish aristocratic rule.

The Poles kept all these different peoples, Lithuanians, Galicians, Volhynians and others alike, at arm’s length by employing Jews (who could read) to administer their estates and collect taxes from their peasant tenants. It was this situation, with Jews employed as bailiffs and tax collectors, that later became the context for the disastrous and tragic relations between Jews and the peoples ruled by the Polish elites, starting with Bohdan Khmelnitski’s 1648 Cossack rebellion against Polish rule. The rebellion culminated in massacres of thousands of Jewish people in cities and towns by Cossacks and other peoples oppressed by Polish rule, after Polish elites fled and left Jewish people (the majority of whom having had nothing to do with working for their Polish feudal overlords, and who were just as oppressed as the peasants who killed them) in their shtetls to their fate.

The name of Bohdan Khmelnitski was anathema to Jewish people for a long time before World War II because of the huge scale of the violence and killings.

Bear all this in mind, when Poland decides it’s going to resurrect its beloved Commonwealth over western Ukraine.

by: Refinnejenna

by Claudiu Secara

It rarely happens to be able to witness the mating rituals of the elephants, but this is one such time. The elephants in this case are the Anglo-Saxons, the Russians and the Chinese. They are triangulating the rest of the world, playing their hierarchical positions within their international intercourse.

Is it about the Donbas, or is it about Taiwan? Or maybe about de-dollarization?

I think that ultimately it is about the WEF Agenda. That is, it is about the demographics, and it is indeed about the limits of growth, but with a twist.

The Barbarians are at the Gate! That is the concern of the Western elites. The jungle is encroaching on civilization’s garden. That is real, and it is a major concern. Hence the mysterious events of the last 30-40 years. We do need a new world order!

Now, as I have written in other essays, there are a number of red flags about many of the major events in the last 30-40 years. The war in Ukraine is only one such example. See The Fake War. Since September 2022, more bizarre things have happened in this war. Suffice it to remember the Prigozhin saga, the missing shells game, all the talk about the tanks, and the F-16s, which don’t make it to the front – and when a few do show up, they are all in a state of functioning incapacitation, etc.

Sure, there are centers of resistance against Russia taking over the whole of Europe. Witness the die-hards in Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics. They know what they know. But they will get their lesson and will fall into line.

Then we have other strange situations. The frozen $300 billion of Russian funds that are about to be confiscated – if only the Western banks can locate them! and even if they do, Western principles and legal scruples prevent the West from actual confiscation. But no legal scruples prevent them from issuing an inapplicable arrest warrant for Putin, the President of Russia, on the basis that Ukrainian children are being sheltered in Russia from the ravages of the war. Oh, yeah, and that’s when in the West, the child welfare gestapo snatch children from their parents’ arms for as little as yelling at the child.

And how about 9/11, obviously a fake, controlled demolition, as any child can see.

But the question is: why do the Russians and the Chinese go along with such a glaring embarrassment of a fake event? Seeing and listening to all the higher-ups of these countries toeing the Anglo-Saxon line is a humiliating spectacle, evincing their servitude and their impotence.

The Corona virus ruse is another glaring example. Against all medical knowledge and all practice over hundreds of years, why did these colossal superpowers, armed to the teeth and ready to spill blood in order to defend their sovereignty and national dignity, why were they all subservient to a piece of paper issued by the WHO, in unison locking down their populations for a pandemic that was not? And furthermore, why did they all poison the blood and the DNA of their national constituencies, the bedrock of their national sovereignty, when they all could have just voted a different resolution at one of the 5-star hotel WHO conferences, and do away with the madness?

Even more bizarre is the phenomenon of Selling Off the West’s Patrimony for One Ruble But Why?

At the very time of an existential war by the West against the up-and-coming challengers, Russia and China, we have the strange phenomenon of the large scale transfer of technology and know-how to China that occurred over the last 40 years. Now the same is happening with the transfer of technology, for a token fee, to Russia.

Company after company, major and not so major, after having invested heavily – transferring their technology, training the Russian workforce in Western methods of management, production and marketing, etc., – they are told to sell it all to the Russians for a ruble, thus legitimizing the ownership of this massive transfer of know-how and modernizing of the Russian economy overnight as a competitive alternative to the West.

Isn’t it the most glaring conspiracy under the full view of the confused populations? – But Why?

Are we actually going to see the demolition of Western hegemony as a result of all these developments? Are we going to see the dollar going out of existence? Is digital currency going to replace the financial overlording by the Western banks? (Could that be one positive outcome?)

Well, we just read that Russia has halted those much-heralded transactions with India on the basis of Rubles and Rupees. Why? Because of a “surplus of rupees, which stands to reach the equivalent of over $40 billion this year, in Russia’s coffers, caused by the growing trade imbalance between the two countries”.

It turns out getting rid of the dollar overnight is more complicated than that.

Yes, on the face of it, the pendulum has swung away from the West. It is the time to reassess the situation.

What is the alternative for the Western Garden in the absence of a controlled management of the growing disparities between the West and the rest of the world? Poverty? But hopeless poverty triggers hopeless actions. We see what is happening in the Mediterranean. At the risk of their lives, more and more people are finding ways to invade Europe. More and more people are taking to the highway and crossing the Rio Grande, etc.

There are certain voices who argue for tall fences, for patrol boats, for tough legislation providing for the returning of illegal immigrants to their countries of origin.

Is that the answer? Yes, as long as we are dealing with hundreds of people. Yes, when we are dealing with thousands of people. But what happens when millions show up at the gate? They are hungry, desperate, and cornered.

I see the answer to these prospects in the events that are taking place these decades. It is about a controlled transfer of economic development on the basis of three world power centers. The Russian sphere from Vladivostok to Lisbon. The Chinese sphere in Asia. And the Anglo-Saxon for the G5. Africa remains to be sliced between each one of the three. The Middle East is shared more or less at the center of the pie.

The plan is for a controlled distribution of . . . control, among the three. With the rest of the world subordinated to the three. And the Anglo-Saxons as the Primus inter pares. First among equals.

That assures the illusion of democracy in the Anglo-Saxon world while the rest are managed by authoritarian governments.

The dollar is diminished but remains more equal than its equals. The world is now manageable, and population growth can be controlled through the agency of the other two superpowers.

And the West, now, with the probable loss of Europe, can go on playing its arbitrage game for another generation or two.

Ed. Note: Today, the little nations of the Austrians and the Hungarians are trying hard to present themselves as normal nations. But it was only a hundred years ago when they ruled over a large multi-ethnic melange of nations not only with an iron fist, but really with a genocidal, criminal mindset. They ruthlessly executed Romanians, Serbs, Ruthenians, Slovaks, etc. Below is a good reminder of the fate of the Ruthenians, and in passing Bukovinians (i.e., Romanians). The novel Pădurea Spânzuraților (The Forest of the Hanged) by Liviu Rebreanu (1922) describes the same period from the Romanian experience.

By Dmitry Plotnikov, a political journalist exploring the history and current events of ex-Soviet states

Galicia, a historical region in the West of Ukraine, is currently the center of the country’s nationalist movement. However, things were once very different. A little over a hundred years ago, representatives of opposing Russophile and pro-Ukrainian political movements competed for the loyalty of the local Ruthenian population, also known as Rusyns. Galicia’s Russophiles welcomed the beginning of the First World War as a step toward an anticipated reunion with Russia. However the Ukrainian movement remained loyal to Austria-Hungary. With the help of the latter, Vienna killed off the Rusyn intelligentsia, which it considered a “fifth column”. To accomplish this, the Hapsburgs set up concentration camps.

What happened next amounted to a genocide.

The beginning of the tragedy

By the start of the First World War, the Russophile movement in Galicia was experiencing tough times. As a result of the “divide and rule” policy implemented by the Austrians, the movement suffered a split. The oldest and most respected organizations ended up in the hands of pro-Austrian leaders who advocated Ukrainian, not Rusyn, identity.

After the army of the Russian Empire crossed the border on August 18, 1914, and launched an offensive in Galicia, mass repressions swept through the region. People fell victim to the rage of the Austrian authorities over trifling matters – like possessing Russian literature, being a member of a Russian society, having a Russian education, or just sympathizing with Saint Petersburg. In some cases, people were arrested just for calling themselves Russians. Prisons were full of “enemies of the state” and “dangerous Moscow agents”, and the streets were lined with gallows.

“Those suspected of ‘Russophilia’ were hung on these trees in front of the windows. People were hung right on the trees. They would hang there for a day, then would be taken off and others would take their place… ” recounted one of the peasants in the Gorodetsky district. The repressions primarily affected the intelligentsia and Orthodox priests, most of whom completed spiritual studies in the Russian Empire.

FILE PHOTO. Austro-Hungarian servicemen pose against the background of three hanged men executed on August 30, 1914 in Mukachevo. © Wikipedia

Repressions against the intelligentsia were followed by those against the general public. Anyone who was thought to sympathize with Russia or Russian culture became a suspect. This included people who had once visited Russia, read Russian newspapers, or were just known as “Russophiles.” Military courts worked around the clock and a simplified procedure of legal proceedings was introduced for cases of suspected treason.

Members of Galicia’s Rusyn movement who chose the “Ukrainian way” actively participated in the repressions. Pro-Austrian politicians prepared lists of “unreliable” suspects and based on mere accusations, and arrested anyone who sympathized with Russia. As Russophile public figure Ilya Terekh described, “At the beginning of the war, the Austrian authorities arrested almost the entire Russian intelligentsia of Galicia and thousands of peasants, based on the lists handed over to the administrative and military authorities by the Ukrainophiles.”

“People who recognized themselves as Russian or simply had a Russian name were seized indiscriminately.

Anyone who possessed a Russian newspaper, book, sacred image, or even a postcard from Russia was grabbed, abused, and taken away. And then, there were gallows and executions without end – thousands of innocent victims, seas of martyr blood and orphan tears,” said another Russophile, Julian Yavorsky.

FILE PHOTO. Talerhof in 1917, the place where the camp executions were carried out. © Wikipedia

In October 1914, the Russian writer Mikhail Prishvin, who served as a medical assistant at the front, wrote in his diary: “When I got to Galicia … I felt and saw the living images of the times of the Inquisition.” Prishvin described the feelings of the Galician Rusyns toward Russia as follows: “Galicians dream of a great, pure, and beautiful Russia. A seventeen-year-old schoolboy walked with me around Lvov [now Lviv, then Lemberg] and spoke Russian without an accent. He told me about the persecution of the Russian language. Students were not even allowed to have a map of Russia, and before the war he was forced to burn books by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.”

Hell on earth

The prisons of Galicia were not big enough to accommodate all the repressed. On August 28, 1914, there were two thousand prisoners in Lviv alone. It was then that the Austrian authorities decided to establish concentration camps. In September 1914, the huge Thalerhof place of incarceration was set up in Styria. The first prisoners were delivered on September 4. According to the testimonyof one of the survivors, priest Theodor Merena, prisoners were “people of different class and age”. They included clergy, lawyers, doctors, teachers, officials, peasants, writers, and students. The age of the prisoners ranged from infants to 100-year-olds.

Occasionally, Ukrainian activists who were loyal to the Austrian regime were accidentally placed into Thalerhof. Most of them were removed quickly. One later recalled that all prisoners had a chance to escape by giving up their Russian name and registering as “Ukrainians” in the “Ukrainian list.”

Up to the winter of 1915, there were no barracks in Thalerhof. People slept on the ground in the open air despite the rain and frost. The camp’s sanitary conditions were awful. The latrines were uncovered and used by twenty people at a time. When the barracks were built, they were overcrowded, housing 500 people instead of the intended 200. The prisoners slept on straw beds which were rarely replaced. Naturally, epidemics were widespread. In just two months following November 1914, over three thousand prisoners died of typhus.

“In Thalerhof, death rarely came naturally – it was injected through the poison of infectious diseases. Violent death was commonplace in Thalerhof.

There was no question of any treatment of the sick. Even doctors were hostile toward the prisoners,” wrote imprisoned Rusyn writer Vasily Vavrik.

The prisoners weren’t provided with any adequate medical care. In the beginning, Thalerhof didn’t even have a hospital. People died on the damp ground. However, when the hospital barracks were finally built, the doctors gave almost no medicine to the patients.

FILE PHOTO. Talerhof. Cemetery “under the pines” in 1917. © Wikipedia

To instill fear, prison authorities constructed poles throughout the camp and regularly hung “violators” on these poles. The violation could be a mere trifle, like catching someone smoking in the barrack at night. Iron shackles were also used as punishment, even on women. Moreover, the camp was supplied with barbed wire, observation towers with sentries, barking dogs, posters with slogans, propaganda, torture facilities, a moat for executions, gallows, and a cemetery.

The camp operated for nearly three years and was closed down in May 1917 on the order of Charles I of Austria. The barracks stood on the site until 1936, when they were finally demolished. 1,767 corpses were then exhumed and reburied in a common grave in the nearby village of Feldkirchen.

The exact number of victims in Thalerhof is still disputed. The official report by Field Marshal Schleer dated November 9, 1914, stated that 5,700 Russophiles were imprisoned there at the time. According to one of the survivors, in the autumn of the same year there were about 8,000 prisoners. Twenty to thirty thousand Russian Galicians and Bukovinians passed through Thalerhof in total. In the first year and a half alone, about 3,000 prisoners died. According to other sources, 3,800 people were executed in the first half of 1915. Overall, in the course of the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian authorities killed at least 60,000 Rusyns.

Remembering the forgotten

In the period between the two world wars, the former prisoners strived to preserve the memory of the tragedy that affected Galicia’s Ruthenians and to perpetuate the memory of the victims of Thalerhof. The first monument was erected in 1934, and soon similar memorials appeared in other parts of the region. In the years 1924-1932, the Thalerhof Almanac was published. It provided documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts of the genocide. In 1928 and 1934, Thalerhof congresses, which gathered over 15 thousand participants, were held in Lviv.

FILE PHOTO. The procession of the participants of the Talerhof Congress on the occasion of the opening of the monument to the victims of Talerhof, 1934. © Wikipedia

Galicia became part of the USSR in 1939. Even before Soviet times, there was an unspoken ban on the topic Thalerhof, because the very fact of Russian existence in Galicia was seen as an impediment to Ukrainization, which was actively cultivated in Western Ukraine following World War Two. After Galicia and Volhynia became part of the USSR, most Russophile organizations in Lviv were closed. However, memorial services by the monuments continued. As the eyewitnesses and contemporaries of the events grew older and died, a new generation of Galicians was brought up in the spirit of atheism and took on a Ukrainian national identity. As a result, fewer and fewer people came to the memorials.

In modern Ukraine, the Rusyn genocide isn’t publicly discussed. Thalerhof is not mentioned in any school textbooks on the history of the country. The idea that Russians once lived in Galicia – the proud center of “Ukrainian culture” – does not fit the nationalistic ideology of contemporary Ukraine. Most young people have never even heard of Thalerhof.

The tragedy marked the end of the Russophile movement in Galicia. All those who did not submit and did not take on a Ukrainian identity were physically annihilated. Just a few years after the tragic events, public views changed. The region came under the influence of other movements and politicians. When Austria-Hungary fell apart after the First World War, Galicia turned into a powerful center of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.

FILE PHOTO. Bird’s-eye view of the Talerhof concentration camp. © Wikipedia