Broadcasting from deep in the heart of the American Empire, join your host Harrison Koehli and fellow Sott.net editors as they discuss everything from current events and the latest machinations and manipulations of the global elite to history, science, and religion, and how it all fits together.
This week, we discussed a range of topics, from Jihadi John and prisons in the USA to the glorification of psychopathy in American culture, and the latest in Ukraine.
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Martyrdom on demand: if not of use alive, perhaps of use dead? US-backed opposition groups in Russia have so far failed utterly to produce results. Their transparent subservience to Washington coupled with their distasteful brand of politics has left a rather unpleasant taste in the mouth of most Russians. Each attempt to spread the "virus" of color revolution to Moscow, as US Senator John McCain called it, has failed - and each attempt has fallen progressively flatter.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has never been more popular. His ability to weather serial provocations aimed at Russia by NATO has made him a champion against the perceived growing injustice exacted against the developing world by an increasingly militaristic and exploitative West.
So when US-backed opposition groups in Russia decided to gather again this coming March 1, Sunday, many wondered just exactly what they expected to accomplish.
Just before he was jailed for handing out leaflets at a metro station, Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny used his last moments in a Moscow court to record a video urging supporters to join a March 1 protest against President Vladimir Putin.
Navalny's removal from the "Spring" rally by a 15-day sentence underlined the beleaguered state of an opposition movement that brought 100,000 onto Moscow's streets three years ago as well as the Kremlin's unease about the potential for unrest in Russia.
Squeezed by government persecution and Putin's near-record approval rating, Russia's opposition is betting that an unfolding economic crisis will spark a spring revolt on a scale last seen at the winter protests of 2011-2012, the largest since the collapse of Communism 20 years earlier. It seeks to draw as many as 100,000 people to the "anti-crisis march" in Moscow, with protests also planned in 15 other cities. They'll highlight declining living standards and the conflict in eastern Ukraine that triggered U.S. and European Union sanctions against Russia.
The article however, also stated that:
The opposition "hasn't been this weak for many years," Stefan Meister, an analyst at the German Council of Foreign Relations in Berlin, said by phone. "Even when we have a growing economic crisis in Russia, there's still high support for Putin."
Clearly to match the expectations the "spring" rally was meant to have, to infuse the "virus" US Senator McCain had claimed was intended for Moscow, something drastic would have to be done to change the current calculus.
I was recently contemplating the fact that cops in the US are showing no signs of letting up their murderandmayhem when this obscure local news article from Reno, Nevada came my way:
Five Reno police officers have been sent to the Ukraine to help train the force in Kiev in community policing techniques through a Department of Justice program aimed at assisting police forces in emerging democracies.
The Reno Police Department is the first police department in the United States to be selected for such a mission, Chief Steve Pitts wrote in a memo to the City Council.
While the assignment is prestigious, some council members were concerned that they weren't kept in the loop on such a big mission. The first Reno Councilman David Bobzien learned of the mission was in a memo that landed in his inbox while the officers were already en route to Kiev.
What happens when you add out-of-control US cops into a climate where fascism is openly encouraged? 'Reinforcements' who will riddle 'agitators' and 'terrorists' with bullets, then ask questions later? I shudder to imagine.
It's a record that members of Congress should ponder on before they leap to applaud for his upcoming address.
Next week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present his case against President Obama's talks with Iran; he is expected to portray Iran as an untrustworthy actor and Obama's diplomacy as naive and a distraction from more sanctions or even military action.
This case suffered a major setback this week as a major intelligence leak showed that Israel's own intelligence service, the Mossad, privately contradicted Netanyahu's public statements on Iran. The leaked secret cables show that as Netanyahu was presenting at the United Nations in 2012 a narrative that Iran that was just "weeks" away from producing enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, Israel's own intelligence service found a very different conclusion. From The Guardian:
Mossad took a different view. In a report shared with South African spies on 22 October 2012 - but likely written earlier - it conceded that Iran was "working to close gaps in areas that appear legitimate, such as enrichment reactors, which will reduce the time required to produce weapons from the time the instruction is actually given".
Comment: So thirty members of the U.S. congress won't be in attendance for Bibi's address, and Secretary of State John Kerry won't be meeting with him, either, when he visits - but NOT not for any substantive reasons like, say, lying through his teeth in order to induce the U.S. into committing genocide. But, rather, to make a point that has more to do with political maneuvering than anything else. At bottom, the Administration shares the same twisted values as Netanyahu, and these values continue to threaten more misery, suffering and destruction for many millions who are caught within the crosshairs of their unquenchable thirst for world hegemony.
Already in February 2012 (three years ago!) Putin was warning Russians about exactly the kind of false flag which we just saw happening with the murder of Nemtsov. See for yourself:
Note: the Russian word "provocatsiia" is often translated as "provocation" which is not incorrect as long as you are aware that in Russian "provocation" can mean "false flag", as it does in this context. Putin is clearly warning about a false flag "sacrifice".
This video was emergency-translated by one of our "brother in arms", Tatzhit, to whom I am most grateful for this ultra-rapid translation.
As for the "liberal" or "democratic" "non-system" opposition it has already announced that it will convert the planned protest into a memorial rally.
Below is the previous post by the Saker on the event in Moscow
Comment: The fact that the Powers That Be have been unable to create a real opposition movement in Russia and thus needed to create a false flag event shows how desperate they are getting. As the Saker says it will be a major propaganda event in the West.
As tensions between the US and Russia have increased in the last year, so too has the polarization of public opinion. While the western corporate media has reverted to its formerly antagonistic, Cold War era attitude toward Russia - predictably radicalizing much of western public opinion, infusing the discourse with a decidedly Russophobic bias - it has increasingly been left to those on the political margins to deconstruct the false narrative, expose the Empire's agenda, and defend the right of sovereign nations to act independent of western diktats.
And it is here, on the political margins, where many are willing to speak out against the US agenda in Ukraine and beyond, where the real fight for hearts and minds is taking place. The political mainstream will simply go along with the narratives presented to it by the Empire's compliant media, thus ensuring its continued impotence and irrelevance to policy. However, a loud chorus of critics, dissidents, and anti-imperialist voices is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore.
And while on the far right libertarians and paleoconservatives are engaged in their own internal conflict over support for Russia and President Putin, so too is there an internal, quasi-ideological confrontation taking place on the left.
Many self-proclaimed "leftists" have merely transposed their anti-Soviet politics into an anti-Russian ideological posture, which sees in Russia both an embrace of capitalism and a desire for imperial revanchism. In this way, such groups (numerous on what passes for the "organized Left") run interference for the political establishment, serving to dilute the potency of an anti-imperialist message through internecine conflict, demonization, and sectarianism. They proclaim that there is nothing about Russia worth defending for leftists. But is this true?
Comment: You know US propaganda is doing its job when even Americans who are weary of it still fall for it. Whether people identify as leftists or not, those who have a genuine concern about the direction the world is headed should be questioning the narratives that fall in line with interests of the pathological elite in the US.
The Western media's latest tall tale is that Russia is supposedly tricking its greenest conscripts into 'invading Ukraine' under the auspices that they're being sent to Rostov instead, and threatening them with detention in a military prison if they refuse.
They got the idea right - young recruits being forced into a war they don't want to fight - but they mixed up the actors and the battlefield; it's actually Ukraine that's forcing its young men to fight in Donbass, not Russia forcing its own to fight in Ukraine.
One doesn't have to take the author's words for it, though, since the Western media has surprisingly published several accounts that corroborate this truth, and they're definitely worth looking into.
The Dangerous Inexperience Of Youth
Ukraine's recruits are dramatically unprepared for war, and actually pose a greater threat to themselves than any 'pro-Russian separatist' does. Take a look at what the UK's The Sunday Times published over the weekend:
"An elite soldier who resigned from the British MobArmy to train Ukrainian forces fighting Russian-backed separatists has revealed the true extent of disarray in Kiev's military.
He said the string of bloody defeats for Ukraine, including last week's fall of Debaltseve, was due largely to a failure of command and a lack of skills and discipline.
The 40-year-old, a naturalised Briton of Ukrainian descent, who served in Afghanistan and the Middle East, said Ukraine's forces, made up largely of volunteers and conscripts, suffer great casualties because of frequent incidents of friendly fire and the mishandling of weapons.
"Six out of 10 casualties among the Ukrainian volunteers occur because of blue-on-blue shooting [the army term for friendly fire] and the inability to handle weapons," said the man, who would give only his nom-de-guerre Saffron."
It's not adults that volunteer for armed service who accidentally shoot themselves or their friends with firearms; it's immature and inexperienced young men who are forced into battle that make such 'mistakes'. For all that is known, it may even be that some of the recruits were purposely inflicting non-fatal injuries on themselves or their friends in order to be dismissed from the front lines and hopefully escape the meat grinder that Poroshenko had forced them into.
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
"To initiate a war of aggression...," said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, "is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
'Now y'all listen to me. This here's what we call a freedom bomb. You throw it at protesters as you drive by, then call it in as a terrorist attack by Shining Path druglords..."
It has been making practically no headlines outside Peru, and hardly any within, but a force of US Marines has apparently been mobilized to the Andean country—specifically to the conflicted coca-growing jungle region known as the VRAE, or Valley of the Apurímac and Ene Rivers. Peru's Congress quietly approved the deployment in a resolution Jan. 29. The first contingent of 58 soldiers arrived on Feb. 1, and a second of 67 troops on Feb. 15. They are to stay for a year on what is being called a "training" mission. A much larger contingent is to arrive in September, a total of 3,200 Marines, for a six-day joint exercise with Peruvian forces. (Defensa.com, Feb. 19)
A small Marine Corps "security cooperation team" returned to the US in late November following a six-week training mission in Villa Rica, a district in central Oxapampa province, Pasco region—an area apparently chosen because its high jungle terrain is similar to that of the VRAE. The mission was apparently to train Peruvian marines for operations in the VRAE, where remnant Shining Path guerillas are said to be working with local narco gangs. Gen. John Kelly, head of US Southern Command, visited the VRAE in September to discuss sharing counterinsurgency skills with Peruvian forces. In a Lima interview with Marine Corps Times, Kelly cited the example of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), long faced by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also used by the guerillas in the VRAE: "What a better way to do it than by joining the experiences our marines face in the VRAEM with what Marines experienced in their conflicts? By putting them together and exchanging those ideas, we increase our knowledge of the problem and find better ways to prevent this type of weapon."
But the deployment is meeting some protest in Peru. Alberto Adrianzen, the country's representative to the Andean Parliament, told TeleSUR the decision to accept the Marines "confirms that the Peruvian government is following a position of not looking for a South American mechanism for defense, which is what many nations propose, but a special relationship with the United States."
Comment: Sure, a 'training' mission to 'stop Shining Path narcotics fiends from subverting Peruvian freedom and democracy'...
Don't you just love how US military expeditions to the garrisons in the Empire's global colonies are always shrouded in the veil of 'protecting our allies from threats'?
70 years they've been doing this now, and no sign of them giving up the ghost.
Putin visited Christian Orthodox holy place, Mount Athos, privately in 2005
President Vladimir Putin made a private pilgrimage Friday to the 1,000-year-old monastic community of Mount Athos, the first Russian head of state ever to set foot in a place regarded as the cradle of Orthodox Christianity.
Putin visited a number of monasteries in the all-male, autonomous sanctuary located on a craggy peninsula in northern Greece. He then flew back to Moscow after driving to the northern port of Thessaloniki.
"I am grateful for the opportunity you gave me to visit the Holy Mountain," Putin told the peninsula's 20 abbots at a welcoming ceremony in Karyes, the medieval community's capital.
"This is a very special place for Orthodox Christians and the whole Christian world. In Russia, we always held the monks who lived here in great admiration and respect."
Dressed in a black suit and shirt, Putin visited the 10th-century Iviron Monastery to view the icon of the Virgin Portaitissa. According to Orthodox tradition, Iviron monks sent a copy of the icon -- the original is thought to date to the ninth century -- to Moscow in the mid-17th century to help cure the sick daughter of Tsar Alexei I.
Comment: So thirty members of the U.S. congress won't be in attendance for Bibi's address, and Secretary of State John Kerry won't be meeting with him, either, when he visits - but NOT not for any substantive reasons like, say, lying through his teeth in order to induce the U.S. into committing genocide. But, rather, to make a point that has more to do with political maneuvering than anything else. At bottom, the Administration shares the same twisted values as Netanyahu, and these values continue to threaten more misery, suffering and destruction for many millions who are caught within the crosshairs of their unquenchable thirst for world hegemony.