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Quenelle - Golden

SOTT Focus: Iranian Professor: 'Iran Will Retaliate if Attacked. Get Over it'

Seyed Mohammad Marandi
Middle East Eye
Tue, 24 Apr 2018 15:50 UTC
Rouhani Iran
© AFPIranian President Hassan Rouhani (L) and senior members of his armed forces watch a parade on the occasion of the country's annual army day on 18 April 2018, in Tehran
"The White Man's Burden" - or perhaps, the better-phrased "the burden of the white man" - has arguably been the greatest yoke in human history. When asked about his thoughts on Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi reportedly replied: "it would be a good idea."

While western intellectuals do voice criticism over their governments' global policies, failings are too often blamed on political parties, poor leadership, ineffectual strategies, not enough funding, weapons or "will". But venture further for a moment to consider whether the problem isn't more foundational - whether the "western" construction of knowledge itself isn't fraught with troubling inadequacies.

Too few mainstream intellectuals are even prepared to entertain the idea that perhaps western social structures and their underlying epistemology of values are so irredeemably flawed that they make western political regimes a serious burden to human existence.
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USA

SOTT Focus: The U.S. Role in the Destruction of Syria

David Ray Griffin
Sott.net
Wed, 25 Apr 2018 19:19 UTC
Editor's note: The text below that is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of David Ray Griffin's book: "Global Chaos," of Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World constitues perhaps the most complete condensed and objectively true description of the causes of the 7 year long war in Syria. It is well worth taking the time to read it.
Syrian soldier liberated Syria
In Syria, the goal of creating chaos has succeeded in spades. Mnar Muhawesh wrote: "[F]oreign powers have sunk the nation into a nightmare combination of civil war, foreign invasion and terrorism. Syrians are in the impossible position of having to choose between living in a warzone, being targeted by groups like ISIS and the Syrian government's brutal crack- down, or faring dangerous waters with minimal safety equipment only to be denied food, water and safety by European governments if they reach shore."
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No Entry

SOTT Focus: British Baroness After Fact-Finding Trip to Syria: Syrians Support Assad But BBC Won't Acknowledge This


RT
Tue, 24 Apr 2018 03:19 UTC
Bashar al-Assad
© SANA / ReutersSyria's President Bashar al-Assad greets his supporters during Eid al-Adha prayers on September 1, 2017, Syria.
Most Syrians support their president and military, but the BBC presents Britons with a different, one-sided story, a British baroness and member of the House of Lords told RT, after returning from a trip to the war-torn country.

Caroline Cox, a baroness and Life Peer in the House of Lords, recently returned from a tour of several Syrian cities, during which she spoke with a "wide range of people," including government officials, opposition leaders, artists, intellectuals, writers and ordinary Syrians walking in the park.

According to Baroness Cox, despite claims from western governments and media outlets, the vast majority of Syrians are thankful to President Bashar Assad and the Syrian and Russian militaries for fighting Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIL) and jihadist groups.

The Syrian people "are very grateful to the Syrian Army, to Assad and, I may say, for Russian help in getting rid of the terrorists. They are the perpetrators of the most appalling atrocities and killings."

Comment: See also: Elections in Syria 2016 defy US, NATO criminals, liars and hypocrites' attempt to deny the will of the Syrian people

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Gold Seal

SOTT Focus: Craig Murray: Complete disillusionment with the UK Establishment

Craig Murray
craigmurray.org.uk
Tue, 24 Apr 2018 11:58 UTC
Theresa May
© Reuters
The second half of my life has been a continual process of disillusionment with the institutions I used to respect. I suppose it started with the FCO, where I went from being Britain's youngest ambassador to being sacked for opposing the use of intelligence from torture, at the same time having an insider view of the knowing lies about Iraqi WMD being used as a pretext for invasion and resource grab.

I still had some residual respect for the BBC, which respect disappeared during the Scottish independence referendum where BBC propaganda and disregard for the truth were truly shameless. My love of the universities was severely tested during my period as Rector of Dundee University, when I saw how far the corporate model had turned them from academic communities developing people and pursuing knowledge, to relentless churners out of unconsidered graduates and financially profitable research, with nearly all sense of community gone.

My respect for charities vanished when I discovered Save the Children was paying its chief executive £370,000 and had become a haven for New Labour politicos on huge salaries, which was why it was so involved in pushing a pro-war narrative in Syria. When Justin Forsyth and Brendan Cox - both massively salaried employees who came into Save the Children from the revolving door of Gordon Brown's office - were outed over sexual predation, that seemed a natural result of "charities" being headed by rich party hacks rather than by simple people trying to do good. As for respect for parliament, well the massive troughing expenses scandal and all those protected paedophiles...
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TV

SOTT Focus: Keep Calm & Blame Russia: RT Documentary on Inconvenient Facts in Skripal Saga

Murad Gazdiev
RT
Tue, 24 Apr 2018 10:42 UTC
salisbury chemcial hazmat suits
If countless Russia-bashing pieces don't help you get the big picture of the lingering Skripal saga, a report by RT's Murad Gazdiev may. He scrutinized the major slipups in the UK government's (and their pundits') narrative.

It is "highly likely" that Russia deployed a deadly weapons-grade toxin to poison former double agent Sergei Skripal. Porton Down, the UK's leading chemical research lab, says there is "no doubt" the toxin was Novichok-class nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union. And Russia surely did it, because the very word 'Novichok' is Russian for 'newcomer.'

RT's Murad Gazdiev examines the stunning discrepancies that emanate from the Skripal case, as the blame game against Moscow continues.

The report includes commentary from renowned chemical weapon experts, both Russian and Western-based, who told RT the formula of Novichok-class agents is actually an open secret as any - yes, you heard it right - laboratory in the world may produce the same substance with the same degree of purity. Moreover, the pace at which the UK authorities identified the poison used on the Skripals raises even more questions.

Watch RT's report in full here:


Comment: Given that it wasn't Russia, suspicions naturally fell on the British security services. But the choice of location for poisoning the Skripals is highly odd - Salisbury, home of British chemical weapons manufacturing for a little over a century. Why would the British paint a target over themselves in this way?

Combined with the British government's utterly bizarre handling of this incident - while being utterly convinced that this was done to them 'from without' - we are led to suspect a 'third force' was behind this.

As former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray wrote one week after the incident in early March:
Israel has the nerve agents. Israel has Mossad, which is extremely skilled at foreign assassinations. Theresa May claimed Russian propensity to assassinate abroad as a specific reason to believe Russia did it. Well, Mossad has an even greater propensity to assassinate abroad. And while I am struggling to see a Russian motive for damaging its own international reputation so grievously, Israel has a clear motivation for damaging the Russian reputation so grievously. Russian action in Syria has undermined the Israeli position in Syria and Lebanon in a fundamental way, and Israel has every motive for damaging Russia's international position by an attack aiming to leave the blame on Russia.


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Colosseum

SOTT Focus: Empire Collapse: Russian Missile Tech Renders America's Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete

Dmitry Orlov
Russia Insider
Sat, 21 Apr 2018 22:42 UTC
kinzhal hypersonic missile
Kinzhal ('dagger') hypersonic missile being test-fired by the Russian military
For the past 500 years European nations - Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, Britain, France and, briefly, Germany - were able to plunder much of the planet by projecting their naval power overseas. Since much of the world's population lives along the coasts, and much of it trades over water, armed ships that arrived suddenly out of nowhere were able to put local populations at their mercy.

The armadas could plunder, impose tribute, punish the disobedient, and then use that plunder and tribute to build more ships, enlarging the scope of their naval empires. This allowed a small region with few natural resources and few native advantages beyond extreme orneriness and a wealth of communicable diseases to dominate the globe for half a millennium.

The ultimate inheritor of this naval imperial project is the United States, which, with the new addition of air power, and with its large aircraft carrier fleet and huge network of military bases throughout the planet, is supposedly able to impose Pax Americana on the entire world. Or, rather, was able to do so - during the brief period between the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of Russia and China as new global powers and their development of new anti-ship and antiaircraft technologies. But now this imperial project is at an end.
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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: Behind the Headlines: Russian Trolls? Let's Talk About British and US Mainstream Media As Unabashed Government Mouthpieces


Sott.net
Sun, 22 Apr 2018 16:00 UTC
russian bot
Those of us with a functioning BS meter and a decent grip on reality have known for many years that the mainstream media has, at least periodically, operated as a fifth branch of government (in the USA) and the 'Ministry of Truth' (in the UK). In recent years however, on all geopolitical topics - in particular those relating to Russia and the 'War on Terror' - the Western press seems to have fully embraced the role of Western government mouthpieces.

In recent months and weeks, with the outrageous claims over the Skripal affair and the 'chemical weapons attack' in Douma, Syria, the US, British and French governments have sunk to new lows (or new highs) in the blatancy of their lies and fabrications, the vast majority of them aimed at Russia.

Tune in this week when your hosts will be discussing the problem that is the Western media from 12-1:30pm EDT / 6-7:30pm CET this Sunday April 22nd.

Running Time: 01:42:12

Download: MP3

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Headphones

SOTT Focus: Trump's 'Mission Accomplished' Moment: What Next for the Middle East? Niall Bradley Speaks With Sputnik


Sputnik
Sat, 21 Apr 2018 17:20 UTC
bashar assad
Trump boasted on Twitter that the US-led strikes on Syria last weekend were a "mission accomplished", which drew criticism from many who likened it to Bush's infamously premature statement about Iraq.

There were differing reports about how many missiles were shot down by Syria's Soviet-era air defense systems and the scale of damage that was wrought by the ones that did get through the country's anti-missile shield, but the general consensus is that Trump's mission didn't accomplish much and may have even been more militarily ineffective than last year's strike in reaction to the Khan Sheikhoun false flag chemical weapons attack from that time. Furthermore, a bold statement such as "mission accomplished" implies a victory much broader than just launching some missiles, most of which are regarded as having never even made it to their targets.
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Robot

SOTT Focus: UK Man Demolishes Sky News Hosts, Slams Neocon Wars After Being Smeared as 'Russian Bot' by Western media


Sputnik
Sat, 21 Apr 2018 11:00 UTC
ian56 sky news
An interview with a prolific Twitter user accused by the British government of being a "Russian Bot" quickly turned heated as challenged their arguments, particularly their claim that by not toeing the UK government line, he was "anti-Britain" - and perhaps even a Kremlin agent.


It all started with a blog post from the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the DC-based, Gulf-funded think tank Atlantic Council, which said that some of the conversations about the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal "appear to involve organized activity, including possibly fake accounts masquerading as English users, in the well-known pattern of the 'troll factory' in St. Petersburg." The post devotes a substantial portion of space to Twitter user @Ian56789, cited as an "unusual account" that was "especially active" on the subject.


​The British government claimed on Thursday to have concluded that there was a 4,000 percent increase in activity from Russian trolls following the Skripal poisoning and the West's attack on Syria on April 14, naming @Ian56789, hereinafter 'Ian,' as one of the Kremlin's accounts.

The US government, for its part, claimed there was a "2,000 percent increase in Russian trolls," as opposed to activity therefrom, although that was just in reference to Syria, not the poisoning in Salisbury.

Comment: Ian56 also penned a response - Why I'm Not a Russian Bot - on his blog.

Sott.net editors chimed in to congratulate Ian on Twitter, to which the Sky News Defence Correspondent, Alistair Bunkall, responded:


Wethinks he doth protesteth too much, so we told him so:



Since this rise in 'Russian bots', the mainstream outlets have gone into overdrive trying to contain the alternate reports to the situation in Syria.

See also: Syrian Crisis Shows US Empire Losing Hegemony as Western Mainstream Media Losing Grip Over Narrative

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Popcorn

SOTT Focus: Syrian Crisis Shows US Empire Losing Hegemony as Western Mainstream Media Losing Grip Over Narrative

Andrés Perezalonso
Sott.net
Fri, 20 Apr 2018 21:42 UTC
Hassan Diab child chemical attack Douma Syria
© South FrontHassan Diab appears in the video of the victims of the 'chemical attack' in Douma. Later the boy explained to Russian media how the event was staged.
Two of the most remarkable facts concerning the April 14th attack on Syria by the US, UK and France are:
  1. Materially, the attacks were completely ineffective, as explained by Joe Quinn's article About Those 'Nice, New, Smart' Missiles And The 'Chemical Weapons' Sites in Syria. The Syrians understood this, which is why they were celebrating rather than mourning when the sun came up.
  2. They were carried out hours before the OPCW mission reached Syria and right after the Russian Ministry of Defense began showing testimonies of local doctors denying there was a chemical attack in Douma. This suggests F.UK.US. were in a hurry to make a show of force before the facts could be properly analyzed while distracting attention away from the evidence.
Rather than demonstrating strength, these facts speak of weakness, impotence and a desire to compensate with theatrics. The US knows it cannot go too far in its pursuit of regime change in Syria because it risks paying a heavy price at the hands of Russia. Even if it could take out all Russian forces in Syria, it is not willing to lose any ships, aircraft or personnel and thus lose its status as the supreme global military force. Furthermore, there is always the risk of escalation, which is madness when it comes to nuclear powers. The Americans are acutely aware that they are playing with fire, which explains how careful they were to stay away from Russian targets. The attack was carefully measured to appear stronger than last year's, yet not strong enough to provoke Russia into action. This could also explain, in part, why the Trump administration is seeking to replace US troops in Syria with an Arab force, as it is much safer (and cheaper) to fight with proxy forces.

In the aftermath of the strikes on Syria, and as more information is coming out about the chemical attack that never was, it is becoming increasingly clear that Western mainstream media outlets are also losing their dominant positions and their grip on the narrative.
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