Open (Not Ukraine) Thread 2023-136

June 8, 2023

News & views (not related to the war in Ukraine) …

Posted by b on June 8, 2023 at 13:06 UTC | Permalink

Comments

“…IMO, the international legal system will need to be rebuilt after its undermining by the Western nations. That must closely follow the building of new international financial institutions as they will need to be supported by the new legal structure and its institutions since finance, trade and contracts are all need legal bases to function properly.” karlof1@100
You are obviously correct. But it doesn’t end there: all internatinal institutions have been corrupted beyond hope of repair by the bullying and bribery carried out by the US government.
Those who value the ideals of the eleanor Roosevelts etc of this world are going to have to start again. And they will probably be looking to BRICS to come up with international institutions for a multi-polar world, in which nations really will be equals, in the face of the law.

Posted by: bevin | Jun 10 2023 23:50 utc | 101

“.. with “experts” like this, the Americans don’t even need enemies.” Writes Pepe at Strategic Culture.
It’s something that we all understand. From the moment that the Soviet Union collapsed and the US was left, unchallenged, as the Hegemon, every nerve that Washington could summon has been strained to the task of self immolation.
It began with the utter folly, not to mention inhuman cruelty, of the Shock Therapy looting of Russia, accompanied by the torpedoing of the representative democracy that the US had been pretending to want since Mark Twain’s time. That knocked ten years off the life expectancy of every Russian. And it made Putin inevitable.
By the same token US efforts to turn the Warsaw Pact into an attack dog for NATO, made the current war inevitable.
And then there was the real programme of folly: the wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Libya to make certain that there wasn’t an idiot on earth left who believed in American democracy or honesty.
Those wars made not only BRICS but the long list of applications to join it, inevitable.
The current Ukraine policy, masterminded by Biden’s Deaf Dumb and Blind Boys, was just the icing on the Bye-Bye Hegemony cake.
The game was already over, but what’s happening in Ukraine brings the funeral closer.
In other News: Justin Trudeau has announced that the Antonov Airfreighter that Ottawa hired during the Covid emergency has now been confiscated and will be given to Ukraine. So it will be back in Russiamn hands sooner than was thought.

Posted by: bevin | Jun 11 2023 0:20 utc | 102

ZH has a posting up wiht the title
Leaked Video Shows D.C. Cops Were ‘Rioters’ And Instigators At J-6 Protest
The quote

Congressman Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) says the authenticated GoPro video raises the question of why police officers, who were identified as intelligence officers, were working to stir up the crowd of protesters instead of working to stop an assault on the Capitol.
At one point in the video, the unidentified police officer equipped with the camera said to another he thought the idea was to get people inside the Capitol Building and trap them inside. The observation by the undercover officer leads one to conclude that there was intelligence about a plan to attack the Capitol and the apparent response by the police was to let them do it and take pictures.
When another alleged officer on the video saw people climbing the scaffolding, he told the officer with the GoPro, “That’s dangerous. Somebody’s going to get shot.” A third alleged officer said, “They’re not going to shoot anybody.” Yet, they encouraged and participated in the dangerous activity.
As the group of officers worked their way through the crowd and to the scaffolding, they joined in with the protesters’ chants, “Whose house? Our house!”

Posted by: psychohistorian | Jun 11 2023 1:05 utc | 103

@ karlof1 | Jun 10 2023 23:26 utc | 100
thanks.. i agree with your conclusions, but it seems we are a long ways from that being witnessed..

Posted by: james | Jun 11 2023 2:52 utc | 104

@ bevin | Jun 11 2023 0:20 utc | 102 – “the Antonov Airfreighter that Ottawa hired during the Covid emergency has now been confiscated and will be given to Ukraine. So it will be back in Russian hands sooner than was thought”
Thank you! I had not thought that through to the obvious conclusion. Hah. Self-immolation can have its lighter side.

Posted by: Grieved | Jun 11 2023 4:34 utc | 105

@ psychohistorian | Jun 11 2023 1:05 utc | 103
Yeah, I never saw a trap more trap-like than that affair. It was so obvious, and one can only speculate how Trump felt when he finally realized that the jaws had snapped around his own play, victim to the larger play that saw his one coming – while he in his foolishness never saw that one coming.
His silence and absence at that moment spoke like the plot of a novel as the reality of the trap dawned on him. He had thrown his own best people over the cliff.
Or so one supposes.
One can only guess, in the absence of presence of the man who walked so blindly into such an obvious play. I guess his mind was filled with other scenarios and he neglected the one at hand. One wonders if he actually learned anything from that, or if the rampant voices in his mind ever do settle long enough for that kind of understanding to occur.
Anyway – 2024. What a year it promises to be. Tears of rage, tears of joy, but not one sigh of contentment.
Drama, thy name is America.

Posted by: Grieved | Jun 11 2023 4:49 utc | 106

Ново з | Jun 10 2023 11:39 utc | 91–
Thanks for your reply. IMO, Ms. Zakharova’s motivation is to remind the world of the UK’s crimes of which they’re many. That motivation comes from the longstanding rivalry between Russia and the British Crown that of course include the lies about the Skripals and those who came before and after that unfortunate pair who are most likely dead.
Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 10 2023 22:31 utc | 98
.
.
Well if Sergei (дебилы бляд) Lavrov’s floosy, Kalinka Malinka thinks NZ is an easy target then she needs to be aware that we have measures against Russia that have suceeded for the last 140 years!
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/restored-disappearing-gun-wins-heritage-awardhttps://flicense.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-russians-are-coming-disappearing.html
But seriously, with regard to the Skripals (slav for fiddle?), several years ago, a friend was at an exhibtion opening at a small art gallery only about a km from the disappearing gun mentioned above and he said there was a couple speaking Russian to each other who resembled the Skripals..

Posted by: Ново з | Jun 11 2023 5:15 utc | 107

Posted by: Ново з | Jun 11 2023 5:15 utc | 108

sorry, should be
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/restored-disappearing-gun-wins-heritage-award
https://flicense.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-russians-are-coming-disappearing.html

Posted by: Ново з | Jun 11 2023 5:22 utc | 109

sorry, should be
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/restored-disappearing-gun-wins-heritage-award
https://flicense.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-russians-are-coming-disappearing.html

Posted by: Ново з | Jun 11 2023 5:22 utc | 110

@stratus #81:

I don’t think that its been mentioned, at Andrei Martyanov’s site a commenter provided a link to an interview with Maria Z. She is interviewed by a journalist from anti-spiegel. It looks like her German is as good as her English.

Thomas Röper and Mariya Zakharova were talking in Russian. The interview is available here with German subtitles and a transcript in German, which you can machine-translate to your language.

Posted by: S | Jun 11 2023 12:39 utc | 111

Posted by: Grieved | Jun 11 2023 4:49 utc | 106

One can only guess, in the absence of presence of the man who walked so blindly into such an obvious play. I guess his mind was filled with other scenarios and he neglected the one at hand. One wonders if he actually learned anything from that, or if the rampant voices in his mind ever do settle long enough for that kind of understanding to occur.
Anyway – 2024. What a year it promises to be. Tears of rage, tears of joy, but not one sigh of contentment.
Drama, thy name is America.

I’ve given up trying to determine if he is witting or unwitting controlled opposition and if he means it when he says the mission of his candidacy this time around is to rid the country of the Deep State entirely and restore the Republic. Or not.
But one thing, I think, is clear. He – and millions like him – believe in an idea, an idealized ‘America’ in which protestors would not have been trapped in that way and the Press and Congress would not have gone along with such narrative framing it so effectively as an ‘insurrection’ that even over two years later a Congressman can summarize that day as a clear example of a President urging his followers to bring down the Republic and he doesn’t get booed and hissed out of the chamber, and people are still being arrested and denied due process simply for being there – or so we are being told. Who knows what is true any more.
I had opened up a Twitter account a year or so before and started to use it more often after the election; but as I saw the trap spring on that day I closed the account because it was clear that the American political drama had changed from farcical-tragedic-comedy to comedic-farcical tragedy and that Trump, wittingly or not, had consented to play the lead tragedic role, a cross between King Lear and his own Fool, and allow his supporters to become sacrificial lambs in the process. Though neither a supporter nor a detractor, I couldn’t bear to watch so many good-hearted Americans being so abused and have tried to reduce reading about America and her politics ever since – though not always successfully. In any case:
Truth really is stranger than fiction.
Still, perhaps that belief in ‘America’ can prevail and they can actually overthrow the Deep State by simply overcoming all the negative messaging, injustice, distortion and hardship. One of the demographics most hurt by the pandemic – the middle class small business owner – tends to be supportive of the America First agenda (which simply means that elected officials should work for Americans First not globalism etc.) believes in that same ‘America.’ As does RFK Jr. who has arisen as the Ghost of Banquo in time for this 2024 Epic and yet who will be running against most of the people most likely to support him – if it weren’t for the irredeemably toxic Political Party system outside of which I for one would greatly prefer both him and Trump to be operating. But it seems neither man can get over their idea/ideal of the political party system either.
We are trapped in a Matrix of Idea. The idea of ‘America,’ of ‘elections,’ of ‘democracy’ and so much more. These are the original traps. How can you run for President without buying into these Ideas? So sincere candidates are dupes on some level, suckers, whilst the Establishment puts in sub-par performances by the likes of Biden, Harris and Blinken.
Drama indeed. But they used to put on a much better show, didn’t they? Probably it was always this corrupt but they hid it better. I suspect many would be happy if we could just get back to that – corrupt, sure, but well produced illusion of it not so being. But no, the screws are turning, a war is coming, and billions are going to suffer far more than the inconvenience of watching poorly produced Reality TV Republic Episodes such as the current Election 2024 Season!

Posted by: Scorpion | Jun 11 2023 13:13 utc | 112

Lithuanian Jews are calling for the removal of the monument to the Holocaust participant, and the authorities are against this (EurAsia Daily, June 10, 2023 — in Russian)

The chairman of the Jewish community in Ukmergė and the district of the same name, Artūras Taicas, calls for the removal of the monument to the murderer of Jews, lieutenant of the Lithuanian bourgeois army Juozas Krikštaponis.
This was reported from the scene on Saturday, June 10, by EADaily’s Baltic correspondent. It is noted that the mayor of the city Darius Varnas actively opposes the idea of dismantling.
The reason is that since the summer of 1944, a participant in the Holocaust, Krikštaponis, has been engaged in underground fighting against Soviet power and, according to Lithuanian standards, is a “forest brother.”
This category of “freedom fighters” was patronized by all Lithuanian presidents, and there hasn’t been a single case where investigative measures were initiated against one of the post-war bandits because of participation in the executions of Jews.
“The crimes of Krikštaponis are legally proven by the documents of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. If the Lithuanian society believes that the person who shot people is worthy of a monument, it is proposed to remember other murderers and also honor their memory,” Artūras Taicas told the Lithuanian press.
As EADaily previously reported, in 1941–1944, according to various estimates, 190–200 thousand Jews in Europe were exterminated on the territory of present-day Lithuania. The exact number of victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania is unknown.

Posted by: S | Jun 11 2023 13:24 utc | 113

Posted by: TM | Jun 9 2023 7:02 utc | 57

I haven’t had a chance to watch Tucker Carlson’s second Twitter show yet, but the first was a fascinating mix of themes. In particular, he starts out with a Ukraine discussion that MOA would largely agree with (though he couldn’t quite say the U.S. blew up the pipeline, for example). He follows that up with – ALIEN SPACESHIPS!!! WTF?

Ha! It’s simple: the US Empire is going through a transition into Brave New World Globalism along with all other major nations and peoples. We need to get past quaint notions of nation states, borders, languages, cultures and all that stuff. We’ve got sufficiently good AI algorithms and computer simulation ability these days to trot out some bona fide virtual aliens who can handle live press questions. They won’t be in the room with them because they will be in special atmospheric chambers somewhere in an undisclosed location, but they will be hooked up to live feed and you can ask them questions and they will talk back, gesticulate, even answer your question far more lucidly than the current US President can – and many would argue the previous one too!
These Advanced Beings will step in to prevent Nuclear War, probably next summer in the lead-in to the next US election which has become too surrealistic for ordinary humans to process and threatens to collapse the world economy due to terminal cognitive dissonance of well over a billion people. (We are all interconnected so the disease will spread world wide like a veritable pandemic.)
So we desperately need a Deus Ex Machina principle to step in and save us from ourselves. Stop all this petty squabbling for reasons none of us can explain or understand. We need Higher Governance, Global Governance, assisted by the kind Emissary of the Intergalactical Federation of Advanced Societies, which we are now being invited to join lest we blow ourselves up by mistake.
And just like they believe everything else presented to them on the screen, the human population will believe this.
If we think things are bad now, well, as the old saw goes:
‘you ain’t seen nothing yet!’

Posted by: Scorpion | Jun 11 2023 13:28 utc | 114

Cont’d from #113
While we’re on the topic on former Soviet republics erecting monuments to Holocaust perpetrators, here’s another news piece from two months ago:
The Wiesenthal Center demands Sandu removes monuments to Romanian fascists in Chişinău (EurAsia Daily, April 17, 2023 — in Russian)

The Simon Wiesenthal Center (a U.S. NGO dedicated to protecting human rights, combating terrorism, anti-Semitism and studying the Holocaust) urged Moldovan President Maia Sandu to remove two monuments in honor of “fanatical Romanian anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators.”
The first monument on the Alley of Classics in the Ștefan cel Mare Central Park, a bust of former Romanian Prime Minister Octavian Goga, was recently installed in Chişinău. One of the capital’s streets is also named after him.
“Goga is known for passing laws that deprived a third of the Jews of the country of citizenship, and he co-founded the National Christian Party, which had a swastika on its emblem and carried out anti-Semitic acts of violence—a notorious anti-Semite,” emphasized the director of the Center for Eastern European Affairs, Dr. Efraim Zuroff.
The second monument, which Dr. Zuroff calls “extremely offensive,” is located in the Valea Morilor Park in the Moldovan capital. It is part of a larger memorial dedicated to the “liberation” of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina by the Romanian army, during which 150,000 of the 205,000 Jews of Bessarabia living there at the time were murdered.
Recall that in October 2021, an opening ceremony of the monument dedicated to the “heroes” of the Romanian army, “General Pavel Ion Georgescu’s spring”, took place in the Chişinău park. In this way, the Moldovan authorities decided to immortalize the participation of Romanians on the side of Nazi Germany in World War II. They believe that in this way they are honoring the memory of the victims of political repressions of the Soviet period.
In 1940, units of the Red Army entered the territory of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which were under the boot of royal Romania for more than 22 years. Unionists consider this date the beginning of the “Soviet occupation.”
In modern Moldova, vandals regularly destroy and desecrate the memorials of Soviet soldiers-liberators. Despite the prescribed regulations and punishment for vandalism, no one has ever been held accountable for such crimes.
The current puppet president of the Republic of Moldova, Maia Sandu, calls the Nazi criminal Romanian Ion Antonescu “a bright historical figure,” and also believes that the Romanian soldiers who fought on the side of the Nazis “fought for the reunification of the country, liberating Moldova from Soviet occupation.”
The Russian Embassy in Chişinău has repeatedly stated that “the flywheel of Russophobia and fascism is being spun in Moldova.”
As EADaily reported, in April 2022 53 MPs of the president’s ruling Party of Action and Solidarity passed a law in the final reading banning the demonstration of the St. George ribbon, which was called “a symbol of Russian aggression.” The Victory Banner was also banned. According to Sandu, “these symbols belong in the dustbin of history.”

Posted by: S | Jun 11 2023 13:58 utc | 115

As a dog returning to its vomit, the old colonial countries, in an era in which everything is crumbling around them reaches out for the one certainty they have always had: racism.
As Alex Lo in the South China Morning Post explains
“..Ottawa is undergoing a mini-red scare. Egged on by deliberate media leaks from the country’s intelligence agencies, paranoid politicians and scoop-seeking journalists are seeing Chinese state interference everywhere.
“In response, the unpopular Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed former governor general David Johnston as a “special rapporteur” to examine the leaks alleging Chinese interference, particularly in two recent elections.
“In an interim report, Johnson concluded that whatever Chinese influence operations were carried out, they had no impact on the outcomes of the elections. That was exactly what election officials had said before. Trudeau concurs and says he will not launch a special commission to investigate, at least for now….”
Iy might need clarification but, for those not paying attention, the villain in this matter is not Trudeau-Silly Arse though he is- but the Conservative opposition and its allies in the media are assisting a CIA attempt to take control of Defence and Foreign policy and ensure that it never deviates from Washington’s.
It is beginning to look as if a coup is planned to dump Trudeau, Nazi birthmarked Chrystia would be the obvious replacement, and set up a coalition government to see Canada through the ‘national emergency.’
“What ’emergency’?” a rational person might enquire. And the answer is Ukraine, where Canadian involvement, from the beginning, and Ottawa’s sponsorship and training of Nazi militias, has joined the fortunes of Canada’s political castes with those of the hapless gang surrounding Zelensky, a professional rather than, like Trudeau, an amateur actor.

Posted by: bevin | Jun 11 2023 14:25 utc | 116

link to 116
https://socialistincanada.ca/what-used-to-be-called-the-yellow-peril-by-western-powers-is-now-the-china-threat/

Posted by: bevin | Jun 11 2023 14:26 utc | 117

Can the real agent provocateur please stand up…?
Bandits crying robbery !
Exhibit 1001
brazen coup plotters in Solomon scream ‘Chinese interference’ !
https://www.thecanadafiles.com/articles/us-agent-defeated-in-solomon-islands-comes-to-ottawa-assists-china-hysteria

Posted by: denk | Jun 11 2023 15:43 utc | 118

Posted by: bevin | Jun 10 2023 15:02 utc | 95
I’m a little disappointed that you didn’t already know that I know all of that. Sorry but I totally forgot about this thread, so maybe I’ll move this comment (or paste it) in the new O/T.
And for you to hone in on Biden when in fact he’s just another example of capitalist corruption is also a little disappointing. Of course I know that the Ukraine war is being waged in large part to cover for the Biden Crime Syndicate’s actions in that country and on behalf of gangster finance capitalists everywhere. Let’s face facts, do you really think this will result in GTNW? If so, how are you any different than ‘young’ or ‘shadowbanned’? Might as well start ‘prepping’, right?

Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Jun 11 2023 19:00 utc | 119

Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Jun 10 2023 15:35 utc | 96
What in the ever loving fuck? Where is “Anti-FA” even relevant to anything going on? Did we miss a news item or something?
If it wasn’t anti-fascists who got burned alive in the trade unionist building, or who were -along with cops and others- sniped at Maidan or beaten after being dragged from a bus on the way back to Crimea, then who was it?
Could you please point us to Anti-FA’s website or corporate headquarters so that we can lodge a formal complaint about their lack of protestation of Ukraine’s nazis and the ANTI-Anti-FA US Democrat government’s support of them?
Get off Newsmaxx, my friend.

Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Jun 11 2023 19:05 utc | 120

@Tom_Q_Collins #120:

If it wasn’t anti-fascists who got burned alive in the trade unionist building, or who were -along with cops and others- sniped at Maidan or beaten after being dragged from a bus on the way back to Crimea, then who was it?

Sorry for being pedantic, but most people sniped at Maidan were actually Svoboda party members, i.e., fascists—shot by their own fascist “brothers” and foreign mercenaries to create the necessary “optics” for ousting Yanukovich, who has already agreed to all demands of Maidan protesters and even signed an agreement with Western envoys.

Posted by: S | Jun 11 2023 19:59 utc | 121

Posted by: S | Jun 11 2023 19:59 utc | 121
Fair. I should have been more clear and not lumped the sniper victims into my comment. There were others burned in Mariupol, IIRC, that I could’ve used as examples instead.

Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Jun 11 2023 20:22 utc | 122

Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 10 2023 23:26 utc | 100
Thanks for that. I’ll do my little (tiny, tiny) bit to spread it around. Is there anything at all to be said for our Western World that we used to be so proud of and secure in?

Posted by: abrogard | Jun 12 2023 19:00 utc | 123

I agree absolutely with all of this that i know about.
But I don’t know it all. I never knew about the looting of Russia. And it all apparently happened during my adult life.
I would like to know about it now.
Was it ever disclosed via the media in the West? Should I have known?
What books can I consult now to read up on it?

Posted by: abrogard | Jun 13 2023 6:05 utc | 124

Posted by: abrogard | Jun 13 2023 6:06 utc | 125

I never knew about the looting of Russia. …
Was it ever disclosed via the media in the West? Should I have known?
What books can I consult now to read up on it?
Posted by: abrogard | Jun 13 2023 6:05 utc | 124
Minimal coverage in the West, of course. You should have known but to learn now
will help put current events into place, imo. Here’s a place to start: Harvard mafia

Posted by: waynorinorway | Jun 13 2023 6:38 utc | 126

This might be interesting to some of you. Professor James Hansen et al., in their recent
“Pipeline Paper”, attempt to break it to the world that Earth’s rate of warming just ratcheted up another notch since 2010, and that recent declines in airborne aerosols are driving this acceleration.
Under the “Policy Implications” heading, Hansen offers his own views, including three proposed solutions: (1) Fee-and-dividend to increase the cost to everyone of fossil fuels, (2) Nuclear power, and (3) Solar Radiation Management (SRM) — probably SO2 pumped into the stratosphere to produce a few years of whiter, cooler skies.
Perhaps the saddest token of Hansen’s confusion is his terse summation of world history:

After World War II, in leading the formation of the United Nations, the World Bank, the Marshall Plan, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the
United States reached a peak close to being the aspired “shining city on a hill.”

If I’ve learned nothing else, over the past year and a half, from ongoing history and from people like b devoted to truth: That exceptional post-WWII narrative Hansen recounts… he touches directly, if accidentally, on the most basic lie threatening Life on Earth, blocking even momentary suspension of suicidal policy.

Posted by: Aleph_Null | Jun 13 2023 20:33 utc | 127

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