Something similar could be said about almost all Western policies except those which make the rich richer. “Is the policy working? No. Are we going to continue? Yes.”
Here’s the thing, AnsarAllah is the only nation in the world taking military action to try and stop the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. During the ceasefire, they stopped attacking ships trading with Israel. When Israel cut off all food and aid, they gave Israel four days warning: restore the aid or we start the attacks again.
Then they did, and then Trump figured that he’d start bombing Yemen again, which won’t do a damn thing except kill a few more people. The Yemenis genuinely don’t give a fuck, they’ve been bombed to hell and back again for the better part of two decades. Unless someone wants to invade and occupy the country, which would take troops in the six figures, I’d guess, there isn’t a damn thing military force will accomplish.
It is tiresome to keep saying this, but Israel, with the full support of many countries, including Britain, Germany and most importantly America (and my own nation, Canada, not that our help amounts to anything) is committing red letter genocide. There is no question about this, it is not “complicated” and there is no possibility of being a moral person, or even not a complete fucking waste of human skin, if you support genocide.
As for Yemen and AnsarAllah, they appear to be the only nation in the world which is fully moral in this respect, and the only nation in the world fully living up to the requirement for nations to actively try and stop genocide. There isn’t much that they can do, given their geography (though they’ve said that if other nations are willing to let their troops thru, they’ll send them, and I believe them) but what they can do, they are doing.
The Biden administration tried to bribe them. They offered full removal of sanctions, recognition of AnsarAllah and lots of money. Yemen refused.
I’m not even close to AnsarAllah ideologically, but I am reluctantly forced to say that I admire them and Yemen more than any other country in the world for the uncompromising refusal to look the other way and do nothing when there is something they can do.
As for the West, with a few exceptions like Ireland and Spain, we have proved ourselves irredeemably evil, not so much because we refuse to act against Israel, but because we actively help this genocide along. We have no moral figleafs left, we are revealed to the world for the monsters we are.
Perhaps China has done nothing, but at least they aren’t sending Israel weapons, and they have the bare decency to deplore the genocide. We can’t even manage that, but instead are arresting those who dare stand up and even say “genocide is bad.”
Pathetic.
Let us hope there is no just God. If there is, let us tremble for our nations.
The U.S. Navy has used more missiles for air defense since combat operations in the Red Sea began in October 2023 than the service used in all the years since Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s…
… the Navy will need years to replenish its supply of missiles…
…The Navy also revealed in January that it had fired 160 rounds from ships’ five-inch main guns as part of combat operations in the Red Sea. Those main gun rounds have been used to destroy Houthi drones, Clark said.
“They have been using guns to shoot down drones lately,” Clark said.
Not only are the 5-inch rounds less expensive than missiles, but the Houthi drones often fly too low or too close to the ship to be hit with missiles, Clark said.
“What often happens is these really small drones get close enough to where the missile can’t really engage in time, because the missile has a minimum range, also,” Clark said.
Mark Level
“I’m not even close to AnsarAllah ideologically, but I am reluctantly forced to say that I admire them and Yemen more than any other country in the world for the uncompromising refusal to look the other way and do nothing when there is something they can do.”– Larry Johnson, in a roundtable hosted by Danny Haiphong, along with Larry McGovern and Glen Diesen said exactly what you did here, Ian. In a “just world”, they would win a Noble Peace Prize. But that will never happen.
“Then they did, and then Trump figured that he’d start bombing Yemen again, which won’t do a damn thing except kill a few more people.”– I’ll quibble with you here, Ian. The good thing that it will do is further deplete the War Machine’s stockpiles, which are already low. On the other hand, it will enrich the War Pigs– I hear that Raytheon is doing the absolute best right now, their competitors are far behind. Even when we print an excess $3 Trillion annually beyond the GDP, they waste billions. I heard the assistance to the depleted Iron Dome when Iran sent their massive, symbolic Missile barrage cost the US alone at least $2 billion– in one (near) “battle”!! But AIPAC was made happy.
“Let us hope there is no just God. If there is, let us tremble for our nations.” There is no “God”, and “just” is another branch out on a non-existent tree. If there were a God, It’s thought processes would not likely resemble humans much, nor would any sense of justice or fairness. I will go so far as to say there is Karma, however. It’s not as strong as the “Instant Karma” John Lennon sang about, but I have seen it. But we could revert to “Character is destiny,” (Socrates as conveyed by Plato) to explain that as well.
Up until recently, I admired Ireland greatly. But the fact that in the last 18 months, the political class drove their best opposition figures, Clare Daley, Mick Wallace, and George Galloway, out of office!! Disgraceful. A reminder to be cautious when examining any issue or phenomenon from a distance.
As to Spain, if it hadn’t been for Covid I likely would’ve emigrated there in 2021. So glad I didn’t!! Their leadership are 100% down with “little Napoleon” Macron’s calls to rob their own populace to gear up for WW III with Russia, in a war that’s already been lost, and which the European chihuahua nations have neither the manpower nor arms to fight for probably at least a decade at minimum.
Stupidity here, there & everywhere. Especially in “The West.” What happened to the Enlightenment? The West wants a new Dark Age, in the US you can support center-right Fascists or full-on Fascists, all owned by Finance, the FIRE sector and the Zionist Lobby. There’s “character = destiny”, & it’s not ending well.
Oakchair
“Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?”
“No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
——
Obviously they are working in some sense because they will continue.
Billions of dollars for the military industrial complex, check.
Excitement and joy watching a nation turned to glass, check.
—–
Something similar could be said about almost all Western policies
—-
Yep, all those “failed” policies are actually huge successes. They only fail if we believe the politically correction rationalizations the oligarchs give us.
Hundreds of thousands dying from opioids wasn’t a failure it was a hundred billion dollar success story.
The financial crash and bailout wasn’t a failure, it was a trillion dollar victory.
20% of the economy going towards healthcare rent while chronic illness skyrockets is possibly the biggest genius business campaign in history.
Remember this is the marketing age. The stated goals and purposes aren’t the actual ones. They are the euphemisms used because the real reasons don’t make for good advertisement.
This is why the ruling class at first opposed and was reluctant about Trump. They feared the consequences of saying the quite part out loud. Now they recognize that the population is too sick, sedated, uncaring, and propagandized for it to even matter.
The collapse wont be a bang. It won’t be a whimper. It wont be gradual and then sudden. It will be our lives.
miss jennings
Thak you Ian.
A few thoughts/questions.
We Know Israel and the US aren’t going to stop this unless they literally run out of munitions or are dealt a devastating countermeasure.
We heard that the Obama admin ‘ran out of bombs’ back in the day but that was a lie. If you read beyond the headlines you see that they were simply below the levels they like to keep for ‘operational capacity.’
The bombs never stopped dropping. The people at the war department’s eleven unified combatant commands weren’t sitting around nervously twiddling their thumbs waiting for Raytheon, Crown et al to deliver more munitions.
If Centcom was indeed out of munitions, why didn’t the resistance take that opportunity to pounce? Isn’t Russia sharing intel with Iran? Isn’t the Middle East ‘theatre’ ultimately a danger to Russia?
Why does Russia refuse to refer to Israel’s slaughter as a genocide? why does russia still call for a ‘two-state solution’ (which implies that ‘Israel’ is a nation-state with declared borders) despite the fact that ‘facts on the ground’ have made that impossible for going on two decades now?
Does anyone remember that pretty much everyone had come around to understanding this and the talk on all sides – including out of the mouths of many former died-in-the-wool Zionists – the talk had switched to one state in all of historic Palestine.
Then the events of October 7, 2023 conveniently ‘happened.’
————
As to China, they may not be supplying weapons but they do a fair amount of business with Israel. They are helping build Israel’s ports, among other projects.
China’s CCP may tamp down its richest to an extent but they are still a part of the overall global shareholder system. They are WTO members for chrissake.
The ties between Russia and Israel are legendary.
Why don’t Russia and China put up a unified front right now as two great world powers and say ENOUGH.
The very moral Russian leadership evidently don’t use Nyet! in relation to genocides.
——-
Vladimir Putin hasn’t relieved Herman Gref of his duties. Sberbank’s Alexey Zabotkin is still held in high esteem.
‘Herman Gref (Hermann Gräf in his ancestral tongue) was born on February 8, 1964 to German parents who were deported to the Kazakh SSR during World War II. He began working in the St. Petersburg government after finishing law school in 1990 and, by the end of the decade, was on the board of directors of several high profile companies, including state-owned airline Aeroflot and energy giant Gazprom.
Gref then followed Vladimir Putin to Moscow, where he was appointed Minister of Economic Development and Trade in 2000.
Seven years later, he was handed the reins of government majority-owned Sberbank.
Perched atop Russia’s largest and most influential bank – and in control of nearly one third of all assets in the country’s banking sector – Gref’s international stature snowballed. In 2009, he became a member of the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council and two years later he was elected to the WEF Board of Trustees. (His profile, in contrast to that of Vladimir Putin, is still visible on the WEF’s website.)
In 2012, the Sberbank CEO moderated a panel discussion at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum called “Way Out from the Management Dead-End: Wisdom of the Crowd or the Authoritarian Genius?”
The panelists showed a certain squeamishness for “authoritarian” managerial practices, prompting Gref to liven up the conversation.
“You are saying terrible things,” the Sberbank CEO playfully scolded them. “You are proposing an actual transfer of power into the hands of the population… If each person can participate directly in management, then what are we managing?”
Citing Confucius and Kabbalah mysticism, he reminded his audience of the millennia-old tradition of shielding the truth from the easily excitable masses.
“People don’t want to be manipulated when they have knowledge. What does it mean to remove the veil from the eyes of millions of people and make them self-sufficient? How do you manage them? Any mass management implies an element of manipulation,” Gref concluded.’
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/07/investigative-reports/resetting-without-schwab-russia-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/
—-
So, Mahmoud Khalil is a spook. He was part of Israel-UKUS-etc groups in Lebanon that were actually dividing ‘the resistance’ until he was reassigned and eventually ended up as the go-between between the actual protesters and the authorities.
Laith Marouf has suggested that even though Khalil is obviously working for the other side – or definirely WAS working for ‘the other side’ – that he should nevertheless be kept in ‘the resistance’ fold because…well, I don’t really understand Marouf’s reasoning here.
Marouf is outing, exposing and ‘compromising’ Khalil and at the same time suggesting ‘the resistance’ should still be ‘on his side.’
That’s a lot of energy expenditure for someone who may be a spy.
But is he a double spy? Marouf may know that he is and thus he’s getting ahead of things so that whatever intel Khalil has isn’t compromised.
Of course, he may be a triple spy….
Who is Laith Marouf?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JilFqeS8drE
——
“We’ve always got a man there working the situation. He may not be our best man…” – Seinfeld, on how men gather intel on women to ‘get’ them
https://seinfeldism.com/seinfeld-quote.php?id=2https://seinfeldism.com/seinfeld-quote.php?id=2
——–
In order to take over the entire world It’s necssary to have one of your own in all critical positions.
———
The Yemenis genuinely don’t give a fuck, they’ve been bombed to hell and back again for the better part of two decades.
Lebanon and Syria hve been bombed for decades by the Israel-led international ‘order’ until Syria was recently annihilated.
Lebanon seems on its way as well.
Craig Murray – fresh off his assignment as the point man for the Julian Assange op – Murray, with a big smile on his face, was recently happily reporting from his new assignment in the Middle East where he showed the sprawling new US intel-military compound, err, Embassy.
It seems that as Hezbollah was fending off Israel and its mercs at ‘the borders’ that the US was going about building an ‘imperial’ intel center in the heart of Lebanon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVjrtgpJti4
‘The resistance’ failed here. You can’t allow TPTB to build a sprawling intel-military base just outside Beirut. And why aren’t they bombling the f out of this as I write?
——-
Is anyone noticing how every country that was happily a US poodle is now condemning their master but not Israel? Aside from the exceptions Ian mentioned, and those exceptions weren’t pathetic rah-rah US bloviators to begin with (Spain, Ireland, etc)
———
Is Russia going to deliver those s-400’s to Iran?
‘Israel trained for striking S-300s for over a decade before the Isfahan strike. Its air force trained against Greece’s S-300PMU-1 based on the island of Crete in 2013, gaining valuable insights about its capabilities and potential vulnerabilities it could one day exploit against a Syrian or Iranian system.
That same year, Israel opposed Russia delivering an S-300 to Damascus, even hinting it would preemptively destroy any Syrian S-300 before it became operational.
Russia did deliver an S-300 to Syria under different circumstances in 2018. But, crucially, Russia never fully transferred it to the Syrian military. In effect, this meant Syria hadn’t permission to use the strategic system—which remained firmly under the command and control of Russian military personnel—in the face of hundreds of Israeli airstrikes in the country.
The “Syrian” S-300 was fired off once in 2022 and unceremoniously withdrawn from the country shortly after that, clearly demonstrating Syria never truly owned nor controlled it.
One primary reason Russia probably did not want Syria using it, aside from wanting to avoid any war between Israel and Syria, was out of fear it would miss its targets or even face destruction.
Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested in 2019 that Saudi Arabia buy Russian S-300 or S-400 systems, as Iran and Turkey did, rather than Western systems to defend its infrastructure, which had come under an unprecedented drone attack.
Delivering advanced armaments to Iran in the middle of a standoff with Israel could produce similarly negative results for Russia if there is a significant escalation. Putin probably doesn’t want that outcome, at least partially because it might impede the supply of Iranian drones and other equipment to his military. He has urged Tehran to avoid targeting Israeli civilians in any attack, undoubtedly cognizant that would increase the likelihood of escalation or even all-out war.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/pauliddon/2024/08/07/russia-risks-reputation-of-its-weapons-systems-with-iran-air-defense-delivery/
[yes, it’s Forbes but the information is generally correct. That the SMO was forced on Russia is beside the point at this point – what’s going on in the world is ‘larger’ than what we’re privy to, as clearly evidenced by Russia and China’s continuing eager participation at the highest levels of global coordination ]
——
Sure, you shouldn’t target civilians. You SHOULD be targeting many more military-intel production and operations installations.
Areas adjacent to this are unfortuntely ‘collateral damage’ but you have to do what you have to do. You are, after all, attempting to end a GENOCIDE.
Of course, if you can’t even utter the word publicly…
And I don’t see the word anywhere on TASS or kremlin.ru.
Genocide? Nyet.
different clue
A narrow quibble . . . George Galloway is British, not Irish. ( Unless there is another George Galloway in Ireland of whom I know nothing.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Galloway
mago
Quite so miss j. The ruskies stay mum about the Genocide because of the number of influential Jewish people in both Israel and Russia. Dudeskies with money and power. Gotta pander to them. Practicalities and all that. Living in the real world.
Gimme another piroshki to go. Got some business to take care of down there in falafel land . . .
miss jennings
Vladimir Putin hasn’t relieved Herman Gref of his duties. Sberbank’s Alexey Zabotkin is still held in high esteem.
I reversed the players here. Gref is Sberbank, Zabotkin is Russian Cental Bank (Bank of Russia). Sberbank is state-owned but commerical and holds a significant majority of Russia’s ‘financial assets’ making it the largest bank in Russia by far as measured by that all-important ‘market cap’ metric that is so ‘humanizing’ and full of love.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/082015/6-biggest-russian-banks.asp
Here are Gref, Zabotkin and banking regulator chairman Elvira Nabiullina speaking at the beginning of June last year:
‘The Russian economy is severely overheated, and its capacities are loaded to the limit. This was stated by the President of Sberbank German Gref, speaking at the Federation Council, as quoted by RIA Novosti.
For the first time, the Central Bank indicated that the economy has exceeded its potential level…
In December, after the key rate increase, the chairman of the regulator, Elvira Nabiullina, compared the Russian economy to an overheated car engine using all its resources at full capacity.
Alexey Zabotkin, Deputy Chairman of the Bank of Russia, said that overheating in the Russian economy creates stable inflationary pressure, which will stop when supply catches up with the prevailing level of demand.
According to the representative of the Central Bank, we are talking about a situation when “the potential of the economy, its production capabilities will catch up with the level of demand that the economy has reached.”
https://www.oreanda-news.com/en/v_mire/gref-said-about-the-overheating-of-the-russian-economy/article1517234/
A few things stand out immediately. We know Russia is much more regulated which is good, and the state maintains highly regulated financing for specific important industries such as war/defense and agriculture.
Of course, this also has the potential to limit financing to favored players with state-government ties. Yes, Austrian Economic Libertarian people always drone on about this and overplay it to the extreme other end such that it becomes essentially useless as an analytical tool. They turn it into a hammer where all it knows is a nail. But there’s still truth to it.
All that said, it’s interesting to note that Russia ultimately plays the global Central Bank game. In other words, they are not doing what the Libyan Cental Bank did under Qaddafi. At all.
They are clearly much more invested for the long-term in the global marketplace competition.
As is Xi in China.
The recent countries who didn’t play this global game are the ones who’ve been bombed to smithereens.
Some of them were allegedly ‘allies’ with Russia.
Still waiting on those s-400s.
———-
Historic Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Russia:
https://yandex.com/images/search?text=Kutuzovsky%20Prospekt
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=Kutuzovsky+Prospekt&iax=images&ia=images
Sberbank City inside Moscow Kutuzovsky:
https://yandex.com/images/search?text=Sberbank%20City
Russia will eventually have an entirely finance/corporate aesthetic ruining everything decent.
And given Sberbank’s open and willing participation in Cyber Polygon and other mammoth global finance-corporate crime-planning schemes…
https://2020.cyberpolygon.com/participants-and-partners/
miss jennings
“Practicalities and all that. Living in the real world.”
Indeed. Thank you mago. I’m an outsider to that ‘real world’ these days but at the same time still a part of it. Not exactly an ‘integral’ part, but I still enjoy the little things so hopefully I’ll be able to stick around for a while.
The only way out is through.
Wish I’d visited China all those years ago. And all those other places I’ve wanted to see and experience.
‘Everyday things change
And the world puts on a new face
Certain things rearrange
And this whole world seems like a new place’
They don’t change much ‘naturally’ or ‘of their own accord’ anymore. But we’ve gotta progress! Move on! Business is business!
Thank you for sharing here mago. I always enjoy your ‘input.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX3pyNFICGE
bruce wilder
miss jennings effectively reminds us all that we are not well-informed and neither are the opinionaters who feed us their overcooked views.
Israel has the largest indeed the only significant population of Russian speakers outside the former Soviet sphere. Of course, Putin treads lightly. Israel is an important Russian ally.
Iran and Russia are historic enemies — rivals in the complex hatreds of the Caucasus.
If we care to look, we can see a Great Game in play across Central Europe. My TikTok, in between attempts to sell me psoriasis crème and toys, was showing me massive demonstrations on Sunday in Budapest, Bucharest and Belgrade. The alliteration made me dizzy. The Serbs were protesting government corruption and incompetence that got people killed in some kind of building collapse. The Romanians may have been protesting their electoral choices, I don’t know. The Hungarians go to the polls shortly, with Orban possibly trailing in the polls — only opposition polls are being reported in Western Media so go figure. Add in Georgia, Moldova and Syria — this an active contest in a very complex game of the board game, Risk.
I kinda hope the Houthis get through to aircraft carrier, Teddy. It has always been a favorite end-of-empire narrative breaker for me, even though I know intellectually that contest isn’t really “controlled” by narratives, per se.
miss jennings
Let nobody be fooled! The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN.
Any further attack or retaliation by the “Houthis” will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there. Iran has played “the innocent victim” of rogue terrorists from which they’ve lost control, but they haven’t lost control. They’re dictating every move, giving them the weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated Military equipment, and even, so-called, “Intelligence.”
Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!
DONALD J. TRUMP,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
———
They just started bombing the f out of Gaza again.
I think everyone agrees that Israel owns Trump. And Congress. But it’s clear we have are now literally living in the time of ‘You and what army?” raw power, so Congress is irrelevant. So are any silly court rulings that dare to go against what is now set in place.
Israel wants Iran eliminated. It is part of the plan, it always has been part of the plan, and there are deep-seated ideological reasons for this beyond simply the geostrategy.
This is going to happen unless someone steps up to physically stop it. I don’t think Russia and China – two great powers – are going to do anything. For starters, Iran desperately requires the more advanced defense systems that Russia has promised and not delivered.
For its part, the China Foreign Ministry just delivered this eloquent statement:
‘China opposes any action that escalates the situation in the Red Sea. The reasons behind the situation in the Red Sea and the Yemen issue are complex and should be properly resolved through dialogue and negotiation.’
Reminds me of the Democrats.
——-
Meanwhile, back in Africa, Netanyahu has declared he’s going to ‘liberate the black people:
https://x.com/AfricanHub_/status/1901549063788495004
I actually thank the genocidal war criminal for the huge belly laugh I experienced upon watching that. Laugher is good for the soul.
——-
I can’t get the pictures of charred babies out of my head. How can I help? What can I do?
Poor me, sitting comforably in my chair.
——
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtJzr1Wcy_s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Yh1efRKZ8
miss jennings
So, Mahmoud Khalil is a spook. He was part of Israel-UKUS-etc groups in Lebanon that were actually dividing ‘the resistance’
British Foreign Office specifically, which is MI6. And he was initially in Syria, not Lebanon. I think. A lot more is coming out now. But definitely MI6.
Daniil Adamov
To be blunt, I don’t think our (Russian) leadership is very concerned with moral matters, stopping genocides, etc. Those are the 90s people, cynical, opportunistic careerists who survived and thrived in a time of chaos. They may have cultivated patriotism or some semblance of such, and they may be simply smarter than their complacent Western partners, but universalist moral concerns like those expressed by Ian Welsh here are basically all Greek to them, and to a large part of the demoralised population. Communists and liberals have done a lot to discredit such notions here by welding them to hated and unjust policies. I don’t pretend to know whether it is that way for Putin, but when a large part of the elite doesn’t care about genocide but does care about global integration and business and family ties in Israel, going against this is bound to be hard; harder still if you don’t feel that strongly about it either.
Astrid
A thriftier interpretation is that Russia, China, and Iran knows the United States and Israel are loco and are proceeding cautiously and not making sudden moves, to avoid provoking a full on WWIII.
I don’t think personal love or hate of Palestinians or Israelis really come into play. Remember that Putin left Donbas under Ukrainian attack for 8 years before deciding that Ukrainian encroachment was an existential issue for Russia sufficient to risk a war with the West. As we’ve seen with October 7 and Ukraine, the Westoids don’t have a reverse mode unless they’re in absolute desperate straits and even then they still think they’re entitled to break every promise made as soon as they can.
So all the primary countries in opposition only have one shot against the West and it better be a knockout blow. The optimal strategy is to wait as long as possible and how hope the West moves further on its steeply downward trajectory. Hard for us to see and there’s a serious risk of losing allies like Syria and Libya to the Western chaos machine, but China/Russia/Iran surely looks much much stronger than they did 5 years ago while the US/EU are looking much much weaker.
There’s a lot of Internet chatter about how Putin is pro-Israel but I haven’t seen evidence of this beyond the occasional friendly public meeting with Israel officials. He obviously understands Jewish oligarchs’ utility as an influential financial block within the Russian Federation and Israel as a backdoor for communication with the West, but he’s not shown any reluctance to knock the oligarchs down when they challenge his power. Anyone with a brain knows that Israel is firmly in the US camp and has no value as an actual ally for Russia, so I don’t interpret being diplomatic and maintaining friendly relations as any biased towards Israel..
Internet chatter tends to emphasize Russian-Israeli dual citizens but they compose less than 0.5 percent of the RF citizenry, whereas Muslims compose about 9 percent. Russia’s Southwestern flank is entirely Muslim. Russia’s partners in North Africa and West Africa and the new BRICS partners are predominantly Muslim. Putin is an intelligent tough man surrounded by intelligent tough people, no way they would let some misplaced WWII nostalgia (and remember Israel did much to blacken the USSR reputation in the 1970s and 1980s to force USSR to open up its Jewish population for emigration) to cause them to lose sight of RF’s strategic interests.
Though it would be kind to at least offer the Alawites, Shi’a, and Christians a safe passage out, if they intend to tolerate the HTS headchoppers there on a long term basis.
Daniil Adamov
Astrid, I don’t think sympathy or antipathy comes into it much. Though I wouldn’t underestimate the dual citizens and Russian Jews (and not just because I’m the former and related to the latter). They may be less numerous in general, but they tend to be much richer and therefore more influential, even if money doesn’t count for quite as much in Moscow as it does in Washington. And money isn’t everything; connections on the level of family or friendship with other members of the Russian elite (oligarchs, officials – especially those involved in economic management) count for something too. I don’t think they have that much power over Putin, all told. I do think he wouldn’t antagonise them over something that, to him, is either a big nothing or is deeply regrettable but not any kind of policy priority.
Ian Welsh
Trump will destroy America’s power faster. So yes, he’s still the anti-Imperial candidate, though I didn’t advise voting for either of them. For some people genocide isn’t a line they won’t cross. For some it is.
Mark Level
This is another very rich thread, and I want to respond to some things shared by “miss jennings” (who I will call just mj from now on, not to be confused with michael jackson) for the sake of brevity–
MJ makes very many good and salient points about problems coming from Russia (which of course many of us who are anti-Nato, anti-Nazi etc. support for reasons of fairness, not out of massive admiration for their Neoliberal Leaders, per se. over the sick, genocidal alternative following a 1930s ideology.) I believe MJ is also peddling some first-take assumptions in other areas which I will push back on.
Mago beat me in responding to the “Putin supports Israel” narrative, yes the large # of expatriate Russian Jews is very obvious. Be that as it may, there should be some things the Russians are wary of, including the Ukraine fascist regime getting drones from Israel (widely reported, if not in the MSM) for attacks into Russia. Zelensky vainly wanting to turn his country into a “Big Israel” Slav-killing machine (based on the fantasy that the Ukies are “Aryans” not Slavs, totally unsupported via language, history, DNA, etc.)
That’s a quibble however. Where I will diverge from MJ and call BS is regarding Khalil. it may just be pre-judicial in nature, or not. But everything in its time. Let’s go chronologically with some claims & assertions that seem to be from a provocateur who’s just interested in getting a reaction or “click” of attention and not devoted to truth for it’s own sake.
I note you had to correct some of your claims about the sinister banking clique in Rossiya. This is all fine and dandy, I know (unlike say, Joe Scarborough or the dumb Libs) that Putin is a former spy, a lawyer, and a NeoLiberal who wanted to join the West, not beat it, and not a “Communist”. Am I surprised that they have skeezy Capitalist swine. Not in the least, the NeoLib nightmare has been imposed everywhere since the 70s. (Hell, I worked as a teen too young to vote for Jimmy Carter, and he introduced it at the Presidential level.) Something that got my b.s. detector not just clicking but bursting nearly off the chart was this little tossed-off bit of “wisdom” (Chokmah.): “Citing Confucius and Kabbalah mysticism, he reminded his audience of the millennia-old tradition of shielding the truth from the easily excitable masses.”
This may or not be true or verified, but such a quote stinks heavily of old anti-Semitic tropes & Conspiracy theories. Now I’m not a Semite, so I have little skin in this game (I am primarily Spanish, Irish, French, sliver of Sardinian, with an ugly German last name.) Having studied the Kaballah seriously, however, starting in 1989 and since, this kind of salacious crap tiptoes up close to the Blood Libel. I originally studied “Goy Kaballah”, the Golden Dawn (McGregor Mathers) and OTO (Mr. Crowley). My first teacher was somewhat of a recognized (Gentile) authority, the late William “Bill” Heidrick, a Marin County hippie and OTO wanna-be luminary, also a bit of a pervert. His classes were very old-fashioned, he taught using a slide-show, lots of Renaissance Art, solid curriculum for the most part. But he had a disturbing pedagogy of speaking very slowly and monotone, in most classes I attended with him over half the audience would be asleep by the end of the class. I prided myself on being one of the few who never dozed off, and I didn’t need caffeine to stay awake either.
Now, a few years ago when I would refer my students to free online research options, Heidrick’s translation of the Sepher Yetzirah was always listed in the top 3 available, with more traditional Jewish sources. Heidrick had his dumb mistakes, one I caught very early was his claim that the lowest of the 4 Worlds, “Assiah”, was the source for naming the East side of the Eurasian continent “Asia.” Absurd, zero proof of that exists. In later years I dipped into Jewish sources, Scholem is decent, but eventually the best book I found in the mid-80s was by an Orthodox Rabbi in NYC, Aryeh Kaplan, title “Sepher Yetzirah: In Theory & Practice”. I learned Hebrew slowly by using this book (slowly learning key words and concepts with a Hebrew-English dictionary, adding some up via gemmatria, etc.) I only learned Hebrew to study this one area of mysticism, not interested in other applications.
Even someone as awesome as Kaplan made mistakes sometimes. One of the bigger ones I caught was when he claimed the English word “cipher” is derived from a QBL term. Nope!! the Etymological dictionary informed me it was from Arabic. (Partisans make mistakes.) There were some bizarre digressions in the S.Y. itself or his commentary that of course I rejected out of hand. A whole sub-section on the mysticism of the cow’s 6 (or 7?, can no longer recall, stomach sections.) How Aaron’s sons were about to be executed for violating KShR law by eating meat and milk at one meal, until they “proved” that the Cow was created by them via QBL magick and not by Adonai, a life-saving loophole! Still, overall Kaplan is an exceptional scholar.
There are dozens of versions, aspects or wrinkles of the field, I prefer to stick with the original text, studied critically. Stuff like Madonna Qabalah (bracelets, folks!) or WeWork QBL is sheer chicanery, obviously. Back to your quote from a sinister (wonder if he’s hook-nosed?) banker: “Citing Confucius and Kabbalah mysticism, he reminded his audience of the millennia-old tradition of shielding the truth from the easily excitable masses.”
Now there is in Western Hermeticism a trick that teachers test students with, called Obscurum per obscurantus. Basically it means Dazzle ’em with Bullshit, see who’s stupid enough to buy it, then show them the door. Morons who believe “millenia-old” made up truths are useful only if they are paying. People who believe Solomon (Shlomo in Hebrew) or David were real figures, or that Freemasonry originated in Egypt, or from the Knights Templar, and not from actual sources (Renaissance Rosicrucian teachings, which were themselves a “Ludubrium” or joke!)
The stuff you are flaunting here (for whatever reasons) derives directly from a right-wing crank of over a century ago, the Brit. Nesta Helen Webster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesta_Helen_Webster — and from a Neophyte’s ignorance of ObperOb.
Now let’s get to your claims about Khalil. I learned about him first from sources who I strongly respect, mainly Max Blumenthal, also some of the ex-CIA crew, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (McGovern, Johnson et al) and even Will Menaker, Felix Biederman, and a guest they had on covered his spying background at Chatham House clearly, his scholarship, etc. The point was made that this guy doesn’t have a rogue bone in his body, he is a Color Inside the Lines person trying to better himself, after being born a Palestinian in a refugee camp in Syria.
There is no one who hates or despises MI-6 cutouts and agencies more than I do. However, is it “possible” that he used these people to move up in the world but as a Palestinian, when it came to supporting the entire extermination of his own people, some rudimentary Conscience exerted itself and he decided to oppose the Genocide via careful, legal (color inside the lines) protest? Oh, let’s fly off the handle, and immediately designate him a “double, triple”, why not quadruple agent. Obscurum per Obscrum, it’s Turtles all the way down!!
This is sloppy, conspiracy theory applied without any data, time to find out the truth, or caution. I don’t respect this. If he is deported from Louisiana to Syria and then executed by our former-ISIS “allies” the head choppers, your off-the-cuff smear is going to look pretty disgusting.
I talked about my own background, studying Western Hermeticism starting in 1989 as an OTO initiate, dropping out in the early 2000s because there was a dangerous wacko and drug addict (as well as self-professed pedophile) in the Bay Area scene who was being supported by the Cult Leader, William Breeze, because WB was fucking the wacko’s wife, and was set to inherit the wacko’s excellent Library of Egyptian Studies (which the OTO later did.) I learned a lot from reading the bisexual poet-mountaineer and drug promoter Aleister Crowley, “A Hell of a Mystic!” as he billed himself. I didn’t despise him for his sex or drugs excesses, but was rather bothered by his work for MI-6 (or maybe it was only 5 a century ago.) He claimed to have helped push the US into WW I while working for the Crown in the ‘teens in NY City, writing for the rabidly pro-German George Sylvester Vierek’s “The Fatherland,” ridiculous stuff to discredit the German cause like comparing Kaiser Wilhelm to the Messiah, etc. It’s uncertain whether he really made that much of a difference, however in a book by Tobias Churton whose short title is The Beast in Berlin, it appears that he was perhaps more successful as a spy in the early 30s living in the Weimar Republic.
https://www.amazon.com/Aleister-Crowley-Berlin-Magick-Republic/dp/1620552566?crid=3N536YPZPVMD8&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.qNUxe5uuMBkUVD-BQYG6V5x9tnx0t-LGFRwWMBzaJBamVvBoU_8emADe9iUzePOiyorWTABGsLiAQwvZ9lUQIo5qkC8Bm7jbZAidZED6ZzdIdrWDzWTTIWBCLs0AfXya7mvSbb28AwJaipsnQAIhpR6fxGTA5OYCE00FB8E89HFbDdNiYAKH6iaQiLH6DurqUDY5dxP76EJI2O8OARR6SX8mlb667WuPc0h3hnJkEIFSMuC3v316IRbtlv7yP8WTqTHPUUjzLB43QQmjKhWg1wfJEvYgh2-GbCuXHAhenf2loilNBCXuUwGzFReEJCE3mJWfqzRHS0c_mSVFYpW3tw.t8egyH5snxibkufvzzw9_3Oa9Ph879n16AnDQLkQrzw&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+beast+in+berlin&qid=1742325352&s=books&sprefix=the+beast+in+berlin%2Cstripbooks%2C155&sr=1-1
Damn, Amazon writes some long script. One of the more interesting bits in this book was that when Rudolph Hess escaped Germany and parachuted into England, imagining that 8 planets in Taurus would allow him to make a German-UK Peace Pact, Ian Fleming wanted Crowley to interview him to get the occult flourishes of his mania. (The higher-ups vetoed this.) Also, one of the first traitors executed by the Brits after the war was the despicable “Lord Haw Haw”, William Joyce, who in propaganda radio broadcasts in support of Mosley and that crew declared that God sided with the Germans, offended that evil Catamites like Crowley were allowed to live openly in Britain. Crowley wrote a famous Riposte, Liber Oz, a 220 word Libertarian Manifesto against fascism.
https://sacred-texts.com/oto/lib77.htm
You write a very valuable piece on the resumed genocide and Nutinyahoo’s pledge to “Save the Africans” so thank you for that, MJ. Be that as it may, you discredit yourself when you shoot from the hip and want to be judge, jury and executioner of Khalil before many (not to mention all) the facts are in . . .
Closing regarding Masonry, & Kaballah (whatever that even means) it’s always been a mixed bag. Some Neo-Fascist groups (“the Illuminati”) some genuinely seeking Universal Brotherhood (& Sisterhood) as well. If I started spouting nonsense about nuclear physics, about which I know nothing, I would certainly look foolish.
During the Bush Jr. starter genocide in Iraq, one of my favorite songs was by the black revolutionary Paris. His album Sonic Jihad had a great cut called “What Would You Do?” that implicates Masonry in mass-murder and genocide. Some Masonry has undoubtedly supported White Supremacy and fascism, some has opposed it. We should not follow overly broad-brush approaches, nor should we mistake needles for straw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVi7av6HxgI