This is a social credit system and this is how it is being implemented — guilty until proven innocent, trial by media-driven majority opinion.
And here is Rumble’s response
This is a social credit system and this is how it is being implemented — guilty until proven innocent, trial by media-driven majority opinion.
And here is Rumble’s response
Published: September 20, 2023 |
Some of the world’s most powerful people are panicking following news that the real Epstein list of elite pedophiles has been leaked online.
As Biden’s DOJ continues to block the “client list” of Epstein, investigators have released new names of VIP pedophiles connected to the child sex trafficker.
New York magazine has painstakingly compiled a list of VIP pedophiles known to have met with Epstein who do not appear in his infamous little black book:
Slaynews.com reports: New York’s list also includes Prince Andrew and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
However, Andrew and Barak’s names do in fact appear in Epstein’s black book.
In April, the Wall Street Journal reported in April that Epstein’s calendar was packed.
On one day alone, Sept. 8, 2014, he had scheduled meetings with Gates, Black, Ruemmler, and Botstein, as well as with Hyatt Hotels chairman Thomas Pritzker, media owner Mortimer Zuckerman, and adviser Barnaby Marsh.
The previously unreported documents reviewed by the Journal include thousands of pages of emails and schedules dating from 2013 to 2017.
The Times said it had obtained Epstein’s schedules “through a public records request to the attorney general for the U.S. Virgin Islands, which had sued Mr. Epstein’s estate.”
Several of the power players identified in the documents gave statements to the Journal.
The CIA said Burns “did not know anything” about Epstein and that the two had “no relationship.”
Summers said he “deeply regrets being in contact with Epstein after his [2008] conviction.”
Meanwhile, Ruemmler said, “I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein.”
A Goldman Sachs spokesperson added that Ruemmler’s relationship with Epstein was professional.
Barak acknowledged that he often met with Epstein, but never “with girls or minors, or even adult women in improper context.”
The Edmond de Rothschild Group, which had previously claimed Ariane de Rothschild had no connection to Epstein, admitted that that claim was inaccurate.
The organization said de Rothschild “was … unaware of any questions regarding his personal conduct” when she met with him.
Chomsky, meanwhile, said in an email to the Journal that his association with Epstein is “none of your business. Or anyone’s. …
“I knew him and we met occasionally,” he admitted.
“What was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence,” Chomsky added.
“According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”
Epstein’s relationship that still raises the most cause for concern, however, is his close friendship with former President Bill Clinton.
Clinton was a frequent flyer of Epstein’s private jet, the “Lolita Express.”
The plane was set up with beds and is where multiple victims have stated their abuse took place.
Clinton is also believed to have visited Epstein’s private island known as “Pedophile Island.”
The remote Carribean island is the main location for abuse as identified by Epstein’s victims.
Epstein was also a regular visitor at Clinton’s White House.
Visitor logs show Epstein visited Clinton’s White House 17 times during his presidency.
Democrat President Joe Biden’s DOJ, meanwhile, is still withholding the “client list.”
These are all the same players directly and indirectly involved in the PSYOP-19 “pandemic.” They are all eugenicists (e.g. Epstein’s planned for insemination facility “Zorro Ranch,” Gates’ numerous depopulation admissions, etc.) that want to control you and ultimately kill you just like the innocent trafficked children that they pathologically molest and murder.
Do NOT comply.
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/on-the-idiotic-notion-that-its-brave?fbclid=IwAR1X58A3DkyFeaD6mRleORrva92VIyGgw0fJJD3NclteF-PPaveiLFqIP38
SEP 19, 2023
During a Sunday appearance on Face the Nation to plug his new Zelensky movie, actor Sean Penn decried the “cowardice” of the US government in its caution around provoking a nuclear exchange with its proxy warfare in Ukraine.
“It is my absolute feeling that the caution with which the United States has pledged support, which seemed, in my reading of February 2022 was a, like a lean on in the fear of nuclear conflict, something I think all of us should look very carefully at and understand that, of course, is possible,” Penn said. “And that’s to be concerning. The likelihood is extremely low. And as one of our witnesses in the film says, you know, are we going to let a gangster with nuclear weapons dictate the way we live?”
Penn emotionally lamented the fact that the Biden administration did not pour F-16 warplanes into Ukraine from the very beginning of the conflict, initially fearing the move to be too escalatory. Describing this hesitation, Penn said that “at some point, caution becomes cowardice.”
As you might expect, the interviewer refrained from challenging Penn on his claim that the likelihood of nuclear war is “extremely low” in spite of his acknowledgement that it’s a real possibility, or on his claim that resisting increasing the likelihood of nuclear war is an act of cowardice.
Sean Penn has been one of Hollywood’s most egregious empire apologists for some time now (in 2020 he told CNN that “there is no greater humanitarian force on the planet than the United States military”), but even by his standards these comments about nuclear brinkmanship are remarkably odious.
There’s this obnoxious idea that comes up in mainstream political discourse about Ukraine that an aversion to nuclear brinkmanship is somehow cowardly, and that being willing to risk the life of every terrestrial organism advancing US strategic objectives is somehow an act of courage.
We saw this back in July from Paul Massaro, an advisor to the US government’s Helsinki Commission and a minor celebrity in online Zelenskyite circles. During this year’s “Captive Nations Summit” with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Massaro mocked westerners for being “fearful” of proxy warfare in Ukraine leading to nuclear warfare.
“I think the biggest thing is fear, I think we’re fearful,” Massaro said. “It’s very funny to me, because you meet Ukrainians, not a single Ukrainian is fearful. You talk to Ukrainians it’s like ‘What if the Russians use nuclear weapons?’, they’re like ‘We’ll keep fighting, we’ll win.’ You know it’s only the westerners that are like ‘Oh my god, I’m over here in California and what if the Russians use nuclear weapons?’ You know, it’s almost pathetic.”
It’s a common theme. Any time you talk publicly about the risk of the continually escalating war in Ukraine leading to nuclear catastrophe you’ll get empire apologists calling you a coward and saying we all need to be brave and stand up to the big bully Putin. And it’s just such a disgusting perversion of what courage actually is and what it looks like.
Empire loyalists often talk about nuclear brinkmanship like it’s something courageous that they personally are doing, as though gambling every terrestrial life on strategic grand chessboard maneuverings is a brave risk that could only hurt them. If you think you are brave for risking the life of everyone on earth to advance your personal geopolitical agendas, you might be a malignant narcissist, because you think the world revolves around you, and other lives exist only as props to support your main character adventures.
Hardly any human on this planet gives a shit who governs Crimea or the Donbass — and exactly zero of the plants and animals do — but people like Sean Penn and Paul Massaro think they have every right to not only gamble all their lives on a bid to control that outcome, but to call themselves courageous for doing so. Imagine being so self-absorbed you think you’re a brave hero for putting the lives of Africans, Asians, and South Americans on the betting table who’ve never even heard of Donetsk or Luhansk and don’t care who governs them, as well as every non-human life on earth.
I mean, the absolute arrogance. The fucking gall. It’s as emotionally stunted and infantile a perspective as you could possibly come up with, but these are the people whose worldview is shaping outcomes on this planet. These are the sort of people who are setting the trajectory of our species as a collective.
The mainstream Western political consensus is a sickness of the mind. Its existence should make us all want to fall to our knees and beg the forgiveness of every life on this earth that it imperils.
https://www.sott.net/article/483744-The-cruelty-of-Canadas-euthanasia-policy
Lionel Shriver
UnHerd
Mon, 21 Aug 2023
© unherd.com
Its liberal Maid programme has been turned into a political weapon…
With uncharacteristic humility, I would concede that a few positions I’ve argued fiercely in print might be viable on paper, but in practice are a disaster. The “war on drugs” being a fiasco, years ago I advocated the legalisation of recreational pharmaceuticals. But given the dirty, dangerous, dismal tent cities full of addicts in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland — which have all effectively decriminalised drug possession — it may be fortunate that glib journalists like me don’t control public policy.
I’ve likewise argued for legalised assisted dying. After all, nobody asked us if we wanted to be here (a favourite headline: “Woman Sues for Being Born”); the least we might expect is help leaving the building. Why should living be an obligation? While the strongest candidates for a gentle, legal assisted death are patients with agonising terminal illnesses, any respectable libertarian would maintain that outfits such as Dignitas in Switzerland simply provide a service, of which consumers in any medical condition should be free to avail themselves. And for lack of a better word, I’m a libertarian.
I gained an appreciation for how being alive could simply fail a clinical cost-benefit analysis in the summer of 2020. For five days, I was in such blinding pain from a nerve in my spine that I awoke each morning screaming at my poor husband: “I would rather be dead!” I wasn’t being histrionic. Well, okay, I was — but I was also brutally sincere. Had remaining alive been conditioned on such intense and unrelenting suffering forever more, for the first time I could see a persuasive case for calling it quits. During the blackest periods of those days, on which I took half an hour to descend a single flight of stairs, I was incapable of pleasure, humour, or love. The sole thought in my head was that I would do anything to get the pain to stop.
Canada has an unusually liberal programme called Medical Assistance in Dying, or Maid — although this acronym doesn’t tidy your flat but sponges your existence from the known universe. The Great White North should, therefore, represent my perverse version of Valhalla. Instead, Maid’s lax protocols make me queasy. In theory, maybe everyone has a right to die if they want to. In practice, maybe the state needs to keep a tight regulatory reign on whom it graciously provides a one-way ticket to nowhere.
Introduced in 2016, Canada’s government-sanctioned euthanasia by medically administered lethal injection and legalisation of assisted suicide (there’s a difference; the latter usually entails patients themselves swallowing fatal tablets prescribed by a doctor) were initially intended to put the terminally ill who’d had enough out of their misery. Yet sister programmes in the seven other countries that permit euthanasia generally restrict the pool of applicants to people destined to die naturally within six months. Maid initially codified no such limitation, merely citing vaguely that death should be “reasonably foreseeable”, as it is for all us mortals. Hypothetically, then, even the programme as originally conceived could have been open to people whose ailments would only kill them many years hence. Yet, bolstering its critics’ “slippery slope” argument, the programme soon radically loosened its restrictions. Assisted dying is now available in Canada to all adults with a serious illness or disability, regardless of whether the source of their torment would be fatal over time.
Most controversially, the government is considering the offer of lethal injection to “mature minors” — whatever that means. The programme is also set to extend to Canadians who are mentally ill. That said, the start date of state-sponsored death for the psychologically unwell (which on one day or another would probably include us all) has been pushed back to March 2024, indicating a degree of bureaucratic anxiety.
Given the stories in the press, that anxiety may be warranted.
At the age of 61, Alan Nichols had a history of depression and was hospitalised as a suicide risk in 2019 — something of an irony, as in due course the hospital staff, according to his family, was altogether too helpful in facilitating the patient’s application for euthanasia. That application was accepted, even though the only health condition it cited as so intolerable that Nichols wanted to die was “hearing loss”. After Nichols was put to death, his family objected that the man was not suffering unbearably, had been refusing to take his medication, and wouldn’t use the cochlear implant that helped him hear. But no medical personnel had ever contacted his relatives, out of respect for patient confidentiality.
While some Canadian disability advocates are upset that disability alone is now a qualification for euthanasia, arguably sending a social signal that the disabled are a burden and better off dead, Nichols did not nominate himself as a political representative of any group. He was just one person who didn’t want to be here anymore, and if we’re not impressed by his motives, that’s our problem. Whether or not to head for the back door was his decision, his business.
Still — I’m reaching here. Hearing loss? Really?
Suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease at 41, Sean Tagert required 24-hour care, but British Columbia only provided 16-hour assistance. Paying caretakers for the remaining eight hours cost Tagert CA$264 per day. Health authorities did offer to move Tagert to an institution, but its location was far from the young son who was clearly his father’s prime reason for living, as Tagert described such a separation as a “death sentence”. The man managed to raise CA$16,000 to invest in medical equipment that would allow him to remain at home, but the funds were insufficient. So instead he applied for euthanasia. The end.
All health systems have finite resources, so let’s assume that 16-hour care was all British Columbia could afford. If Tagert couldn’t manage on that support, we wouldn’t encourage a bureaucracy to give in to blackmail: If you don’t give me 24-hour care, I’ll kill myself. On the other hand, the availability of assisted dying as a solution to his problems must have made it more likely that Tagert would choose death, as opposed to giving institutional care a go and perhaps discovering that seeing his son somewhat less often wasn’t the end of the world. In general, then, legalising assisted dying without fierce limits on who qualifies may increase the likelihood that, rather than find more creative escapes from their predicaments, people give into despair.
In more than one instance in Canada, too, patients seem to have been actively pressed to consider pulling their own plug to save the health system money. Hospitalised for a degenerative brain disorder, Roger Foley was, according to Associated Press, “so alarmed by staffers mentioning euthanasia that he began secretly recording some of their conversations”. In one recording, the hospital’s director of ethics informs Foley that his hospital stay is costing the institution “north of $1,500 a day” — quite the guilt trip. Foley asks about the plan for his long-term care. “Roger, this is not my show,” the “ethicist” said. “My piece of this was to talk to you, to see if you had an interest in assisted dying.” But Foley himself had never expressed the slightest interest in dying.
For while the Australian province of Victoria, for example, forbids doctors from bringing up the option of euthanasia, lest it be mistaken for medical advice, Canada’s physicians can cheerfully recommend being killed as one of patients’ “clinical care options”. Thus, Sheila Elson took her daughter to an emergency room in Newfoundland six years ago. Unprompted, the doctor informed Elson that her daughter of 25, who had cerebral palsy and spinal bifida, was a good candidate for euthanasia. As Elson later told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the doctor chided that not taking up the state’s kindly offer to slay her daughter would be “selfish”.
Given that they both tattled to the media, Foley and Elson clearly resented being enticed to please consider lethal injection as an economy for the state. But more fragile characters might be less apt to stand up for their rights.
At least four cases have been unearthed of veterans with, say, PTSD being encouraged to consider assisted dying in preference, as one staffer put it diplomatically, to “blowing your brains out”. Maid has been active in prisons as well, whose population is also costly and understandably prone to feeling glum. I wouldn’t melodramatically portray this programme as some wicked Final Solution for castoffs and criminals, but there’s more than a hint here of the brutal social utilitarianism that horrified Captain Kirk in more than one episode of Star Trek.
The woman who has most alarmed critics of Maid’s prospective extension to the mentally ill is Lisa Pauli, who is queueing up for assisted dying months in advance. At 47, Pauli has been anorexic for the better part of 40 years and now holds out no hope of defeating the disorder. She weighs 92 pounds and goes days without solid food. Pauli’s psychiatrist assures her that once the law in Canada becomes more encompassing next year, she’ll probably be eligible for assisted dying. Yet it takes one look at Lisa Pauli’s picture to conclude that she doesn’t need a lethal injection. She needs a sandwich.
Maid is popular in Canada. In a recent Research Co. poll, 73% of Canadians approved of the regime in its current form, while only 16% opposed it. Moreover, a goodly measure of Canadians would be happy for the programme to expand further: 27% claimed Maid should be an option even for people whose only affliction was “poverty”; 28% would offer state-sponsored oblivion to the homeless. A fifth of respondents would provide Maid to anybody for any reason. Sean Tagert’s was one of several cases of Canadians finally choosing death after years of struggling to obtain sufficient health care, and a hefty 51% of poll respondents believed that “inability to receive medical treatment” should qualify applicants for the needle.
I wonder if these Canadians are exercising their imaginations. For governments, citizens are an annoyance. Is it really in the broader interest of us peons to make it too easy for the authorities to simply dispose of us, rather than contend with our messy, expensive problems? Keep loosening the restrictions on such programmes, and pretty soon it’s only so fanciful to envision California cleaning up its tented encampments of homeless alcoholics and drug addicts by sending Swat teams marching through the cardboard and corrugated iron with sub-machine guns.
As for qualifying for euthanasia by dint of mental illness, psychic afflictions are still poorly understood and poorly defined. Because the portion of the population claiming to have mental health problems continues to rise, this is surely the gateway to offering the ultimate cure for human suffering to everybody. Although all pain is subjective, the physical kind usually has an objective correlative. In 2020, I could have shown you on an MRI exactly what was wrong with my back. Mental pain, though, is heavily dependent on self-reporting, so that assessing its severity from the outside is almost impossible.
While Maid guidelines stipulate that whatever drives a candidate to seek a last resort should be incurable, it’s also impossible to tell whether mental problems are temporary or intransigent. In fact, one of the major concerns of too-ready access to assisted dying is that people are moody, fickle, and changeable. One day, one month, or even one year, our outlook can be unbearably bleak, and the challenges of the future can appear insurmountable. But fortunes and frames of mind can pick up, clouds lift: we get a new job, fall in love, finally put a bereavement behind us, after which the prospect of asking to die may strike us as preposterous. Many a failed suicide has been grateful in retrospect for having botched the job.
What’s especially puzzling about Canada, of all places, having such loose restrictions on assisted dying is that Justin Trudeau’s government is famously — I would say notoriously — Left-wing. It’s the Left that traditionally prides itself on concern for the “vulnerable” (a ubiquitous catch-all adjective I’ve come to detest). We would expect Canadian worthies to be out on the streets protesting the state’s offer of nonexistence to the incapacitated, the incarcerated, the addled, or the down at the heel, and instead a slim majority of the country seems to see assisted dying as an answer to the shortcomings of their healthcare system. In a way, I’m impressed. I didn’t think those wet Canadians capable of such cool, callous calculation.
To be fair, the average age of Canadians euthanised by Maid in 2021 was 76; 80% had already been in palliative care, and 65% had cancer. In majority, the regime continues to serve the patients it was originally designed to help: people in searing physical pain who are certain to die soon anyway.
I come full circle, then. I still believe in legal assisted dying. After that experience of paralysing nerve pain — which has blessedly not returned — I would even endorse extending such a service to people in non-fatal agony if such life-despoiling torture is chronic and physicians can offer no effective relief. But that’s where I’d draw the line, and I’d hold the line: relieving people of physical pain, for which I have developed a sober respect.
Ironically, the very liberality of Canada’s system has turned it into a political weapon for opponents of kindred programmes proposed in countries such as Britain, where the practice of assisted dying is still banned. But there’s no reason a state that allows what used to be called “mercy killing” under strictly defined circumstances necessarily slides down that hackneyed slippery slope and starts slaughtering every citizen whom someone considers inconvenient or costly. A well-designed protocol should require a waiting period and make it easy for clients to change their minds. Knowing they have the option of an ultimate exit gives many people the fortitude to keep going.
If I would not offer legal euthanasia to anorexics, people with hearing loss, or depressives, much less to the poor or homeless, let’s remember what’s at issue: not whether the state forces you to keep living but whether the state actively helps you die. For any folks bound and determined to not be here anymore, a range of old-fashioned if unpleasant remedies remain at hand. If that disagreeableness presents enough of a barrier to get you to reconsider, maybe you’re still up for continuing to kick around the planet after all.
“No matter what it says, it [the US] controls this war, it supplies weapons, munition, intelligence information, data from satellites, it is pursuing a war against us,” he said, according to a translation. “These are exactly the dirty methods that the West uses not only in relation to Ukraine but in many other areas of global politics,” Lavrov stated.
https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/russia-says-that-its-at-war-against-the-united-states
by Mac Slavo
Sep 19, 2023
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in statements made to reporters, that the United States is waging war against Russia through the Ukraine proxy war. In previous comments on Friday, Lavrov had said the U.S. is also waging a global effort to isolate Moscow.
It doesn’t appear to be working, as China continues to make it clear that it is on Russia’s side, no matter what the ruling class of the United States decides to do. “There is a real plot around the topic of the so-called (peace) negotiations, as well as attempts to turn everything upside down through pseudo diplomacy,” he said Friday. He explained:
“The West has been saying for months that this ‘peace formula’ is the only basis for negotiations. It starts from innocent topics … and then comes to the purpose for which it was concocted – inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia, to restore the borders of Ukraine as they were in 1991, court-martial the Russian leadership, force Russia to pay reparations, and then ‘mercifully’ agree to sign a peace agreement.”
When Lavrov, who is a top Russian diplomat, was speaking on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum on Sunday morning, he said: “No matter what it says, it [the US] controls this war, it supplies weapons, munition, intelligence information, data from satellites, it is pursuing a war against us,” he said, according to a translation. “These are exactly the dirty methods that the West uses not only in relation to Ukraine but in many other areas of global politics,” Lavrov stated.
https://x.com/LukeGromen/status/1703816215716610310?s=20
Lavrov also claimed that Washington is not only transferring some $100 billion in military aid to Kiev but is actually controlling its decision-making. He further said this is in order to try and inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia, according to a report by ZeroHedge.
Meanwhile, the White House appears to be on the cusp of approving more weapons for Ukraine’s use in the war. These include long-range missiles, the ATACMS, which has a range of 190 miles. These new long-range missiles from Washington will make it easier for Kiev to continue to strike cities and bases inside Russia. This new scheme by the U.S. is going to risk more severe escalation which could eventually see direct Russia-NATO clashes.
Pepe Escobar
Sept 19, 2023
© POOL
It will take ages to unpack the silos of information inbuilt in the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok last week, coupled with the – armored – train-keeps-a-rollin’ conducted by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un straddling every nook and cranny of Primorsky Krai.
The key themes all reflect the four main vectors of the New Great Game as it’s being played across the Global South: energy and energy resources; manufacturing and labor; market and trade rules; and logistics. But they go way beyond – exploring the subtle nuances of the current civilizational war.
https://t.me/geopolitics_live/5330?embed=1
So Vladivostok presented…
– A serious debate on the surge of anti-neocolonialism, presented for instance by the Myanmar delegation; geostrategically, Burma/Myanmar, as a privileged gateway to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, was always an object of Divide and Rule games, with the British Empire only caring about extracting natural resources. This is what “scientific colonialism” is all about.
– A serious debate on the concept of the civilization-state, as already developed by Chinese and Russian scholars, applied to China, Russia, India and Iran.
– The interconnection of transport/connectivity corridors. That includes the upgrading of the Trans-Siberian in the near future; a boost for the Trans-Baikal – the world’s busiest rail line – connecting the Urals to the Far East; a renewed drive for the Northern Sea Route (last month two Russian oil tankers sailed from Murmansk across the Arctic to China for the first time; ten days shorter than the Suez Canal route); and the coming of the Chennai-Vladivostok channel, which will be connected to the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC).
– The common Eurasia payment system, discussed in detail in one of the key panels: Greater Eurasia: Drivers for the Formation of an Alternative International and Monetary and Financial System. The immense challenge to set up a new payment settlement currency against “toxic currencies” instrumentalized amid relentless Hybrid War. In another panel, the possibility of a timely BRICS and EAEU joint summit next year has been evoked.
Far East, Russia’s New Weapons and Economy of The Future – Putin at EEF 2023
The genesis of Kim Jong Un’s train journey to the Russian Far East – coinciding with the Forum, no less – is a masterful strategic coup that was in the works since 2014, at the time of the Maidan.
Xi Jinping was still in the beginning of his first mandate; he had announced the New Silk Road exactly ten years ago, first in Astana and then in Jakarta. The DPRK was not supposed to be integrated into this vast pan-Eurasian project that would soon become China’s overarching foreign policy concept.
The DPRK then was on a roll against the Hegemon, under Obama, and Beijing was no more than a worried spectator. Moscow, of course, was always focused on peace in the Korean Peninsula, especially because its geopolitical priorities in 2014 were Donbass and Syria/Iran. The last thing Moscow could afford was a war in Asia-Pacific.
Putin’s strategy was to send Defense Minister Shoigu to Beijing and Islamabad to calm it all down. Pakistan at the time was helping Pyongyang to weaponize their nuclear arsenal. Simultaneously, Putin himself approached Kim, offering serious guarantees: we’ve got your back if ever there is an attack by the Hegemon supported by Seoul. Even better: Putin got Xi himself to double down on the guarantees.
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un Wraps Up Visit to Russia, Leaves by Train
The categorical imperative was simple: as long as Pyongyang did not start any trouble, Moscow and Beijing would be by its side.
A sort of calm before any possible storm then set in – even if Pyongyang continued to test their missiles. So over the years, Kim’s mindset changed; he became convinced that Russia and China were his allies.
The DPRK’s geoeconomic integration into Eurasia was seriously discussed in previous, pre-Covid editions of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. That included the tantalizing possibility of a Trans-Korean Railway linking both North and South to the Far East, Siberia and the wider Eurasia.
So Kim started to see the Big Eurasia Picture, and how Pyongyang could finally start to benefit geoeconomically from a closer association with the EAEU, SCO and BRI.
This is how strategic diplomacy works: you invest during a decade, and then all the pieces fall into place when an armored train keeps-a-rollin’ across Primorsky Krai.
From the perspective of a Russia-China-DPRK triangle, it’s no wonder the collective West has been reduced to the status of crying toddlers in a sandbox. The Hegemon’s puny US-Japan-South Korea axis to counter, simultaneously, China and the DPRK, is a joke compared to the DPRK’s brand-new role as a sort of Asia-Pacific Military District, adjacent to their immediate neighbor, the Russian Far East.
There will be military integration, of course, in missile defense, radars, ports, airfields. But the key vector, along the way, will be geoeconomic integration. Sanctions from now on are meaningless.
No one in 2014 was seeing this all play out, except for a very sharp analyst who coined the precious Double Helix concept to define the still evolving, at the time, Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership.
The Double Helix perfectly explains the full-spectrum geostrategic symbiosis between two civilization-states which happen to be former empires but since the middle of the previous decade willfully decided to accelerate their mutual drive to lead the Global Majority in the path towards multipolarity.
All of the above finely coalesced in the last panel in Vladivostok – informally known even to the Japanese and Koreans as “the European capital of Asia”, in the heart of Asia-Pacific. The debate was on a “global alternative to Western dominance”. The West, incidentally, was absolutely invisible at the Forum.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova summed it all up: the recent G20 and BRICS summits had set the stage for President Putin’s remarkable address to the plenary session in Vladivostok.
Zakharova alluded to “fantastic strategic patience”. That applies to the whole “pivot to Asia” policy and boosting the development of the Far East, initiated in 2012, and now implying a full turn of the Russian economy towards Asia-Pacific geoeconomics. But at the same time, that also applies to integrating the DPRK into the geoeconomic Eurasian high-speed train.
Top N Korean Diplomat Lauds Growing Strategic Ties Between Russia, DPRK
Zakharova stressed how Russia “never supported isolation”; always “advocated partnership” – which the Forum graphically displayed for dozens of Global South delegations. And now, under the conditions of a “dirty fight, unlawful and with no rules”, a serious stand-off, the Russian position remains easily recognizable for the Global Majority: “Not to accept dictatorship”.
Andrey Denisov, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, made a point to mention crack political analyst Sergey Karaganov as one of the key drivers of the concept of Greater Eurasia. More than “multipolarity”, Denisov argued, what is being built is “polycentricity”: a series of concentric circles, involving plenty of dialogue partners.
Former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl now heads a new think tank in St. Petersburg, G.O.R.K.I. As a European who ended up being ostracized by her own peers under the blatant toxicity of cancel culture, she stressed how freedom and rule of law have disappeared in Europe.
Kneissl referred to the Battle of Actium as the key passage of power from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Western Mediterranean: “That’s when the dominance of the West started”, complete with all the mythology built around the Roman Empire which obsesses the Anglosphere to this day.
With sanctions dementia and irrational Russophobia installed at the head of the EU and the European Commission, Kneissl stressed, the notion that “treaties must be preserved” disappeared while “the rule of law has been destroyed. This is the worst that could have happened to Europe”.
Alexander Dugin, online, called for understanding “the depth of Western domination”, expressed via hyper-liberalism. And he proposed a key breakthrough: the Western modus operandi should become an object of research, in a sort of Gramscian attempt to define what distinguishes Western ideology, and thus act towards “deep decolonization”.
Western Russophobia Campaign is Insane – Daughter of Chilean Political Prisoner Corvalan
In a sense this is what is being attempted by current actors in West Africa – Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger. That poses the question of who is a real Sovereign in a new world. The West, argues Dugin, is a Total Sovereign; Russia, as a nuclear power and prime military power defined as an existential threat by the Hegemon, is also a Sovereign.
Then there’s China, India, Iran, Turkey. These are key poles in a dialogue of civilizations; actually what was proposed by former Iranian President Khatami way back in the late 1990s, and then dismissed by the Hegemon.
Dugin remarked how China “has moved far away in building a civilizational state”. Russia, Iran, India are not far behind. These will be the essential actors steering the world towards polycentricity.