A former White House official has acknowledged the reality of growing resistance to the country’s imperialism
It is high time that the American people awaken to the crimes their country has committed, and to the fact that the rest of the world is painfully aware of them and is rebelling accordingly.
In an interesting recent speech in Tallinn, Estonia, former White House official Fiona Hill showed that at least someone in Washington has enough self-awareness to see what’s happening in the world.
Hill acknowledged that the conflict in Ukraine has sparked a global “proxy rebellion,” led by Russia, against American hegemony. This is quite true, as many of us could see from the very start of Moscow’s military offensive, in the spring of last year. But this kickback has been a long-time coming, and the US has brought it upon itself through its own deeds.
First of all, it must be pointed out that the Soviet Union, modern Russia’s predecessor, led a rebellion against American hegemony throughout much of its history. Especially during the Cold War, Moscow’s support was critical for Third World countries striving to overturn centuries of Western colonialism in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The US took it upon itself to forcefully defend this colonial system. Indeed, the Cold War was really a giant proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union over colonialism, with the US fighting to maintain this system and the Soviet Union fighting to dismantle it. Much of the world’s population continues to be grateful for the help they received from the Soviets in breaking their colonial chains.
The Russian Federation recently acknowledged all of this in its foreign policy statement of March 31, 2023, in which it stated that the Soviet Union’s chief foreign policy achievements were the defeat of Nazism during the Second World War and its part in the successful decolonization of the world. Modern-day Russia states that, as the “legal successor” to the USSR, it continues to pursue these goals. It is my observation, after just returning from Russia and the May 9 Victory Day celebrations, that the Russian people continue to cherish these accomplishments of the Soviet Union, with the hammer and sickle red flag ubiquitous in every city I visited from St. Petersburg to Yalta.
Meanwhile, after the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989 and the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the US saw the opportunity to reassert Western dominance of the world largely unchecked. While the US referred to its goal as Pax Americana, its methods had little to do with peace and everything to do with war. Thus, Washington wasted no time in invading and attacking other countries from Panama (1989), to Iraq (1990), Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq again (2003) and Libya (2011). This does not even count the smaller invasions and many proxy and terror wars waged by the US during this time, such as Syria, beginning in 2011, and in Ukraine with the coup it helped instigate in 2014.
Russia and the rest of the world, unable to counter the superior US military might, largely sat back and took this. But anger and resentment grew, for none of these wars were necessary or just. They were wars of choice, which the US waged to protect what it saw as its economic and geopolitical interests, all the while dressing up its actions as “humanitarian.” As a rule they claimed these interventions as necessary to protect the target country’s population from an “oppressive,” “brutal” or “dictatorial” regime. While Americans largely bought into such justifications, the rest of the world grimaced at the patent absurdity.
In 2015, the Russian bear started to awaken once more, intervening in Syria to beat back the brutal terrorist war against that country, which the US actively instigated and supported.
While the US tries to claim that the whole world stands with it in opposing Russia’s actions, in Ukraine, this is simply not true, and US officials know it. “The world” supports the US only if one excludes Latin America, Asia and Africa. These regions, home to most of the planet’s population, did not and do not support the Americans. Many countries in these regions are weary of the US intervening in their backyards at will in the form of aggressive wars, coups d’etat and the support of armed insurgents, and they were happy to see that someone – namely Russia – was finally fighting back. Meanwhile, even Saudi Arabia, a long-time ally and co-conspirator of the US in its imperial machinations, has broken ranks with the US by refusing to boost oil supplies. It has additionally begun engaging with Iran, demonstrating that the world is getting fed up with Washington’s meddling.
The US government pretends it doesn’t see this, and much of the American public really doesn’t, demonstrating the pervasiveness of propaganda and its ability to drown out and obfuscate reality. This again brings to mind playwright Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize speech in which he scolded the US imperium, which “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War,” leading to “hundreds of thousands of deaths.” But thanks to the power of propaganda, “it never happened,” Pinter said. “Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. America has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good,” something Pinter describes as a “highly successful act of hypnosis.”
It is high time that the American people awaken to the crimes their country has committed, and to the fact that the rest of the world is painfully aware of them and is rebelling accordingly. After acknowledging this, Americans could finally start to hold their government accountable for its actions and demand that it stop antagonizing the world through unprovoked violence and instead try to engage with other nations as equals in addressing the world’s pressing problems of poverty, illness and environmental degradation. It is the only course of action that can save humanity.
Then we had the orchestrated “Covid Pandemic” that used propaganda and fear to accustom Western peoples to the removal of their freedoms and Constitutional civil liberty protections in order “to be safe.” And again the insouciant Western peoples fell for it, and again diminished their liberties.
Time and time and time again, insouciant Americans allow the presstitutes to brainwash, indoctrinate, and deceive them. Afterwards they, or some of them, eventually catch on. But despite lessons learned, another precedent that erodes truth and liberty has been established. And despite lessons learned, they will sit in front of their TV screens for their next brainwashing and indoctrination by the presstitutes who serve the ruling oligarchy by deceiving Americans. My voice is that of one; theirs are many.
We don’t have to go far back in time, just the adult lifetime of the current older American generation to list deception after deception.
We had the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy by the CIA and its cover-up by both political parties and the Warren Commission.
After that, the atrocities exploded. Not to name them all, we had the Clinton regime’s violation of the word of the US Government when taking advantage of Russian weakness with the collapse of the Soviet Union resulting from President Gorbachev’s arrest by hardline members of the Politburo, Clinton moved NATO to Russia’s border. American patriots hailed this fatal error as “giving communism a knock-out blow.”
Then we had the inside job of 9/11 that gave the US neoconservatives their “new Pearl Harbor” to launch their wars against Middle Eastern countries that constrained Israeli expansion into Southern Lebanon and further.
Then we had the invasion of South Ossetia, a Russian protectorate, by the US equipped and trained Georgian army. Georgia, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, before the Soviet collapse was long a province of Russia.
Then we had the orchestrated “Maidan Revolution” in Ukraine in 2014 which overthrew a government living at peace with Russia, which Ukraine had been a part of for many centuries, and replaced it with a neo-Nazi government directed by Washington. This stupid and irresponsible act by the US neoconservatives has resulted in increasing gratuitous provocations of Russia that will end in a nuclear war.
Then we had the orchestrated “Covid Pandemic” that used propaganda and fear to accustom Western peoples to the removal of their freedoms and Constitutional civil liberty protections in order “to be safe.” And again the insouciant Western peoples fell for it, and again diminished their liberties.
The US has lived through Russiagate, exposed by Special Counsel Durham as a baseless FBI orchestration to discredit President Donald Trump, two baseless impeachments of Trump based on nothing but ideological hatred, a fake “January 6 insurrection” orchestrated to demonize Trump and his supporters, a fake documents gate scandal orchestrated against Trump until it was found that Biden, as VP, had in his possession far more documents of the kind being used to go after Trump. And now we have Pornstargate. An aging porn star apparently saw her last chance for wealth as extortion of Trump during his presidential campaign. Trump’s attorneys advised, “pay her and get rid of what the Democrats will make the main campaign issue.” The charge by the black New York state prosecutor and black attorney general is that Trump’s lawyers misreported the payoff as a legal expense, which it was as it was advised by and handled by attorneys when it should have been reported as a campaign expense. This is not a legitimate basis for indicting a President of the United States.
When we consider that the President of the United States can be harassed for seven years entirely on the basis of obvious false charges, how can we expect that the United States has a future? If they can do this to a President, what can they do to you and me?
Having watched the insouciant American public for a lifetime, I have been convinced by them that they are incapable of defending their liberty and incapable of recognizing the challenges to their liberty. They forever fall for the “foreign enemy” pitch of the ruling establishment.
Insouciance is inconsistent with liberty.
I believe Jean Raspail saw the end of the Western World in 1973 and described it in his novel, The Camp of the Saints. To stave off discouragement, I recite the 9th-century Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Malvern Bridge, where the English Earl attempting to hold off the Viking raiders, tells his diminishing force: “As our numbers diminish, our will must grow stronger.”
VIENTIANE, May 23. /TASS/. The United States should pay Russia for undermining the Nord Stream pipeline explosion as well as for the cities it is responsible for destroying in new regions, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said.
Medvedev responded positively to a question about whether the US should compensate Russia for the damage caused by the Nord Stream pipeline’s sabotage in an interview with the RT TV channel broadcast on Tuesday. “And not only this damage. Let them repay or at least give them the means to restore Artyomovsk, Mariupol and a host of other places that were ruined with their help and support. Using their money,” the official noted.
He reiterated that the US should reimburse Russia for undermining the [Nord Stream] pipeline. “Let them compensate here also, though there is still room to talk with respect to the evidence,” Medvedev said. “This process is not over yet and this page has not been turned,” he noted. “In any case, they deny it [their involvement – TASS] but their arguments do not appear to be very sound,” the official added.
“NATO is not serious about this scenario. Otherwise, NATO would not have supplied such dangerous weapons to the Ukrainian regime. Apparently, they think that a nuclear conflict, or a nuclear apocalypse, is never ever possible,” the politician said
VIENTIANE, May 23. /TASS/. The North Atlantic alliance does not take the threat of nuclear war seriously enough, thus making a big mistake, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, said on Tuesday.
“NATO is not serious about this scenario. Otherwise, NATO would not have supplied such dangerous weapons to the Ukrainian regime. Apparently, they think that a nuclear conflict, or a nuclear apocalypse, is never ever possible,” he said in an interview with the RT television broadcaster. In Medvedev’s view, NATO is “wrong and at some point events may take a completely unpredictable turn.”
“The responsibility will be placed squarely on the North Atlantic Alliance,” he said.
As Medvedev pointed out, no one knows whether the point of no return has been passed.
“No one knows this. This is the main danger. Because as soon as they provide something, they say: let’s supply this, too. Long range missiles or planes. Everything will be all right. But nothing will be fine. We will be able to cope with it. But only more and more serious types of weapons will be used. That’s what the current trend is,” he concluded.
The destruction of depleted uranium shells in Ukraine has produced a radioactive cloud which has been blown toward Western Europe, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, has claimed. The UK has supplied this type of munition to Ukraine to be fired from British-made Challenger tanks.
The senior official revealed the purported threat during a government meeting on Friday, in which he accused the US of manipulating its allies to provide “help” to other nations that results in harm being done to the recipients.
“They ‘helped’ Ukraine this way too, applied pressure to its satellites to supply depleted uranium munitions. Their destruction resulted in a radioactive cloud moving towards Western Europe. They have detected an increase in radiation in Poland,” Patrushev stated.
Unconfirmed reports have circulated in Ukraine regarding the target of a Russian strike last Saturday, which Moscow said destroyed an ammunitions depot in the city of Khmelnitsky. According to the claims, the military facility was used to store British-provided depleted uranium shells. It has been suggested that the material may have been turned into dust by powerful explosions at the depot.
Russia previously warned that the use of depleted uranium munitions poses a long-term environmental and public health threat, based on studies in nations such as Serbia and Iraq, where the weapons were previously used. London has denied such a risk.
While it is mildly radioactive, depleted uranium is mainly considered a health risk because the material is a toxic heavy metal. Particles of uranium or uranium oxide produced in an explosion could be inhaled by anyone exposed to them, or contaminate the environment.
Polish authorities have denied claims that a spike in radiation was detected in the eastern city of Lublin on Monday.
Speculation about the blast in Khmelnitsky was fueled by the reported deployment of Ukrainian military patrols that allegedly collected samples in and around the city. A nuclear power plant is located nearby, but reports claimed that patrols that normally monitor the situation around the facility were seen far away from their usual routes.
The ‘Global South’ is starting to question whether Western countries and primarily the US, should be allowed to continue dictating the international agenda
By Igor Makarov, Associate Professor at the Higher School of Economics (HSE), head of the Research and Educational Laboratory for the Economics of Climate Change, and the editor-in-chief of HSE’s Contemporary World Economy
Last week, in Mumbai, I attended the Think 20 interim conference. It describes itself as an “idea bank” for the G20 that brings together think tanks and high-level experts to discuss policy issues relevant to the group.
The recommendations involved are far from trivial. The world is in a series of simultaneous structural crises right now: the economy, debt levels, sustainable development goals and, separately, climate change. Above all, it is also engulfed in a crisis of global governance, the basic architecture of which was developed in a different era (when there was a different balance of power between countries, in which they had different objectives).
The main target of criticism were international financial institutions. The problem is not so much the effectiveness with which they are run by developed countries (although this has also been much debated), but that they are not up to the task of pooling large amounts of money for common purposes. The world has sufficient financial resources to address many sustainable development issues, but they cannot be directed to where they are needed.
For example, the cost of capital in the developed (mostly Western) world has averaged 1.5-2% over the past five years, but it has been at 8% in Asia, 16% in Africa and 22% in sub-Saharan Africa. Tightening monetary policy in the West only exacerbates the situation for developing countries. The role of international financial institutions is not so much to provide aid to poor states but to help channel sufficient private savings around the world into development projects, taking on some of the risks of investors.
India, as it happens, complains that the World Bank has provided only peanuts in funding (just a few billion dollars), relative to its over $3 trillion economy, in nominal US dollar terms.
The second necessity is digitization. The focus is on digitizing services and public infrastructure (as opposed to the manner in which it can be used for industry in the US and Europe). An example of how this can work is the digital ID system being developed in India, which is linked to a bank account. As a result, there are now four times more digital transactions in the South Asian country than in China, and 11 times more than in the US and Western Europe combined.
The aim is twofold: to make it easier to include more people (especially women) in economic activity, and to stimulate innovation. Developing countries will be less and less able to host Western industries (which was the Chinese growth model), so innovation will have to be built up through services, especially as new technologies will allow global companies to outsource more and more.
Multilateralism is essential. However, the question is to what extent the US, on the one hand, and China, on the other, are ready for it.
The former is more interested in the results of its next election, and the cycle itself, than in global problems; while the latter sees its participation in solving them so far only in the form of China-centric formats such as the Belt and Road Initiative. There was one attempt to attack Russia for undermining a well-functioning world order – by an Anglo-American participant, who was immediately rebuked rather harshly by a Brazilian and then an Indian moderator.
In general, any talk of a “rule-based order” in Mumbai was visibly tiresome. In just a few years, I have seen a clear shift from delegates declaring the crisis of this kind of order to key people asking who should actually make the rules.
The general impression is that the successive presidencies of Indonesia, India, Brazil and South Africa, from 2022-2025, (with very active interaction between them) of the G20 will be maximized by these countries to shape a new narrative, which of course will not automatically translate into reforms of global governance, but will serve as constant pressure for these changes.
On Tuesday Russia’s military announced it destroyedUS-supplied Patriot anti-air battery in Ukraine during a hypersonic missile strike on Kiev. Widely circulating video appeared to confirm the destruction of a Patriot battery, but still there was much speculation over the event, given it was a significant first on the Ukrainian battlefield.
US defense officials are now confirming that US Patriots were hit by Russia, however, they downplayed the degree of devastation of the strike. CNN reports:
The damage to a Patriot air defense system following a Russian missile attack near Kyiv on Tuesday morning is minimal, three US officials tell CNN, with one official describing it as “minor” damage.
The US sent inspectors to examine the system on Tuesday after being told by Ukrainian forces that the system appeared to have been damaged, one official said.
CNN writes further based on the statement from US officials: “It is not clear what part of the Patriot was damaged or if it was damaged by an actual missile strike or falling debris. The Ukrainians said they successfully intercepted all six Russian Kinzhal missiles on Tuesday morning.”
Despite claiming the Patriot wasn’t utterly “destroyed” in the attack, CNN’s reporting seems to confirm the narrative from the Russian Defense Ministry, which said in a Tuesday Telegram post: “a high-precision strike by the Kinzhal hypersonic missile system in the city of Kyiv hit a US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missile system.” Ukraine had publicly denied Moscow’s assertion.
The Pentagon on Wednesday said that Russia is currently attempting to overwhelm Ukraine’s anti-air system with large-scale barrages in various places, including with missiles and drones. Previously The National Interest described how the Patriots are vulnerable:
Patriot systems are limited to pinpoint defense of major assets and are designed to operate in tandem with air defenses engaging targets at higher and lower altitudes. Without these additions, Patriot will have too many threats to engage and the result will either be porous coverage that doesn’t protect its defended assets, or coverage that quickly subsides when Patriot runs out of interceptors.
Moreover, Patriot systems are themselves vulnerable. Operating a Patriot radar system gives away its location, making it an open target for Russian attacks. This means that Patriot is not a one-stop-shop for defending Ukraine’s military assets or its people.
Confirmation of the strike on one or more Patriot systems is not something the Ukrainians or Americans want to own up to, given it would show them to be deficient.
Patriot air defense system was hit in Kiev by a high-precision strike with a Kinzhal hypersonic missile – Russian Defense Ministry. Obviously, Kiev denies it.
Remarkable how they hid it behind the residential buildings.
The White House when asked refused to confirm, but Kirby’s words suggested the accuracy of the CNN report:
“First of all, I can’t confirm these reports,” said Kirby.
“It would depend on the scope of the damage if it could be repaired by Ukrainians on site. Obviously, if there was damage done to a Patriot system that needed to be repaired outside Ukraine, we would certainly assist with that.”
Earlier, CNN reported that a U.S.-made Patriot missile defense system was likely damaged, but not destroyed, during a Russian missile attack on Kyiv on May 16. Two Patriot systems are currently located in Ukraine, one provided by the United States and the other by Germany and the Netherlands.
Commenting on the video of the purported Russian direct hit on the Patriot battery, Kim Dotcom wrote on Twitter, “30 US Patriot PAC-3 MSE launch at a cost of $5 million per missile. That’s $150 million gone within 2 mins. At the end the Patriot launch platforms were destroyed by Russian missiles. Why would any military still want to buy Patriot after this failure?”
The longer this war carrie’s on by the own hands of the West the more I see the truth about Russia. He’s bang on that they don’t want us western countries to see how Russia really is! The enemies are our own govt… they destroyed our nations beyond recognition with wokeism. https://t.co/qJ5FNOhlRX
“He emphasized this means a considerable escalation of the conflict and an expansion of the military operations area,” the embassy said in the statement, referring to Andrey Kelin
LONDON, May 12. /TASS/. The UK gave Kiev long-range Storm Shadow missiles for strike on Russian cities including in Crimea, Russian Ambassador to the UK Andrey Kelin has said.
He made the statement when addressing members of the Russian Club of Oxford, which was established in 1906, and the Russian embassy sent a statement about his remarks to TASS on Friday.
“He emphasized this means a considerable escalation of the conflict and an expansion of the military operations area,” the embassy said in the statement, referring to Kelin. “It has been noted that Western countries used to be cautious enough to avoid sending Kiev weapons like this.”
“It’s obvious for us that London made this step to enable Kiev to strike Russian cities and villages, including the territory of Crimea,” the statement went on to say. “We regret that the UK, which has nothing to do with this conflict, nevertheless plays a leading role in extending and escalating it.”
Russia warns Britain over cruise missiles — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union https://t.co/VbcItigT3a
— Komrade Deplorable (@astroloupicus) May 13, 2023
“The expansion of the British Empire was the largest among the Western European states in terms of geography; it covered almost every region in the world. It was built, to a large extent, based on an idea of the cultural and religious exceptionalism of the British as promoted by London.
While occupying rich countries and territories, the British exploited them economically, drained them of resources and used them as raw material colonies and markets for their goods. To keep other peoples under control, London did not hesitate to use the harshest methods. The animal cruelty of British colonizers is astonishing, as evidenced during the fight for independence in India or during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War, when the Brits created the world’s first concentration camps, where even children were used as a workforce… The British colonial machine basically ground down millions of people in Africa and radically changed the continent’s demographic picture. One can rightfully say that the British are responsible for the genocide of the peoples in Africa, India (the British Empire intentionally starved Indian territories believing that it would suppress the independence movement), as well as the indigenous peoples in Australia and Tasmania, exterminating up to 90 percent of the local population.”
ZAKHAROVA (Russia MFA Spokeswoman): "The expansion of the British Empire was the largest among the Western European states in terms of geography; it covered almost every region in the world. It was built, to a large extent, based on an idea of the cultural and religious… pic.twitter.com/aUosmas2t8
The Foreign Ministers of Russia, Iran, Syria and Turkey meet in Moscow. Lavrov said that the launch of the process of normalization of Turkish-Syrian relations has a positive impact on the situation in the region and the Middle East as a whole. pic.twitter.com/XtwuqBByiN
🇸🇾🇹🇷🇷🇺🇮🇷 A meeting of the foreign ministers of Turkey, Russia, Iran, and Syria on Syria has started in Moscow. Lavrov noted that the launch of the process of normalization of Turkish-Syrian relations has a positive impact on the situation in the region and Middle East as a whole. pic.twitter.com/HIgmrSO9rH
— 🅰pocalypsis 🅰pocalypseos 🇷🇺 🇨🇳 🅉 (@apocalypseos) May 10, 2023
The Russian leader has accused Western powers of trying to build a system of “robbery, violence and suppression”
“It seems that they have forgotten what the insane ambitions of the Nazis led to. They have forgotten who defeated this monstrous, total evil,” he stressed.
Western elites have forgotten the consequences of the Nazis’ “insane ambitions,” Russian President Vladimir Putin has said during his Victory Day Parade speech on Red Square in Moscow.
Russia believes that “any ideology of superiority is by its nature disgusting, criminal and deadly,” the president pointed out.
“The globalist elites keep insisting on their exceptionalism; they pit people against each other, split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia and aggressive nationalism, destroy traditional family values that make human a human,” Putin said.
According to the Russian leader, all this is being done by the US and allies in order to “further dictate their will, their rights and their rules” and implement what is basically “a system of robbery, violence and suppression” on the international stage.
“It seems that they have forgotten what the insane ambitions of the Nazis led to. They have forgotten who defeated this monstrous, total evil,” he stressed.
Referring to the conflict in Ukraine, Putin said that “a real war has been unleashed against out Motherland. But we resisted international terrorism. We’ll also defend the residents of Donbass and assure our security.”
The aim of the West is “to achieve the disintegration and destruction of our country, nullify the results of World War II, completely break down the system of global security and international law, and strangle any sovereign centers of development,” he insisted.
The US and its allies are to blame for the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, the head of state said.
“Overwhelming ambitions, arrogance and permissiveness inevitably lead to tragedies. This is the reason for the catastrophe that the Ukrainian people are now experiencing,” he pointed out.
The Ukrainians became “hostages” of the coup that took place in the country in 2014 and were turned into “a bargaining chip” by the West, which uses the country to implement its “cruel selfish plans.”
The two countries are on course to hit $200 billion in turnover this year
China’s trade with Russia hit a record high in 2022, growing by nearly a third amid Western sanctions on Moscow. Bilateral trade is on track to surpass $200 billion this year, according to first-quarter results.
The volume of trade between China and Russia has continued to grow, with both exports and imports surging at double-digit pace since the beginning of 2023, the General Administration of China Customs reports.
According to its report released on Tuesday, bilateral trade soared more than 43% in January-April compared with a year ago, to $73 billion. During that period, Chinese exports to Russia jumped 67.2% in annual terms to $33.6 billion, while imports from the country rose almost 25% to $39.4 billion.
China’s trade with Russia hit a record high in 2022, growing by nearly a third amid Western sanctions on Moscow. Bilateral trade is on track to surpass $200 billion this year, according to first-quarter results.
Official statistics show that Russia was the leader among China’s 20 largest partners in terms of trade growth in 2022. China has been competing with India as Russia’s biggest buyer of oil, and has overtaken the EU as the top importer of Russian agricultural products.
Beijing’s seaborne imports of Russian oil have been hitting record highs as refiners take advantage of discounts amid a rebound in domestic fuel demand following the lifting of Covid restrictions.
“We see how in certain countries they ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly destroy memorials to Soviet soldiers, demolish monuments to great commanders, create a real cult of the Nazis and their proxies, erase and demonize the memory of true heroes. Such profanation of the feat and sacrifices of the victorious generation is also a crime, an outright revanchism on the part of those who were cynically and blatantly preparing a new march on Russia and who brought together neo-Nazi scum from around the world for this.”
“We believe that any ideology of superiority is abhorrent, criminal and deadly by its nature. However, the Western globalist elites keep speaking about their exceptionalism, pit nations against each other and split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, destroy family and traditional values which make us human.
They do all that so as to keep dictating and imposing their will, their rights and rules on peoples, which in reality is a system of plundering, violence and suppression. They seem to have forgotten what the Nazis’ insane claims of global dominance led to. They forgot who destroyed that monstrous, total evil, who stood up for their native land and did not spare their lives to liberate the peoples of Europe.”
PUTIN at the Victory Day Parade: "We believe that any ideology of superiority is abhorrent, criminal and deadly by its nature. However, the Western globalist elites keep speaking about their exceptionalism, pit nations against each other and split societies, provoke bloody… pic.twitter.com/2rFuTHFilk
An Australian university has unearthed millions of Tweets by fake accounts pushing disinformation on the Ukraine war, Peter Cronau reports. The sample size dwarfs other studies of covert propaganda about the war on social media.
Rally for Ukraine outside the White House in Washington, Feb. 27, 2022. (Mike Maguire, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts.
An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war.
The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian.
The university researchers also found these automated tweets had been purposely used to drive up fear amongst people targeted by them, boosting a high level of statistically measurable “angst” in the online discourse.
The research team analysed a massively unprecedented 5,203,746 tweets, sent with key hashtags, in the first two weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Feb. 24. The researchers looked at predominately English-language accounts. A calculated 1.8 million unique Twitter accounts in the dataset posted at least one English-language tweet.
The results were published in August in a research paper, titled “#IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war,” by the University of Adelaide’s School of Mathematical Science.
The size of the sample under study, of over 5-million tweets, dwarfs other recent studies of covert propaganda in social media surrounding the Ukraine war.
The little-reported Stanford University/Graphika research on Western disinformation, analysed by Declassified Australia in September, examined just under 300,000 tweets from 146 Twitter accounts.
The Meta/Facebook research on Russian disinformation reported widely by mainstream media, including by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) a fortnight later, looked at only 1,600 Facebook accounts.
Reports on the new research have appeared in only a few independent media sites, and on Russia’s RT. The ground-breaking study exposing a massive anti-Russia social media disinformation campaign has been effectively ignored by Western establishment media, showing how stories that don’t fit the desired pro-Western narrative are routinely buried.
Disinformation Blitz Krieg
The Adelaide University researchers unearthed a massive organised pro-Ukraine influence operation underway from the early stages of the conflict. Overall, the study found automated “bot” accounts to be the source of between 60 to 80 percent of all tweets in the dataset.
The published data shows that in the first week of the Ukraine-Russia war there was a huge mass of pro-Ukrainian hashtag bot activity. Approximately 3.5 million tweets using the hashtag #IStandWithUkraine were sent by bots in that first week.
In fact, it was like someone had flicked a switch at the start of the war as pro-Ukraine bot activity suddenly burst into life. In that first day of the war the #IStandWithUkraine hashtag was used in as many as 38,000 tweets each hour, rising to 50,000 tweets an hour by day three of the war.
By comparison, the data shows that in the first week there was an almost total absence of pro-Russian bot activity using the key hashtags. During that first week of the invasion, pro-Russian bots were sending off tweets using the #IStandWithPutin or #IStandWithRussia hashtags at a rate of only several hundred per hour.
Given the apparent long-range planning for the invasion of Ukraine, cyber experts expressed surprise that Russian cyber and internet responses were so laggard. A researcher at the Centre for Security Studies in Switzerland, said: “The [pro-Russian] cyber operations we have seen do not show long preparation, and instead look rather haphazard.”
After being apparently left flatfooted, the #IStandWithPutin hashtag mainly from automated bots, eventually fired up a week after the start of the war. That hashtag started appearing in higher numbers on March 2, day 7 of the war. It reached 10,000 tweets per hour just twice over the next two days, still way behind the pro-Ukraine tweeting activity.
The #IStandWithRussia hashtag use was even smaller, reaching only 4,000 tweets per hour. After just two days of operation, the pro-Russian hashtag activity had dropped away almost completely. The study’s researchers noted the automated bot accounts “likely used by Russian authorities,” were “removed likely by pro-Ukrainian authorities.”
The reaction against these pro-Russian accounts had been swift. On March 5, after the #IStandWithPutin hashtag had trended on Twitter, the company announced it had banned over 100 accounts using the hashtag for violating its “platform manipulation and spam policy” and participating in “coordinated inauthentic behaviour.”
Later that month, the Ukraine Security Service (SBU) reportedly raided five “bot farms”’ operating inside the country. The Russia-linked bot operators were reportedly operating through 100,000 fake social media accounts spreading disinformation that was “intended to inspire panic among Ukrainian masses.”
Ukrainian security forces unearthed a pro-Russian automated “bot army” operating out of an apartment in March 2022. The raid found 100 sets of GSM-gateways, left, and 10,000 sim cards, right, operating 100,000 fake bot accounts. (SBU)
Unfiltered Research
The landmark Adelaide University research differs from these earlier revelations in another most unique and spectacular way.
While the Stanford-Graphika and Meta research was produced by researchers who have long-term deep ties to the U.S. national security state, the Adelaide University researchers are remarkably independent. The academic team is from the university’s School of Mathematical Science.
Using mathematical calculations, they set out to predict and model people’s psychological traits based on their digital footprint.
Unlike the datasets selected and provided for the Stanford/Graphika and the Meta research, the data the Adelaide University team accessed did not come from accounts that had been detected for breaching guidelines and shut down by Meta or Twitter.
Adelaide University campus, in Australia, 2008. (Pdfpdf, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)
Joshua Watt is one of the lead researchers on the university team, and is a Master of Philosophy candidate in applied mathematics.
He told Declassified Australia that the dataset of 5 million tweets was accessed directly by the team from Twitter accounts on the internet using an academic license giving access to the Twitter API.
The “Application Programming Interface” is a data communication software tool that allows researchers to directly retrieve and analyse Twitter data.
The fake tweets and automated bot accounts had not been detected and removed by Twitter before being analysed by the researchers, although some were possibly removed in Twitter’s March sweep.
Watt told Declassified Australia that in fact many of the bot accounts behind the 5 million tweets studied are likely to be still up and running.
Declassified Australia contacted Twitter to ask what action they may have taken to remove the fake bot accounts identified in the University of Adelaide research. They had not responded by the time of going to press.
Critical Tool in Info War
This new research paper confirms mounting fears that social media has covertly become what the researchers call “a critical tool in information warfare playing a large role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
The Adelaide University researchers tried their best to be noncommittal in describing the activities of the fake Twitter accounts, although they had found the vast majority – over 90 percent – were anti-Russian messages. They stated: “Both sides in the Ukrainian conflict use the online information environment to influence geopolitical dynamics and sway public opinion.”
They found the two main participating sides in the propaganda war have their own particular goals and style. “Russian social media pushes narratives around their motivation, and Ukrainian social media aims to foster and maintain external support from Western countries, as well as promote their military efforts while undermining the perception of the Russian military.”
While the research findings concentrated on automated Twitter bots, there were also findings on the use of hashtags by non-bot tweeters. They found significant information flows from non-bot pro-Russian accounts, but no significant flows from non-bot pro-Ukraine accounts.
As well as being far more active, the pro-Ukraine side was found to be far more advanced in its use of automated bots. The pro-Ukrainian side used more “astroturf bots” than the pro-Russians. Astroturf bots are hyper-active political bots that continuously follow many other accounts to increase followers of that account.
Social Media Role in Boosting Fear
Crucially, the University of Adelaide researchers also investigated the psychological influence the fake automated bot accounts had on the online conversation during those early weeks of the war.
These conversations in a target audience may develop over time into support or opposition towards governments and policies – but they may also have more instant effects influencing the target audiences’ immediate decisions.
The study found that it was the tweets from the fake “bot” accounts that most drove an increase in conversations surrounding “angst” amongst people targeted by them. They found these automated bot accounts increased “the use of words in the angst category which contains words related to fear and worry, such as ‘shame,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘threat, ‘panic.’”
By combining the “angst” messaging with messages about “motion” and geographical locations, the researchers found “the bot accounts are influencing more discussion surrounding moving/fleeing/going or staying.” The researchers believe this effect may well have been to influence Ukrainians even away from the conflict zones to flee from their homes.
The research shows that fake automated social media “bot” accounts do manipulate public opinion by shaping the discourse, sometimes in very specific ways. The results provide a chilling indication of the very real malign effects that mass social media disinformation campaigns can have on an innocent civilian population.
Origins of Twitter Bot Accounts
The researchers report that the overwhelming level of Twitter disinformation that was anti-Russian was from bots “likely [organised] by pro-Ukrainian authorities.”
The researchers asserted no further findings about the origin of the 5 million tweets, but did find that some bots “are pushing campaigns specific to certain countries [unnamed], and hence sharing content aligned with those timezones.” The data does show that the peak time for a selection of pro-Ukrainian bot activity occurred between 6pm and 9pm across U.S. time zones.
Some indication of the origin and the targeting of the messages could be deduced from the specific languages used in the 5 million tweets. Over 3.5 million tweets, or 67 percent, were in the English language, with fewer that 2 percent in Russian and Ukrainian.
In May 2022, the National Security Agency (NSA) director and U.S. cyber command chief, General Paul Nakasone, revealed that the Cyber Command had been conducting offensive Information Operations in support of Ukraine.
“We’ve conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum: offensive, defensive, [and] information operations,” Nakasone said.
U.S. Cyber Command training exercise at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, 2011. (Fort George G. Meade Public Affairs Office, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Nakasone said the U.S. has been conducting operations aimed at dismantling Russian propaganda. He said the operations were lawful, conducted through policy determined by the U.S. Defense Department and with civilian oversight.
Nakasone said the U.S. seeks to tell the truth when conducting an information operation, unlike Russia.
U.S. Cyber Command had deployed to Ukraine a “hunt forward” cyber team in December to help shore up Ukraine’s cyber defences and networks against active threats in anticipation of the invasion.
A newly formed European Union cyber rapid response team consisting of 12 experts joined the Cyber Command team to look for active cyber threats inside Ukrainian networks and to strengthen the country’s cyber defences.
The U.S. has invested $40 million since 2017 in helping Ukraine buttress its information technology sector. According to U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the investments have helped Ukrainians “keep their internet on and information flowing, even in the midst of a brutal Russian invasion.”
Wars &Lies in Our Pockets
With the rise of the internet, war and armed conflict will never be the same. Analysts have noted that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has ushered in a “new digital era of military, political and economic conflict” being manipulated by “laptop generals and bot armies.”
“In all dimensions of this conflict, digital technology plays a key role – as a tool for cyberattacks and digital protest, and as an accelerator for flows of information and disinformation,” wrote analysts at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in Brussels. “Propaganda has been a part of war since the beginning of history, but never before could it be so widely spread beyond an actual conflict area and targeted to so many different audiences.”
Joshua Watt, one of the lead researchers on the University of Adelaide team that conducted the landmark study, summed it up: “In the past, wars have been primarily fought physically, with armies, air force and navy operations being the primary forms of combat. However, social media has created a new environment where public opinion can be manipulated at a very large scale.”
“CNN brought once-distant wars into our living rooms,” another analyst stated, “but TikTok and YouTube and Twitter have put them in our pockets.”
We are all carrying around with us a powerful source of information and news media – and also, most certainly, disinformation that’s coming relentlessly at us from influence operations run by “bad actors” whose aim is to deceive.
The West and Russia will eventually sit down to discuss their differences, but this dialogue should be held not with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky but with those using him as a stooge, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.
Speaking to reporters after a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Goa, India, Lavrov reiterated that Moscow had “never refused to settle issues arising from the actions of the US and their satellites to pump Ukraine with weapons” so that it could fight Russia.
The minister noted that many countries around the world are growing increasingly aware that these tensions cannot be defused solely by freezing the Ukraine conflict. “Everyone understands that the ongoing events are geopolitical in nature,” he said.
“Without solving the main geopolitical problem – that of the West aspiring to hold onto its hegemony and impose its own will on all the others, – it is impossible to resolve crises in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world,” Lavrov added.
The Russian diplomat pointed to China’s 12-point plan for a political settlement in Ukraine, which was released in late February. Lavrov said that while the plan does seek to settle the conflict itself, it also focuses on much more global and comprehensive issues.
“All this has to be discussed, of course, not with Zelensky, who is a puppet in the hands of the West, but directly with his masters,” Lavrov said, noting that such talks would take place “sooner or later.”
In early April, amid speculation about an imminent Ukrainian spring counteroffensive, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken ruled out any peace negotiations between Kiev and Moscow, suggesting that such talks would only help Russia to “ratify” its territorial gains.
Moscow has repeatedly said it is open to talks with Kiev if the latter recognizes “the reality on the ground,” including the new status of four former Ukrainian regions that overwhelmingly voted to join Russia last autumn. However, around the same time as the referendums, Zelensky signed a decree prohibiting negotiations with the current Russian leadership.
When you are standing on the brink of the unthinkable, it can be way too easy for someone to come along and push you over the edge. I don’t know who just attacked the Kremlin with drones, but it was obviously done for a reason. Whoever did it knew, or should have known, that the Russians would strike back really hard. Just imagine how we would feel if there were explosions at the White House. Russian leaders are extremely angry, and some of them are openly talking about using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine. But if that happens, our world could be completely turned upside down. The Biden administration has hinted that the U.S. would use tactical nuclear weapons against Russian forces if the Russians use tactical nukes against Ukraine, and so let us hope that cooler heads will prevail.
Because once the nukes start flying, there is no turning back.
The Russian presidential administration said Wednesday that the Kremlin was attacked by drones overnight in an attempt on President Vladimir Putin’s life.
Moscow residents had reported hearing two explosions behind Kremlin walls shortly after 2 a.m. local time, after which the lights went out. Footage shared by residents in a local Telegram channel captured the incident, as smoke was seen filling the sky above the Kremlin. Videos also appeared to show part of the Kremlin on fire.
So who was responsible for doing this?
Could it have been a false flag by the Russians themselves?
That is certainly possible. Both sides in this conflict are more than capable of conducting false flag attacks.
It is also certainly possible that the Ukrainians were behind the attack. They have been using drones to strike other targets deep inside Russia, and the Washington Post had previously reported that Ukrainian officials had discussed attacking Moscow…
Last month, The Washington Post reported that the United States had secretly monitored discussions among Ukrainian officials about possible attacks against Moscow timed to coincide with the Feb. 24 anniversary of Russia’s invasion. The White House feared that such a move would provoke an aggressive response from Moscow, and two days before the anniversary, the C.I.A. said that Ukraine’s intelligence directorate “had agreed, at Washington’s request, to postpone strikes” on Moscow. The information was part of a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents obtained by The Post and other news organizations.
When he was asked about the attacks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky flatly denied that his government was involved…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday denied Moscow’s claims that Kyiv had attempted to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin, after Russia said two drones were shot down at the Kremlin.
“We didn’t attack Putin. We leave it to the tribunal. We fight on our territory, we are defending our villages and cities,” Zelensky told reporters at a joint press conference with Nordic leaders in Helsinki.
Maybe he is telling the truth.
I don’t know.
We should also not rule out the possibility that some third party is trying to provoke Russia into using tactical nukes against Ukraine because they know that the U.S. would likely respond by using tactical nukes against Russian forces.
There are certainly many interested parties that would love to see an apocalyptic conflict erupt between the United States and Russia.
But no matter who did this, the end result is that Russian leaders are absolutely furious.
Russia’s ex-president Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday called for the ‘physical elimination’ of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky after Moscow accused Kyiv of a drone attack on the Kremlin aimed at assassinating Vladimir Putin.
‘After today’s terrorist attack, there are no options left aside the physical elimination of Zelensky and his cabal,’ said Medvedev, who has been increasingly hawkish since Moscow’s Ukraine offensive.
Other prominent Russian leaders are issuing extremely angry statements as well…
Pro-Putin Just Russia party leader Sergey Mironov added: “This is the very real casus belli – a pretext for war.”
He urged the “liquidation of Ukraine’s terrorist top brass. We have something to hit their bunkers with.”
Senior politician Alexei Zhuravlev urged: “It is necessary to target the centre of Kyiv.
“Destroy the president’s office, destroy to the ground the [Ukrainian parliament], the general staff, and the buildings housing the Ukrainian special services.”
MP Mikhail Sheremet said: “It’s time to launch a missile strike on Zelensky’s residence in Kyiv.”
If the Russians do take out Zelensky, that will take this war to a very dangerous new level.
And if they actually decide to use tactical nukes against Ukraine, the Biden administration would be under a tremendous amount of pressure to hit the Russians back.
This is such a critical moment in our history, and Joe Biden will be the one making the final decisions on our end.
Needless to say, that thought should not bring comfort to any of us.
Of course, the U.S. military is not exactly prepared for an apocalyptic conflict with Russia. Instead, our military has been focusing on other things…
The US Navy invited an active-duty drag queen to be a “Digital Ambassador” – as part of a recent drive “to attract the most talented and diverse workforce” and combat plunging recruitment.
Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, who identifies as non-binary, was appointed as the first of five Navy Digital Ambassadors in a pilot program that ran from October to March.
Kelley, whose stage name is Harpy Daniels, has shared their journey on TikTok and Instagram, where they described how they began performing onboard and became an “advocate” for people who “were oppressed for years in the service.”
In a battle of political correctness, we would beat the Russians hands down.
But that is not the way that real wars are won.
Of course, most Americans do not want a war with Russia at all.
Most Americans just want to work hard and raise their families.
Unfortunately, our leaders have just kept pushing us closer and closer to the unthinkable, and now we are staring down into an abyss of misery and pain.
Is it possible that someone just tried to push us over the edge?
I don’t know.
But what I do know is that the Russians are going to hit Ukraine extremely hard, and I am just hoping that they decide to use some restraint.
De-dollarization is heading for a breakthrough due to rising global discontent with US ‘casino capitalism’, Pepe Escobar, geopolitical analyst and veteran journalist, told Sputnik News.
“It’s a gigantic snowball all over the world. We cannot even keep up with it,” Pepe Escobar said in an interview with the New Rules podcast. “It’s very important what is going to be discussed at the BRICS summit in South Africa. This will probably be the crossroads moment where things are going to then go.”
De-dollarization is heading for a breakthrough due to rising global discontent with US ‘casino capitalism’, Pepe Escobar, geopolitical analyst and veteran journalist, told Sputnik News.
“It’s a gigantic snowball all over the world. We cannot even keep up with it,” Pepe Escobar said in an interview with the New Rules podcast. “It’s very important what is going to be discussed at the BRICS summit in South Africa. This will probably be the crossroads moment where things are going to then go.”
Escobar explained that a growing number of countries in the Global South were doing the math and concluding that the US dollar was not a safe bet. The combination of aggressive US sanctions policy and reckless government spending have dramatically reduced the greenback’s international appeal.
“If you want to analyze the patterns these past two decades, you need to understand the fact that, if you are rich in commodities and if you are a productive capitalist nation and you decide to issue a currency, it will be internationally respected because people will know it’s based on facts, actual provenance, actual wealth,” he said. “That’s contrary to the system that we have now, which I have been calling it ‘casino capitalism’ for years. It’s futures, it’s bets, it’s suppositions. It may go right or wrong. If you lose, you lose it all. The house mostly always wins because the house is the one who prints the currency. It’s backed by nothing, literally, by a country that owes $30 trillion [in national debt] now and it will never be able to repay it.”
To make matters even worse, the US Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes has made borrowing in dollars expensive for almost everyone in the world. Prior to the Fed’s move, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned in January 2022 that the US raising interest rates could backfire on the global economy and especially on countries with higher levels of dollar-denominated debt.
The ongoing US banking crisis threatens to further destabilize international financial markets. No country in the world wants to “catch a cold” when the US economy “sneezes,” as memories of the 2008 financial crisis linger.
“They say, ‘look, why do we have to be subjected to this kind of arrangement?’ And of course, before, as we all know, it was ‘the Empire of bases’, over 800 military bases all over the world, ‘the power of the financial markets’, ‘the power of soft culture’, ‘the power of cancel culture’, but the Global South is not intimidated anymore. I think this is the first [time] in this new millennium. We never had this before in the past two and a half centuries, at least,” Escobar said.
In January 2023, BRICS – an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – made a splash by announcing that it may soon explore the possibility of creating its own currency to by-pass the US dollar. The idea was articulated on both sides of the Atlantic: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov touched upon the plan during a presser after his meeting with Angolan President Joao Lourenco on January 25.
On the other side of the pond, President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva discussed the issue of the creation of a common currency for BRICS and the countries of Mercosur, a South American trade bloc, during his meeting with his Argentine counterpart Alberto Fernandez.
“Why can’t an institution like the BRICS bank have a currency to finance trade relations between Brazil and China, between Brazil and all the other BRICS countries? Who decided that the dollar was the (trade) currency after the end of gold parity?” Lula said during an April visit to the Shanghai-based New Development Bank.
According to Escobar, the formation and development of three organizations, namely BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Eurasian Economic Union predetermined the end of the greenback-centered world order. BRICS members are now discussing designing an alternative currency; similar discussions are being held in the Eurasian Economic Union; they should start coordinating and then this will spill over to the SCO, the writer projected.
The trend has already been engulfing other blocs, Escobar continued, referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). On March 28, ASEAN finance ministers and central bank governors held a meeting in Indonesia to discuss how to move to settlements in local currencies by further enhancing an ASEAN cross-border digital payment system.
Initially, the agreement on such transactions was reached between Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand in November 2022. The association is seeking to reduce dependence not only on the US dollar, but also on euros, yens, and British pounds in financial transactions.
“We have something that was absolutely unbelievable two months ago,” Escobar emphasized.
De-dollarization has been discussed for decades. For instance, Mikhail Khazin, a Russian economist and publicist, who served in the Working Center for Economic Reforms under the Boris Yeltsin government in the 1990s, and his co-author Andrey Kobyakov predicted the demise of the US dollar dominance roughly 20 years ago in their book titled “The Decline of the Dollar Empire and the End of Pax Americana.” While the idea has been in the air for quite a while, why is it that this phenomenon has only now started to gain critical mass?
“We can even establish a date for it,” responded Escobar. “February last year, with that freezing, confiscation, stealing of Russian foreign reserves. And the Global South as practically as a whole started asking themselves from Latin America to Africa to South East Asia, ‘if they can do this with a nuclear superpower, they can do it with any one of us snapping their fingers’. So that’s why the coordination inside these multilateral organizations and in other forums picked up astronomic speed.
To illustrate his point, the journalist referred to the swift development of BRICS with a staggering 19 countries currently on the list to join the organization. Among them the strongest candidates are Iran, Argentina, Algeria, as well as the United Arab Emirates, Turkiye, Egypt, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia, as per the geopolitical analyst.
“So these are all strong middle rank powers from anywhere,” Escobar said. “And they’re going to start discussing the now notorious BRICS alternative currency. So they have to speed up this conversation and let’s hope that they are going to start discussing it in conjunction with the Eurasian Economic Union, which is much more advanced, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.”
Escobar believes that nothing short of a breakthrough in this respect could occur as early as next year.
“It’s possible, it’s a feasible scenario,” he insisted. “Until a few months ago, this would be the ultra-far-fetched scenario. Not anymore, because now the speed is unbelievable. Literally every day – Bangladesh, Argentina, Algeria, countries in Southeast Asia.”
Last month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with his Bolivian counterpart Rogelio Mayta in the Venezuelan capital Caracas and introduced a new trade transaction system to drop the US dollar and the euro and switch to rubles and Bolivianos instead.
Together with Argentina and Chile, Bolivia forms the so-called “Lithium Triangle” which accounts for more than half of the world’s deposits of the silvery-white alkali metal. Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni salt flat alone contains 21 million metric tons of lithium, widely used in rechargeable batteries for mobile phones, laptops, digital cameras and electric vehicles.
The most important element is the coming of the petroyuan, as per Escobar. For decades, crude oil has been traded in US dollars. However, the petrodollar could be soon dethroned: last year, Beijing called on Gulf leaders to settle their gas and oil deals with China in yuan. The US and China remain the world’s top two consumers of crude, using 18.7 million and 15.4 million barrels per day, respectively. Energy settlements in yuan could deal a heavy blow to the greenback.
“We are on our way, which is something that even very good American financial analysts who have been following this story could never imagine that this would be literally around the corner,” the journalist said. “Now, the only thing that is missing, in fact, is the Chinese delegation going to Riyadh and saying, ‘okay, from now on everything is going to be in yuan, no more Western currencies anymore.’ And we already have a mechanism for it. I did a column about that, basically explaining that it’s a very simple mechanism.”
“You buy oil futures at the Shanghai Exchange priced in yuan. So from now on you have a new benchmark, an oil benchmark in yuan that you transact in Shanghai. The Chinese say, ‘look, it’s linked to gold as well. You want to change yuan into gold? Simple. We have a gold exchange here in Shanghai and we have another one here in Hong Kong. You can trade all you want for gold.’ This is the way. It’s extremely simple. But not many people are aware of it. Only a few economists, in fact. And I have not seen this discussion in American media, for that matter,” Escobar continued.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the dollar will be replaced by the yuan: instead, a whole set of currencies will be used wiping out the greenback’s hegemony, according to the geopolitical analyst.
“I think we’re going to start with having multiple replacements, and then maybe in the second stage, these multilateral organizations start thinking, okay, why don’t we think about a fusion? Because we have different priorities,” he said.
For more of Pepe Escobar’s exclusive analysis on de-dollarization, check out the full episode of the podcast on our Telegram and Odysee.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 
