Western Civilization
The exploitation of other nations by the so-called “golden billion” is coming to an end, the Russian president has stated.
https://www.sott.net/article/489750-Your-Vampire-Ball-is-Over-Putin-to-Western-Elites
RT
Wed, 13 Mar 2024
© Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends an interview with Rossiya Segodnya International Media Group Director General Dmitry Kiselev at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia.
Exploitation of other nations by the so-called “golden billion” is coming to an end, the Russian president has stated.
The era of Western elites being able to exploit other nations and other peoples across the world is coming to an end, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an exclusive interview published by Rossiya 1 and RIA Novosti on Wednesday.
The president stated that over the past few centuries, the so-called “golden billion” has grown accustomed to being able to “fill their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money” as they have been “parasitizing” other peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
“But they must understand that the vampire ball is ending,” Putin said.
He added that the citizens of the aforementioned regions, which have been continuously exploited by the West over the past 500 years, have started to associate Russia’s struggle for sovereignty with “their own aspirations for sovereignty and independent development.”
https://www.sott.net/embed/hE1GYdK7AShKALQ7wkHJL9f6uhg
Comment: The above statement will be remembered for the “vampires’ ball” comment, but note also the way he sees the global geopolitical battle shaping up: that Russia’s efforts to realize full sovereignty are resonating with desire for such in peoples from Latin America to Africa to Asia. Contrast this with the more coarse, bi-polar understanding in Western capitals that the battle revolves around the dichotomy of ‘alliance with the West or alliance with China’.
At the same time, Putin noted that Western elites have a very strong desire to “freeze the current situation” and preserve the “unjust state of affairs in international affairs.”
Previously, in his keynote address to Russia’s Federal Assembly last month, Putin stated that the West, with its “colonial habits” of “igniting national conflicts all over the world,” intends to do everything it can to stall Russia’s development and turn it, as it did Ukraine, into a dying failed state.
“In place of Russia, they want a dependent, withering, dying space, where they can do whatever they want,” he said.
The president followed up on those comments in Wednesday’s interview, stating that many Western elites, who have been “blinded by their Russophobia” were “thrilled” when they were able to push Russia to the point where it had to launch its military offensive in Ukraine in order to end the war unleashed by the West in 2014.
“They were even happy, I think because they believed that now they would finish us off using a barrage of sanctions, having practically declared a sanctions war against us, and with the help of Western weapons in the hands of Ukrainian nationalists,” said Putin, suggesting that this mindset was behind Western calls to “inflict a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield.”
Now, the West appears to have realized that defeating Russia in this way is not only unlikely, but impossible due to the unity of its people, the fundamental foundations and stability of its economy and the growing potential of its military, the president said.
“Those who are smarter” have now come to the conclusion that it is necessary to change their strategy in relation to Russia, Putin surmised.
Comment: On the 2024 US presidential election: “It’s absurd that Trump is persecuted because of any connection to me. Their election is becoming uncivilized.”
On Polish/NATO troops entering Ukraine: “This will have serious geopolitical consequences. Polish troops will never leave, and Ukrainian statehood will end.”
Here is the new world order. It is a shame that the West became a corrupted mentally unstable entity that constantly lies and creates wars for profits. The world is sick of this evil crap. Viva BRICS!
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega: We see that in NATO, in Europe and in the United States they unite to defend Nazism.
While the Russian people, Russian soldiers are fighting Nazism in Ukraine. And now we even openly hear European presidents, the president of France, the president of France, the same France that killed millions of people in Algeria and other occupied countries, they are talking about bringing in European troops and they want to accompany American troops to defend Nazism in Ukraine.
The bloodshed in Palestine and the bloodshed in Ukraine is bloodshed because of the Nazi-fascist attitude of NATO. We are facing an attempt by world capitalism, and imperialism, to reintroduce fascism, Nazism, not only in Europe, not only in Ukraine, but also in our Latin American and Caribbean countries.
Medvedev:
“I look at what the Western political panopticon has turned into. A sad, sometimes amusing, but ominous spectacle.
Serial clowns, who have never worked a day in public service, are directing military actions and dictating the lives of millions of unfortunate people, sending them to certain death.
The parliamentary circus of freaks from the country of defeated fascism, once again convening in the Reichstag, demands to send long-range missiles to their neo-Nazi offspring, risking receiving even longer-range missiles on their own heads.
Growing weaker with each passing day, old men with uncertain steps and persistent dementia, barely understanding who or what is being talked about, embrace cheerful whores disguised as widows of deceased Russian extremists.
Western leaders make theatrical visits to Kyiv on the anniversary of the start of the Special Military Operation to distract their own electorate from the accumulated problems and once again lick the dirty boot of their American master in a state of acute lackeyish exaltation.
Petty heirs of Bonaparte, donning the gold epaulets torn off two hundred years ago, with Napoleonic grandeur thirst for revenge and unleash fierce and extremely dangerous blizzard about the deployment of NATO troops in Kyiv, as well as about new weapons for striking Russia.
Examples of cerebral decay among Western politicians appear every day. And thus, the pale horse and its rider draw ever closer…
Dixi et animam levavi…” (“I have spoken and my soul relieved”.)
Evidence that external forces were involved has been suppressed for ‘political reasons’
https://www.rt.com/russia/570921-maidan-sniper-killings-censorship
Feb 6, 2024
An anti-government protester throws a Molotov cocktail during clashes with police on Hrushevskoho Street near Dynamo stadium on January 25, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. © Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images
This feature was first published on February 6, 2023. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the events that took place in Kiev on February 22, 2014, we are again posting it on the front page.
Political scientist Ivan Katchanovski – of the University of Ottawa – revealed last year, in a paper, that the February 2014 massacre of Ukrainian protesters by sniper fire, a defining moment of the Western-backed Maidan coup, was not published by an academic journal for “political reasons.”
‘The evidence is solid’
In a lengthy Twitter thread, Katchanovski first laid out the circumstances behind the rejection of his article, and the bombshell evidence included in it. The paper was initially accepted with minor revisions after peer review, and the journal’s editor offered a glowing appraisal of his work, writing:
“There is no doubt that this paper is exceptional in many ways. It offers evidence against the mainstream narrative of the regime change in Ukraine in 2014… It seems to me that the evidence the study produces in favour of its interpretation on who was behind the massacre of the protesters and the police during the ‘Euromaidan’ mass protests on February 18-20, 2014, in Ukraine, is solid. On this there is also consensus among the two reviewers.”
As the editor noted, the massacre was a “politically crucial development,” which led to the “transition of powers in the country” from the freely elected Viktor Yanukovich to the illegitimate and rabidly nationalistic administration of Aleksandr Turchinov, a former security services chief. It was endlessly cited in Western media as a symbol of the brutality of Ukraine’s government and an unprovoked attack on innocent pro-WesternMaidan protesters, who allegedly sought nothing more than democracy and freedom.
Rumors that the killings were a false flag intended to inflame tensions among the vast crowds filling Maidan, and provoke violence against the authorities, began circulating immediately.
Anti-government protesters continue to clash with police in Independence square, despite a truce agreed between the Ukrainian president and opposition leaders on February 20, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. © Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images
No serious investigation into what happened was ever conducted by the Western media, with all claims that the sniper attacks were an inside job dismissed as Kremlin “disinformation.” However, even NATO’s Atlantic Council adjunct admitted in 2020 that the massacre was unsolved and that this “cast a shadow over Ukraine.”
Ask the witnesses
It may not remain unsolved for much longer though, due to an ongoing trial of policemen at the scene on the fateful day. The legal action has been unfolding for well over a year and has received no mainstream news attention at all outside Ukraine. Katchanovski drew heavily on witness testimony and video evidence that has emerged over the course of the trial in his suppressed paper.
For example, 51 protesters wounded during the incident testified at the trial that they were shot by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings, and/or witnessed snipers there. Many spoke of snipers in buildings controlled by Maidan protesters shooting at police. This is consistent with other evidence collected by Katchanovski, such as 14 separate videos of snipers in protester-controlled buildings, 10 of which clearly feature far-right gunmen in the Hotel Ukraina aiming at crowds below.
In all, 300 witnesses have told much the same story. Synchronized videos show that the specific time and direction of shots fired by the police not only didn’t coincide with the killings of specific Maidan protesters, but that authorities aimed at walls, trees, lampposts, and even the ground, simply to disperse crowds.
Among those targeted by apparently Maidan-aligned snipers were journalists at Germany’s ARD. They weren’t the only Western news station in town at the time – so too were Belgian reporters, who not only filmed Maidan protesters screaming towards Hotel Ukraina for snipers not to shoot them, but also participants being actively lured to the killing zone. This incendiary footage was never broadcast.
Berkut riot police throw stones at anti-government protesters, who are throwing rocks in return, on Independence Square on February 19, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine. © Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images
CNN likewise filmed far-right elements firing at police from behind Maidan barricades, then hunting for positions to shoot from the 11th floor of the Hotel Ukraina, minutes before the BBC filmed snipers shooting protesters from a room where a far-right MP was staying. The network opted not to report this at the time.
We needn’t rely purely on video footage. Over the course of the trial, no fewer than 14 self-confessed members of Maidan sniper groups testified they had explicitly received massacre orders, Katchanovski claims. By contrast, no police officer at the scene has said they were directed to kill unarmed protesters, no minister has come forward to blow the whistle on such a scheme, and no evidence Yanukovich approved of the killings has ever emerged.
Last bow for ‘The Last Emperor’: The Russian MMA colossus preparing for his final battle
Separate from the trial, leaders of the far-right Svoboda party have openly stated that Western government representatives expressly told them before the massacre that they would start calling for Yanukovich’s ouster once casualties among protesters reached a certain number. This figure was even actively discussed by both sides – were five enough, or 20? Or even 100? The latter was the final total reported, and indeed led to calls for the Ukrainian government’s abdication.
***
Katchanovski previously published a landmark study on the Maidan massacre in 2021, which has been referenced over 100 times by scholars and experts, already making him one of the most cited political scientists specializing in Ukraine, according to Google Scholar.
Whatever the nature and source of the political pressure applied to the journal that led to the censoring of the dynamite paper, the move may well backfire massively, in the spirit of the Streisand Effect. Indeed, it could help the truth of what happened on those deadly days come out, and assist in those responsible for the killings being brought to justice.
It should also prompt a wider reconsideration of the nature of Maidan too, and the government it produced. The banning of opposition parties, attacks on the Orthodox Church, the closure of dissident media outlets, and the war on Russian culture and language are all consequences.
By Felix Livshitz
Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil
This is what the West doesn’t want you to see.
This is a video back from 2015, one year after the Western-sponsored coup in Ukraine brought outright neo-Nazis to power.
The residents of Avdeevka are protesting against Ukrainian Nazis who are opening up military bases next to their shopping centers and then shelling Donetsk civilians with artillery. “We are sick of the Ukrainian fascists who surrounded our Avdeevka!
They are killing us! They are trying to open up a military base right next to the shopping centre! 90% of us want to be a part of the Donetsk People’s Republic!” Where do you think these people are now?
What do you think the Ukrainian regime and their pocket neo-Nazis have done to them for 10 years before the Russians finally started the special military operation and freed the city?
“Western modernization was fraught with sanguineous crimes such as war, slave trade, colonization, and plunder, which inflicted untold misery on developing countries.
Having suffered from aggression, bullying, and humiliation by Western powers, we Chinese are keenly aware of the value of peace and will never follow the beaten path of the West.”
“The biggest problems with Western modernization are that it is capital-centered rather than people-centered and that it seeks to maximize capital gains rather than serve the interests of the vast majority of the people.”
Authored by Pepe Escobar,
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-how-west-was-defeated
SATURDAY, JAN 20, 2024
Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East.
The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de L’Occident (“The Defeat of the West”) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the “aggression” by “Tsar” Putin.
At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates.
Another key reason was his 2002 book Apres L’Empire, a sort of preview of the Empire’s Decline and Fall published a few months before Shock & Awe in Iraq.
Now Todd, in what he has defined as his last book (“I closed the circle”) allows himself to go for broke and meticulously depict the defeat not only of the US but of the West as a whole – with his research focusing in and around the war in Ukraine.
Considering the toxic NATOstan environment where Russophobia and cancel culture reign supreme, and every deviation is punishable, Todd has been very careful not to frame the current process as a Russian victory in Ukraine (although that’s implied in everything he describes, ranging from several indicators of social peace to the overall stability of the “Putin system”, which is “a product of the history of Russia, and not the work of one man”).
Rather, he focuses on the key reasons that have led to the West’s downfall. Among them: the end of the nation-state; de-industrialization (which explains NATO’s deficit in producing weapons for Ukraine); the “degree zero” of the West’s religious matrix, Protestantism; the sharp increase of mortality rates in the US (much higher than in Russia), along with suicides and homicides; and the supremacy of an imperial nihilism expressed by the obsession with Forever Wars.
The Collapse of Protestantism
Todd methodically analyses, in sequence, Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia and finally The Empire. Let’s focus on what would be the 12 Greatest Hits of his remarkable exercise.
1. At the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, the combined GDP of Russia and Belarus was only 3.3% of the combined West (in this case the NATO sphere plus Japan and South Korea). Todd is amazed how these 3.3% capable of producing more weapons than the whole Western colossus not only are winning the war but reducing dominant notions of the “neoliberal political economy” (GDP rates) to shambles.
2. The “ideological solitude” and “ideological narcissism” of the West – incapable of understanding, for instance, how “the whole Muslim world seems to consider Russia as a partner rather than an adversary”.
3. Todd eschews the notion of “Weberian states” – evoking a delicious compatibility of vision between Putin and US realpolitik practitioner John Mearsheimer. Because they are forced to survive in an environment where only power relations matters, states are now acting as “Hobbesian agents.” And that brings us to the Russian notion of a nation-state, focused on “sovereignty”: the capacity of a state to independently define its internal and external policies, with no foreign interference whatsoever.
4. The implosion, step by step, of WASP culture, which led, “since the 1960s”, to “an empire deprived of a center and a project, an essentially military organism managed by a group without culture (in the anthropological sense)”. This is Todd defining the US neocons.
5. The US as a “post-imperial” entity: just a shell of military machinery deprived of an intelligence-driven culture, leading to “accentuated military expansion in a phase of massive contraction of its industrial base”. As Todd stresses, “modern war without industry is an oxymoron”.
6. The demographic trap: Todd shows how Washington strategists “forgot that a state whose population enjoys a high educational and technological level, even if it is decreasing, does not lose its military power”. That’s exactly the case of Russia during the Putin years.
7. Here we reach the crux of Todd’s argument: his post-Max Weber reinterpretation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published a little over a century ago, in 1904/1905: “If Protestantism was the matrix for the ascension of the West, its death, today, is the cause of the disintegration and defeat.”
Todd clearly defines how the 1688 English “Glorious Revolution”, the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Revolution were the true pillars of the liberal West. Consequently, an expanded “West” is not historically “liberal”, because it also engineered “Italian fascism, German Nazism and Japanese militarism”.
In a nutshell, Todd shows how Protestantism imposed universal literacy on the populations it controlled, “because all faithful must directly access the Holy Scriptures. A literate population is capable of economic and technological development. The Protestant religion modelled, by accident, a superior, efficient workforce.” And it is in this sense that Germany was “at the heart of Western development”, even if the Industrial Revolution took place in England.
Todd’s key formulation is undisputable: “The crucial factor of the ascension of the West was Protestantism’s attachment to alphabetization.”
Moreover Protestantism, Todd stresses, is twice at the heart of the history of the West: via the educational and economic drive – with fear of damnation and the need to feel chosen by God engendering a work ethic and a strong, collective morality – and via the idea that Men are unequal (remember the White Man’s Burden).
The collapse of Protestantism could not but destroy the work ethic to the benefit of mass greed: that is, neoliberalism.
Transgenderism and the Cult of the Fake
8. Todd’s sharp critique of the spirit of 1968 would merit a whole new book. He refers to “one of the great illusions of the 1960s – between Anglo-American sexual revolution and May 68 in France”; “to believe that the individual would be greater if freed from the collective”. That led to an inevitable debacle: “Now that we are free, en masse, from metaphysical beliefs, foundational and derived, communist, socialist or nationalist, we live the experience of the void.” And that’s how we became “a multitude of mimetic midgets who do not dare to think by themselves – but reveal themselves as capable of intolerance as the believers of ancient times.”
9. Todd’s brief analysis of the deeper meaning of transgenderism completely shatters the Church of Woke – from New York to the EU sphere, and will provoke serial fits of rage. He shows how transgenderism is “one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy, not just things and humans but reality.”
And there’s an added analytical bonus: “The transgender ideology says that a man may become a woman, and a woman may become a man. This is a false affirmation, and in this sense, close to the theoretical heart of Western nihilism.” It gets worse, when it comes to the geopolitical ramifications. Todd establishes a playful mental and social connection between this cult of the fake and the Hegemon’s wobbly behavior in international relations. Example: the Iranian nuclear dear clinched under Obama becoming a hardcore sanctions regime under Trump. Todd: “American foreign policy is, in its own way, gender fluid.”
10. Europe’s “assisted suicide”. Todd reminds us how Europe at the start was the Franco-German couple. Then after the 2007/2008 financial crisis, that turned into “a patriarchic marriage, with Germany as a dominant spouse not listening to his companion anymore”. The EU abandoned any pretention of defending Europe’s interests – cutting itself off from energy and trade with its partner Russia and sanctioning itself. Todd identifies, correctly, the Paris-Berlin axis replaced by the London-Warsaw-Kiev axis: that was “the end of Europe as an autonomous geopolitical actor”. And that happened only 20 years after the joint opposition by France-Germany to the neocon war on Iraq.
11. Todd correctly defines NATO by plunging into “their unconscious”: “We note that that its military, ideological and psychological mechanism does not exist to protect Western Europe, but to control it.”
12. In tandem with several analysts in Russia, China, Iran and among independents in Europe, Todd is sure that the US obsession – since the 1990s – to cut off Germany from Russia will lead to failure: “Sooner or later, they will collaborate, as “their economic specializations define them as complementary”. The defeat in Ukraine will open the path, as a “gravitational force” reciprocally seduces Germany and Russia.
Before that, and unlike virtually any Western “analyst” across the mainstream NATOstan sphere, Todd understands that Moscow is set to win against the whole of NATO, not merely Ukraine, profiting from a window of opportunity identified by Putin in early 2022. Todd bets on a window of 5 years, that is, an endgame by 2027. It’s enlightening to compare with Defense Minister Shoigu, on the record, last year: the SMO will end by 2025.
Whatever the deadline, inbuilt in all this is a total Russia victory – with the winner dictating all terms. No negotiations, no ceasefire, no frozen conflict – as the Hegemon is now desperate spinning.
Davos enacts The Triumph of the West
Todd’s ample merit, so evident in the book, is to use history and anthropology to take Western society’s false consciousness to the divan. And that’s how, focusing for instance in the study of very specific family structures in Europe, he manages to explain reality in a way that totally escapes the brainwashed collective West masses lingering under turbo-neoliberalism.
It goes without saying that Todd’s reality-based book will not be a hit among the Davos elites. What’s happening this week in Davos has been immensely enlightening. Everything is out in the open.
From all the usual suspects – the toxic EU Medusa von der Leyen; NATO’s warmongering Stoltenberg; BlackRock, JP Morgan and assorted honchos shaking hands with their sweaty sweatshirt toy in Kiev – the “Triumph of the West” message is monolithic.
War is Peace. Ukraine is not (italics mine) losing and Russia is not winning. If you disagree with us – on anything – you will be censored for “hate speech”. We want the New World Order – whatever you lowly peasants think – and we want it now.
And if all else fails, a pre-fabricated Disease X is comin’ to get you.
The Turkish leader said Ankara was exerting great efforts for the sake of ending various conflicts, recalling the Istanbul talks on a settlement in Ukraine in March 2022
https://tass.com/world/1734871
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
ISTANBUL, January 19.
TASS.
There is no more trust toward the West, which has not taken any steps to prevent the crisis in Gaza, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has said.
The organizations whose tasks include ensuring global security have failed, of which the conflict between Israel and Palestine is an example, he stated.
“There is no more trust towards the Western countries that have failed the test on the Gaza issue. Their fascist faces have been exposed. They have not taken a single step to prevent violence. The organizations tasked with global security, just as in Iraq, Bosnia, Syria and Somalia have suffered a fiasco. They have confined themselves to idly watching acts of genocide and barbarism committed against the people of Palestine by the ‘Fuehrer of Modern Times,’ [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” Erdogan said at a handover ceremony for the Turkish Navy’s new warships, held at the Yalova shipyard in the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul, telecast by the TRT Haber channel.
Erdogan said Turkey was exerting great efforts for the sake of ending various conflicts. In particular, he recalled the Istanbul talks on a settlement in Ukraine in March 2022.
“The importance of the process we initiated when the conflict between Russia and Ukraine had lasted several months is better understood today. Had that process, which the military lobbies sought to sabotage, achieved its goal, tens of thousands would have not lost their lives. We see that those who criticized us then, today express agreement with us. Rest assured that the same repentance will eventually be evoked by the tragedy in Gaza. Those who turn a blind eye to the massacres being committed by Israel in Gaza will face disastrous consequences,” Erdogan said.
Lavrov:
“Relations between Russia and China are experiencing their best period in history.”
“Russia’s goal in 2024 is to eliminate any form of reliance on the West, both in terms of its economy and supply chains.”
“The Blitzkrieg with the aim of defeating Russia turned out to be an illusion, and the West understood its mistake.”
“Washington has abandoned all the principles on which we built relationships.”