The Vineyard of the Saker: Open letter of the members of the French Resistance to President Hollande

The voice of France, the UN and Russia, an open letter to Monsieur le Président de la République

Monsieur le Président de la République

Fascisme is reemerging everywhere in Europe, singularly in countries which have been freed from the USSR where powerful and dark forces are using NéoNazism as an ideological vector for their national emancipation and their territorial sovereignty .In these circles and beyond them, the Ukrainian crisis, which is politically and diplomatically overexploited to undermine the Russian Federation is used as a pretext for multiple attempts to rehabilitate the Third Reich, especially in the Baltic Countries, where monuments commemorating the 1945 victory are often desecrated with the covert or overt complicity of the concerned governments.

The Western world is in no way immune from these dangerous overflows. In defiance of it's historical status, the European Union tolerates within itself, political movements which have been able, with impunity, to send to the EU Parliament, legally elected deputies, although self styled Nazis.

In face of this situation, which is fed and worsened by a never ending economical crisis on the old continent, Russia submit every year to the general assembly of the United Nations, a resolution calling for the refusal of « this glorification of Nazis and their collaborators who, waiving Swastika banners and marching with their right arms held up, are overtly promoting xenophobia and racial superiority.

Unfortunately, The United States of America, Canada and the Marshall Islands, systematically oppose this text and the European Union - among which is France-, choosing in that respect to renew with the disastrous spirit of Munich, chose to refrain.Opponants and abstentions, put forward as an excuse... Respect for freedom of expression, to justify their decisions. Under the same pretext, they block the passing of similar decisions within the OSCE. This attitude is pitiful and dangerous and can be considered as a signed blank paper for the Fascists to keep on with their criminal activities.

This year, the pretext put forward for a 'no' vote or abstention to the resolution, is the Ukrainian crisis and the « annexation » of Crimea. Putin should be made to understand that the West won't tolerate an expansionist Russia. This is of course only a pretext because in November of 2013, as the Ukrainian crisis was just unfolding, their was no separatists claims of any sort in Eastern Ukraine or in Crimea. The vote had been the same. Most noticeable is the 2010 vote, during which the Russian President was Medvedev, known to be closer to the West than the actual President.

The fact that the Russian diplomatic initiatives are thus subjected to contempt is unacceptable. The tremendous death toll paid by the USSR during the second world war, morally forbid it. Resistants in Europe and especially in France, know what they owe to the Red Army. Without the decisive victories over Hitler, the world battle for liberty wouldn't have been possible and the allies would have never landed in Italy nor on the Coast of Normandie. Must it be reminded, that on the D Day, June the 6th of 1944, the Werhmacht was collapsing everywhere on the East front and that Hitler had thus already lost the war ? Must it be reminded that, without the Soviets sacrifices, France would have never recovered it's freedom ? Must it be reminded that without Moscow, Stalingrad and Koursk's victories – the mains Nazis military defeats- the world could never have freed itself from fascism and the United Nations Organisation would have never existed ?

Complete story at - The Vineyard of the Saker: Open letter of the members of the French Resistance to President Hollande

The Vineyard of the Saker: In the Charlie Hebdo psyop double standards, logical fallacies and crass ignorance are everywhere

Many of pointed out that apparently the French and most westerners seem to be much more upset when 12 people die in Paris then when hundreds, thousand and tens of thousands die elsewhere. It appears that the 1980s slogan "don't touch my pal" which was originally supposed to denounce racism now has been "re-worked" into a, if not racist, then at least a chauvinistic mode: don't kill French leftists no matter how offensive their discourse is. I won't make that case again here, but because by now anybody still capable of critical thought "got it", but I will look at another, much less noticed case of double standards: the one about the issue of moral pain.

Here is what the official doxa tells us: Muslims have no right to whine about their Prophet being insulted, this is part of free speech. It is disingenuous for them to claim that they have been hurt by these caricatures, in reality they have not been hurt, they just had their feathers ruffled by a bit of disrespectful speech. How can you possibly compared such ruffled feathers with issues of life and death?

So is there such thing as moral pain and can it be compared to physical pain?

Let's look at the record as it stands in the West:

Any psychologist will explain to you that not only does moral pain exist, but it can be worse then physical pain. This is why some people confess to crimes (whether real or not) when they are told that their family members will be tortured next even though they themselves had found the internal courage not to yield to torture inflicted upon them. An idea can hurt more then physical pain.

The Geneva conventions specifically forbid mock executions even though all they inflict is fear (a form of moral pain).

In France, it is currently illegal to even question the official version of the so-called "Holocaust" precisely because doing so would cause moral pain to the very few actual "Holocaust survivors" still alive. This protection from moral pain even extends to the relatives and descendants of "Holocaust survivors" who were born already after the war and how never suffered from any ill-treatment themselves.

At the famous Nurenberg trial Julius Streicher was sentenced to death even though he never committed any other crime then "infecting the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism". He was, by the way, also viciously tortured before his execution. His crime? He was the founder and editor of a newspaper, Der Stürmer, a nasty racist propaganda paper whose name can be roughly translated as "The attacked" or "The stormer". Apparently, hate speech can even get you the death penalty in the West.

The 8th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment" especially if it "degrading to human dignity". Apparently, for the Founding Fathers human dignity was an extremely valuable and real thing which deserved to be protected.

Even in GITMO (hardly a bastion of civilization and human rights!) following the 2005 scandals about the desacration of the Quran, it was decided that the rules about the manipulation of the Quran (which had already existed in the past) would be strictly implemented. So even in waterboarding GITMO insulting the Prophet is considered beyond the norms of civilized behavior. Apparently not in Paris.

Complete story at - The Vineyard of the Saker: In the Charlie Hebdo psyop double standards, logical fallacies and crass ignorance are everywhere

Paris Charlie: The “Shock Doctrine” par Excellence

by Peter Koenig

On 12 January the French Parliament approved with almost unanimity – with one abstention only – the budget for France’s continuous and enlarged involvement in the new war on Iraq, a new war engagement led by Washington and supported by its vassals, UK, Canada, Australia and France. Aircraft carriers and troops were immediately mobilized, not even losing a day. Doesn’t that conspicuously smell of an earlier preparation, just waiting for that crucial and appropriate event, prompting parliamentary approval?

At the same time France lawmakers agreed to display 10,000 troops throughout the country to protect ‘vulnerable places’; spying on citizens, for their protection takes on new forms and formats. A direct reaction to the attack on Charlie Hebdo on January 7 and the assault on a kosher supermarket on January 9? – Killing 17 people in all? Is that it?

French Ministers of the Interior and of Defense have advanced their wish of substantially increased respective police and defense budgets, when the 2016-2017 allocations are being discussed later this year. No doubt they will get their way.

And – no doubt, this is the shock doctrine at its best. People are in awe and shock after the assault on the satirical and Moslem insulting Charlie Hebdo. A million and a half took to the streets in Paris this past weekend, the largest manifestation since the liberation of Paris after WWII in 1945. Some media report more than 6 million people marching throughout Europe. Almost all waving signs “I am Charlie” – Solidarity or stupidity? Hard to say. Most likely just sheer ignorance.

It’s ignorance that kills our democracies, our human values; public ignorance allows leaders (sic) to wage wars, to aggress nations that refuse to submit, to fall to their knees. It’s ignorance perpetuated daily by our mainstream media and swallowed without question, day-in-day-out like breakfast coffee.

Neocon leaders, all over Europe, the new patsies of Washington that we, the people, have voted into office, under shrewd but hardly perceptible Washington-funded propaganda, through NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and other well-endowed CIA sponsored so-called think-tanks, meddling in local politics, sowing subtle threats or acts of destabilization. Europe’s new masters that a majority of the people doesn’t really like, but who are in office anyway – these spineless stooges constitute Europe in Brussels, the EU itself having become a miserable colony of Washington.

Complete story at - Paris Charlie: The “Shock Doctrine” par Excellence

The Vineyard of the Saker: The Empire on the offensive in France and Russia

The Empire on the offensive in France and Russia

The latest issues of Charlie Hebdo has been printed at 3 million copies (some sources said 5 million). They go on ebay for up to 300 Euros. RT reports that "Sunni Islam's most renowned center of learning, Al-Azhar in Cairo, said that the cartoons "stir up hatred" and "do not serve the peaceful coexistence between peoples." Tabnak, a conservative online outlet in Iran, wrote that "Charlie Hebdo has again insulted the Prophet."

French comedian Dieudonne was arrested for "apology for terrorism". He had tweeted “Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly” (combining Charlie and the last name of one of the terrorists involved in the attacks. Millions will not take to the streets to protect his freedom of speech. They are Charlie, but they are not Dieudonne.

A source of mine with links to French police services has told me that the French Ministry of Internal Affairs had created a hotline to report terrorist. About 50% of the messages they got were "Allahu Akbar!".

Another of my sources in Europe tells me that the European Commission will meet to decide if the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics will be declared "terrorist organizations" following the bombing of a bus filled with civilians in the Ukraine. Apparently, the bus exploded out of reach of Novorussian artillery and probably on a landmine.

One more thing. Dmitri Orlov has written an absolutely fantastic piece entitled "Peculiarities of Russian National Character" every word of which I fully subscribe to and which I highly recommend to everybody.

The Saker

Complete story at - The Vineyard of the Saker: The Empire on the offensive in France and Russia

A Message From the Dispossessed - Chris Hedges - Truthdig

The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about radical Islam. It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of civilizations. It was a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendor and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury.

We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance, passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it.

If you spend time as I have in Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan, as well as the depressing, segregated housing projects known as banlieues that ring French cities such as Paris and Lyon, warehousing impoverished North African immigrants, you begin to understand the brothers Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi, who were killed Friday in a gun battle with French police. There is little employment in these pockets of squalor. Racism is overt. Despair is rampant, especially for the men, who feel they have no purpose. Harassment of immigrants, usually done by police during identity checks, is almost constant. Police once pulled a North African immigrant, for no apparent reason, off a Paris Metro subway car I was riding in and mercilessly beat him on the platform. French Muslims make up 60 to 70 percent of the prison population in France. Drugs and alcohol beckon like sirens to blunt the pain of poor Muslim communities.

The 5 million North Africans in France are not considered French by the French. And when they go back to Algiers, Tangier or Tunis, where perhaps they were born and briefly lived, they are treated as alien outcasts. Caught between two worlds, they drift, as the two brothers did, into aimlessness, petty crime and drugs.

Becoming a holy warrior, a jihadist, a champion of an absolute and pure ideal, is an intoxicating conversion, a kind of rebirth that brings a sense of power and importance. It is as familiar to an Islamic jihadist as it was to a member of the Red Brigades or the old fascist and communist parties. Converts to any absolute ideal that promises to usher in a utopia adopt a Manichaean view of history rife with bizarre conspiracy theories. Opposing and even benign forces are endowed with hidden malevolence. The converts believe they live in a binary universe divided between good and evil, the pure and the impure. As champions of the good and the pure they sanctify their own victimhood and demonize all nonbelievers. They believe they are anointed to change history. And they embrace a hypermasculine violence that is viewed as a cleansing agent for the world’s contaminants, including those people who belong to other belief systems, races and cultures. This is why France’s far right, organized around Marine Le Pen, the leader of the anti-immigrant Front National, has so much in common with the jihadists whom Le Pen says she wants to annihilate.

When you sink to despair, when you live trapped in Gaza, Israel’s vast open-air prison, sleeping 10 to a floor in a concrete hovel, walking every morning through the muddy streets of your refugee camp to get a bottle of water because the water that flows from your tap is toxic, lining up at a U.N. office to get a little food because there is no work and your family is hungry, suffering the periodic aerial bombardments by Israel that leaves hundreds of dead, your religion is all you have left. Muslim prayer, held five times a day, gives you your only sense of structure and meaning, and, most importantly, self-worth. And when the privileged of the world ridicule the one thing that provides you with dignity, you react with inchoate fury. This fury is exasperated when you and nearly everyone around you feel powerless to respond.

Complete story at - Chris Hedges: A Message From the Dispossessed - Chris Hedges - Truthdig

Sacre Bleu! What’s Happening With The MISTRAL Ship “VLADIVOSTOK”? | The Kremlin Stooge

Alert Internet followers of this subject – and it has its own dedicated community, both for and against – noticed almost immediately when the MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identity) assignment changed from “France” to “Russia”, and the resulting speculation was instantaneous and explosive.

The “for” community was jubilant but restrained, considering this is only the expected outcome – the contract was signed in completely legal circumstances, and in fact was once touted as Russia finally making the right moves, by breaking away from its practice of purchasing state-supplied, obsolescent-on-delivery, technically-outclassed junk. More recently, the issue has become a bone growled over by the United States, which sees forestalling the delivery as a badly-needed political victory for Obama and America, whose image as a dispassionate button-pusher who can make anything happen, anywhere has suffered many dents of late. For that reason, the “against” community was incandescent with fury.

For its part, DCNS (Direction des Constructions Navales), owner of the St-Nazaire yard which built VLADIVOSTOK, was quick to deny any significance in switching the French identifier for the Russian, announcing that it was simply a required step in the Airworthiness test. This is probably true, but it has done little to calm the passions of those who believe the ships Russia legally contracted for, fulfilling its part of the bargain in every respect, should be withheld to “teach Putin a lesson”, although the “evidence” of Russian “meddling” in Ukraine has thus far turned out to be fabricated to an increasingly ridiculous degree, so much so that the Ukrainian NSDC Council recently reported an advancing column of its own armor and artillery as Russian.



The U.S. State Department reportedly is grinding the French government under its thumb, pressuring it daily not to crack, and insisting it withhold delivery of the VLADIVOSTOK and its sister ship, and proposing wild alternatives such as NATO purchasing the ships for its own use. My, yes – that’d be a great deal for France, wouldn’t it? It could collect payment from NATO – maybe – in one hand and pay most of the money out with the other in return of advances from Russia and penalties for breach of contract. NATO would get two ships specifically designed for the Russian navy which would require extensive and expensive retrofitting to make them operable by NATO. I guess when you cling to the illusion that you have unlimited spending money – thanks to holding the world’s reserve fiat currency – your financial common sense turns to goo and seeps out your ear into your pillow while you are sleeping.

Complete story at - Sacre Bleu! What’s Happening With The MISTRAL Ship “VLADIVOSTOK”? | The Kremlin Stooge

Putin Slams US $9 Billion Fine Against French BNP As "Blackmail" For Russian Warship Deal | Zero Hedge

Recall that about a month ago we reported that shortly after France was stunned to see its largest bank slammed by its bestest buddy, the US, with a record $9 billion fine, "France responded to the fine by announcing it will train hundreds of Russian seamen to operate the French-Made Warship", the Mistral. In other words, for all the angry rhetoric of sanctions against Russia, France was merely the latest country to admit that it too can't exist without Russian business (not to mention natural gas) even if, or especially if, it means incurring US wrath which is taken out on its banking institutions. After all, if the US is engaging in scorched earth tactics France needs a stable trade partner, especially if it is one who turns on the gas, so to speak.

.....

However, it turns out that was only a small part of the story.

Earlier today, when speaking to Russian diplomats in Moscow, Vladimir Putin accused the U.S. of blackmailing France to scrap a contract to sell Russia Mistral warships by offering to cut a record $8.97 billion fine against BNP Paribas. From Bloomberg:

France’s largest bank agreed to plead guilty in court documents yesterday to processing almost $9 billion in banned transactions involving Sudan, Iran and Cuba from 2004 to 2012. The company will be temporarily barred from handling some U.S. dollar transactions.

French President Francois Hollande has refused to cancel a contract to sell two Mistral-class helicopter carriers to Russia in the face of criticism from the U.S.

“We know about the pressure which our U.S. partners are applying on France not to supply the Mistrals to Russia,” Putin told Russian diplomats in Moscow today. “And we even know that they hinted that if the French don’t deliver the Mistrals, they would quietly get rid of the sanctions against the bank, or at least minimize them,” he said without naming BNP Paribas.

“What is that if not blackmail?” Putin said.

Complete story at - Putin Slams US $9 Billion Fine Against French BNP As "Blackmail" For Russian Warship Deal | Zero Hedge

“Pavlovian Bipolar Fantasies”: Le Monde Hammers the West’s Scrotum Flat | The Kremlin Stooge

It would be understandable if the French were getting a little dizzy these days, what with their lurching back and forth on the U.S. government’s Beloved-Ally Meter between “Shits the Bed, Stupid Frog Surrender Monkeys” and “Most Excellent; I Would Not Even Mind if a Frenchman Moved Into my Neighborhood”. The last time they experienced the latter rating was throughout the reign of Sarko the American, the son of a Hungarian immigrant who rose to become Monsieur le President; admired and envied by fellow European leaders for his taste in expensive watches and beautiful women, and regarded with benevolent affection by that demographic among the American public that knew Europe was not a country (sorry, Mrs. Palin). Sarko knew how to walk the walk and talk the talk, and his eagerness to go straight for the no-fly zone and airdrop weapons to rebels without consulting NATO allies made American policymakers applaud his aggressive audacity. Sarko could be counted upon in the circle of global movers and shakers to support the American Way, because he believed in it. If les imbeciles did not do as they were told, why, you gave them one chance to straighten up and fly right. If they didn’t take it, allons-y, NATO!! (Yes, I know it’s OTAN in French, but too many people would not recognize it) Leaders make people do things they would not always do if the choice were left up to them – which, naturellement, it would be foolish to do – because they are too shortsighted and stupid to act for their own good. Yulia Latynina must have loved Nicolas Sarkozy, although I don’t know that I ever read an opinion of him from her, because he embodies every single quality of leadership that she prizes – wealth, arrogance, sociopathy, indifferent education and huge ears.

Just lately, the French have sunk progressively in western opinion downward past “Throw Them Under the Bus” and toward “Shits the Bed”, mostly due to the unpleasant surprise that is Monsieur Hollande, the current leader and Grave Disappointment. He got off to a good start with some rousing pugnacious talk against Russia during his campaign speeches, and good things were expected of him even though he was supposed to be a socialist (because, face it, nobody who matters really gives a toss what happens to the dozy population so long as they vote the right way and keep the complaining to a manageable level). However, he soon revealed his shortcomings in a variety of ways – chief among them his complete inability to stifle dissent among the proles – and went completely off the reservation with his decision to sell French Assault Carriers of the MISTRAL Class to Russia. He compounded this folly by insisting on going ahead with the sale even when the United States government hinted in terms that even a French socialist blockhead should be able to grasp that they thought it would be best if the sale were canceled in the most dramatic fashion possible, perhaps with a nice speech.

Which brings us to the current state of affairs, in which the happy party has ended tout en larmes, in tears, and American political figures accuse the French of being sneaks who are the world’s second-best at stealing American technological secrets (after The Heathen Chinee) from the laptops of visiting American businessmen, whilst they are tucking into a plate of the buttery merde the French call food, down in the restaurant. I swear, if some enterprising American would just open up a stall that sold decent pork rinds, funnel cakes and deep-fried pickles in Paris, half those poofy Frog joints would have to shut down. But I digress. Anyway, with all the contre-français vitriol blowing Europe-ward from the Last Remaining Superpower, it is small wonder that la République strikes back. And instinctively, she rubs salt in the USA’s wounds by attacking it through a particularly tender weakness – its comical, embarrassing and senseless Russophobia. Read on, as Olivier Zajec skewers the west in Le Monde, with typically Gallic sarcasm and mockery.

From the original French,

Complete story at - “Pavlovian Bipolar Fantasies”: Le Monde Hammers the West’s Scrotum Flat | The Kremlin Stooge