The Greanville Post • Vol. IX | Those Who Collaborate with the West

It is much easier to rule over those people who have lost all their dignity.

There is no reason to fear resistance where cynical consumerism, lack of knowledge, and constant anxiety are shaping the behavioral patterns of a nation; of most of its citizens.

The West made an art form out of controlling the world. Its once rough and simple ‘divide and rule’ tactics have reached, with time, great virtuosity. What Richter, Rostropovich or Argerich did for the art of Western classical music, people like Brzezinski, Kissinger and Negroponte matched with their brilliance in the art of destruction and terror.

In today’s world, everything is upside down. Brothers fear brothers, guerilla fighters are made to spy on each other, and heroes who are fighting for the survival of the planet are labeled by Western regime as demagogues, strongmen or even terrorists.

The Empire has successfully mobilized the most regressive elements in each society that it controls. It upheld religions, archaic family compositions and feudalist power structures in order to make rebellion almost impossible.

Albert Camus, a French philosopher, made one of the most important statements of the 20th Century, when he declared: “I rebel, therefore I exist!”

Complete story at - The Greanville Post • Vol. IX | Those Who Collaborate with the West

A Family Business of Perpetual War | Consortiumnews

Exclusive: Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan have a great mom-and-pop business going. From the State Department, she generates wars and – from op-ed pages – he demands Congress buy more weapons. There’s a pay-off, too, as grateful military contractors kick in money to think tanks where other Kagans work, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia – and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats.

This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.

Not only does the broader community of neoconservatives stand to benefit but so do other members of the Kagan clan, including Robert’s brother Frederick at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly, who runs her own shop called the Institute for the Study of War.

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (which doesn’t disclose details on its funders), used his prized perch on the Washington Post’s op-ed page on Friday to bait Republicans into abandoning the sequester caps limiting the Pentagon’s budget, which he calculated at about $523 billion (apparently not counting extra war spending). Kagan called on the GOP legislators to add at least $38 billion and preferably more like $54 billion to $117 billion:


Complete story at - A Family Business of Perpetual War | Consortiumnews

The Crimean Tatars are ready to help Turkey to lay the way to Russia and Eurasia | Center For Syncretic Studies

From the begining of crisis in Ukraine and referendum on joining of Crimea to Russian federation, many of the western media have speculated what kind of efect will the crisis have on Tartar national minority that exists in Crimea. Many of them where supraised to find out that amoung the muslim population on Crimea there are a lot of pro Russian activists that didnt have a postive view on Kiev Junta goverment. In interview for serbian academic magasine, Vasvi Ambduraimov, leader of organization of crimean tartars “Mili Firka” talks about the history of his people and situation on Crimea.

1. Can you tell us something about yourself and your organization and its history, roots and influences?

– Milliy Firqa’s public organization (in translation from Crimean Tatar is the People’s party) was created in Crimea in 2006 when as a result of the aggressive nationalistic policy in Ukraine concerning “indigenous dwellers” the ethnic question of the Crimean Tatars was forced into a dead lock. And the policy of the accelerated assimilation of the Crimean Tatars by dissolution of the nation across the all territory of Ukraine was pursued by the authorities of Ukraine through the structure Kurultay Mejlis which was created by them. The base of the ideology of Milliy Firqa is the doctrine of the great educator of the East Ismail Gasprinski about Slavyano-Turkic unity on the open spaces of Eurasia as a necessary condition of the preservation and development of the Russian and Turkic worlds and their people within the united sociocultural matrix. Now the Crimean Republican Public Organization of Sociocultural Development of Milliy Firqa (such is the full legal name of our organization) is registered in the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation with the status of the legal entity. I have honor to head the Board of Milliy Firqa and to represent the organization at all levels.


In a lot of western media we could hear the statemants of Mustafa Dzemilev and his organization “Mejlis” about current repression towards Crimean Tartars. Does Mustafa Dzemilev represent the true voice of Crimean Tartars? How much of Crimean Tartar population supports him?

– And there is no wonder. About whom should write the western mass media, how not about the satellites and conductors of an euroatlanticism in the Crimean Tatar environment whо are the structure of Kurultay Mejlis and it’s heads Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov?! None of the mortal can be the only just voice for these or those people. It always was, is and will be only One-Above-All.

As for support the Crimean Tatars of M. Dzhemilev, I think that soon it will be narrowed to his direct relatives and those whom he supports with money which generously receives from the same western government and non-governmental institutions. In Ukrainian Crimea M. Dzhemilev was demanded, in Russian Crimea he is not.

Complete story at - The Crimean Tatars are ready to help Turkey to lay the way to Russia and Eurasia | Center For Syncretic Studies

The Greanville Post • Vol. IX | American Exceptionalism in the New Gilded Age

At one point last year, United States President Barack Obama declared that he “believe[d] in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” It was hardly a surprising or remarkable thing to hear. In US political culture, faith in “American exceptionalism” has long been doctrinally mandatory for top politicians, policymakers, and other elites. For those persons and others, stating one’s allegiance to “American exceptionalism” is hardly more controversial than standing up for the National Anthem or a US “commander in chief” saying “God Bless America” at the end of a major national speech.

(Just to be clear, the more accurate term would be “United States exceptionalism,” for “American exceptionalism” really refers to the US, not “America,” which technically includes Canada, Central America, the Caribbean islands and nations, and South America.)

“The United States is Good”

But what, exactly, does the term denote? Its meaning depends, I suppose, on the identity and values of its user and the context in which it is used, among other factors. For me, observing the term’s habitual use by US political and media personalities and some intellectuals, the phrase has two basic and interrelated meanings when it is employed by those “leaders.” The first such connotation holds that the United States is unique among world history’s great powers in the fundamentally benevolent, democratic, humanitarian, and non- and even anti-imperial intention and nature of its foreign policies – of its actions abroad.

“The United States is good,” Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright explained in 1999. “We try to do our best everywhere.” Three years before, Clinton explained that the U.S. was “the world’s greatest force for peace and freedom, for democracy and security and prosperity.” These were curious reflections on (among other things) the U.S.-led economic sanctions that killed – as Albright acknowledged on national television in 1996 – more than half a million Iraqi children in the 1990s (Albright added that she “felt the price” of those deaths was “worth paying” for the advance of inherently noble U.S. foreign policy goals).

Complete story at - The Greanville Post • Vol. IX | American Exceptionalism in the New Gilded Age

Islamic State is the cancer of modern capitalism | Middle East Eye

Debate about the origins of the Islamic State (IS) has largely oscillated between two extreme perspectives. One blames the West. IS is nothing more than a predictable reaction to the occupation of Iraq, yet another result of Western foreign policy blowback. The other attributes IS’s emergence purely to the historic or cultural barbarism of the Muslim world, whose backward medieval beliefs and values are a natural incubator for such violent extremism.

The biggest elephant in the room as this banal debate drones on is material infrastructure. Anyone can have bad, horrific, disgusting ideas. But they can only be fantasies unless we find a way to manifest them materially in the world around us.

So to understand how the ideology that animates IS has managed to garner the material resources to conquer an area bigger than the United Kingdom, we need to inspect its material context more closely.

Follow the money

The foundations for al-Qaeda’s ideology were born in the 1970s. Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden‘s Palestinian mentor, formulated a new theory justifying continuous, low-intensity war by dispersed mujahideen cells for a pan-Islamist state. Azzam’s violent Islamist doctrines were popularised in the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

As is well-known, the Afghan mujahideen networks were trained and financed under the supervision of the CIA, MI6 and the Pentagon. The Gulf states provided huge sums of money, while Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) liaised on the ground with the militant networks being coordinated by Azzam, bin Laden, and others.

The Reagan administration, for instance, provided $2 billion to the Afghan mujahideen, which was matched by another $2 billion from Saudi Arabia.

Complete story at - Islamic State is the cancer of modern capitalism | Middle East Eye

Tom Cotton Suggests War With Iran Would Be A Breeze | ThinkProgress

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a strong opponent of President Barack Obama’s diplomatic efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear program, suggested on Tuesday that armed conflict with Tehran could be easily contained to “several days of air and naval bombing” and would not require the deployment of American ground troops. The comments eerily echoed the false predictions of Bush administration officials on the eve of the Iraq invasion.

Appearing on the Family Research Council’s Washington Watch radio show, Cotton slammed Obama for suggesting that military confrontation was the only alternative to diplomacy in preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“This president has a bad habit of accusing other people of making false choices, but he presented the ultimate false choice last week when he said it’s either this deal or war,” Cotton said, before adding, that “Even if military action were required…the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq and that’s simply not the case.”

“It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox,” he continued. “Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.”

But American military leaders — who worked for lawmakers of both parties — strongly disagree with Cotton’s assessment, arguing that an attack could actually prove a regional war and further push Iran towards the bomb.

Complete story at - Tom Cotton Suggests War With Iran Would Be A Breeze | ThinkProgress

The Greanville Post • Vol. IX | Russia may be a lot tougher than the Washington neocons expect

By Muravei-s | Translated from Russian by J.Hawk

I was compelled to write this article by the following photograph: It’s a famous photo. Georgia, August 8, 2008. After the Georgian army’s defeat, its retreating forces regrouped and decided to return to Gori, but encountered a Russian checkpoint.



One can see on the photo how a Russian Army soldier, with a machine gun slung over his shoulder, stands in the path of Georgia’s motorized infantry, whose officers threatened the machine-gunner in order to force him to let them pass, only to hear “go f*** yourselves” in response. Members of the media accompanying the column also tried to reason with the machine-gunner, only to receive the same response. In the end the column turned around and returned to whence it came. Foreign journalists later published an article with the title “You don’t need 300, one is enough.”

What was the soldier thinking? What did he feel at that moment? Was he not terrified? He probably was. Or maybe he was not hoping to have children and grandchildren, or to live a long happy life. Of course he hoped to.

Can you imagine a NATO soldier standing like that, with a machine-gun against an enemy column?

I can’t. They value their lives too much. So what makes us so? Why are we Russians different?

And why do foreigners consider us unpredictable madmen?

Complete story at - The Greanville Post • Vol. IX | Russia may be a lot tougher than the Washington neocons expect

Politics, Bullshit, and Ukraine by Vladimir Golstein -- Antiwar.com

Once in a while a book appears that forces us to rethink the previous cognitive patterns. To use the celebrated phrase from Thomas S. Kuhn’s influential, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), it introduces the paradigm shift. Kuhn’s explored scientific revolutions and the shifts produced by, say, Newtonian or quantum physics. The realm of social ideas is not immune to similar breakthroughs. In the twentieth century, Orwell’s analysis of a doublespeak and the mutual corruption of politics and language has clearly changed the way we look at modern politics.

Recently, Harry C. Frankfurt’s little pamphlet, with its beguilingly simple title, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005) has pushed Orwell’s insights into a higher degree of conceptualization. While written in Orwellian vein and addressing the abuse and manipulation of language, Frankfurt’s analysis offers a new way of looking at the old problem. The book open with the following, by now well-known observation: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows it. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves.”

Without proper understanding of its functions and purposes, we are left, frankly, unarmed to confront and understand bullshit, despite our confidence to recognize it. For Frankfurt, BS is a greater enemy of truth then a lie because a liar does care about truth and thus tries to pass falsehood for truth, while BS artists do not really care about the truthfulness of their statements – they just make assertions to impress, while disguising their real agenda. There are obvious mechanisms to challenge lies: just produce facts. But how does one challenges bullshit and understands its secret agenda? There is no cognitive frame, no intellectual traps into which the bullshitter can be caught.

Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, the novel written at the height of Stalin’s bullshit, reveals Bulgakov’s awareness that one, in fact, needs to possess supernatural abilities to expose it. Devil, called Voland in the novel, visits Moscow and appears to be scandalized by the amount of “claptrap” (“bullshit” would surely be a better term) that he encounters. A liar himself, Voland does show a peculiar fondness for facts. It is the bullshitters with their blatant disregard for the very concept of truth, that illicit Voland’s particular ire. Such is the barman, Andrei Fokich, whose head is clawed by a demonic cat, and who is punished by the factual, nonnegotiable knowledge of his impending death from cancer. One of the barman’s crimes was to sell “the sturgeon of the second degree of freshness.” Second degree of freshness is a misguiding concept deliberately intended to deflect the accusations of lying, while achieving the goal of selling rotten product.

Complete story at - Politics, Bullshit, and Ukraine by Vladimir Golstein -- Antiwar.com

U.S. Propaganda 101: Illegally Invade Countries, Fund the Media, Call it “Independent” | Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

Foreign Policy Magazine recently had a column called Cranks, Trolls, and Useful Idiots, in which the author, Dalibor Rohac, hunts down “Russia’s information warriors” who, he claims, have infested the web with their lies and propaganda on websites potentially paid for by the Russian government.

Rohac writes:

“Throughout the conflict in eastern Ukraine, these sites have systematically regurgitated Russian propaganda, spreading lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories, often directly translated from Russian sources…

The Czech weekly Respekt published a feature article about the mysterious “news” site Aeronet (also known as AENews). Started in 2001 by aviation fans, the domain has changed ownership several times. Since the summer of 2014 it has regularly published articles accusing the new Ukrainian government of fascism and claiming that American and British mercenaries were fighting in eastern Ukraine. (Dalibor Rohac, Cranks, Trolls, and Useful Idiots, Foreign Policy, March 12, 2015)

First let’s look at the weakness of the claims in the article.

The author accuses news outlets of doing exactly what he himself and the U.S. mainstream media in general does when reporting about foreign policy issues such as Ukraine: they “systematically [regurgitate U.S. propaganda, spread] lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories.” The advantage they have is that they don’t need to translate anything. Apparently for Rohac an article written in Russian has to be Russian propaganda. It’s that simple: Russians are just not producing any honest journalistic content. This argument about texts being “directly translated from Russian sources” is not only weak, it is xenophobic.

In addition the author’s examples to prove his points are unsound. Aeronet is not the only website to have not only accused but also proven the fascistic nature of the Ukrainian government. Numerous independent media outlets have published countless articles to that effect, demonstrating that several key figures within the unelected government were neo-Nazis and that the Azov Battalion was filled with members linked to neo-Nazi groups:

The Cabinet is not only integrated by the Svoboda and Right Sector (not to mention former members of defunct fascist UNA-UNSO), the two main Neo-Nazi entities have been entrusted with key positions which grant them de facto control over the Armed Forces, Police, Justice and National Security.

While Yatsenuyk’s Fatherland Party controls the majority of portfolios and Svoboda Neo-Nazi leader Oleh Tyahnybok was not granted a major cabinet post (apparently at the request of assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland), members of Svoboda and the Right Sector occupy key positions in the areas of Defense, Law Enforcement, Education and Economic Affairs. (Michel Chossudovsky, The U.S. has Installed a Neo-Nazi Government in Ukraine, Global Resarch, March 2014)

Complete story at - U.S. Propaganda 101: Illegally Invade Countries, Fund the Media, Call it “Independent” | Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

Mainstream media's schizophrenic attitude towards 'conspiracy theories' -- Puppet Masters -- Sott.net

Late February the Finnish publication Iltalehti published a sensational news headline about conspiracy theories:

Now it is proven: conspiracy theorists are fools living in a bubble

The internet is the information highway for both good and bad, because on the net all content is equal and trustworthy content competes for attention among all kinds of misinformation. Among other things, conspiracy theories and the peddling alternative media, are spread widely within the depths of the net.

Rumors, propaganda, and other net-loopers have become such a serious problem, that the World Economic Forum, committed to monitoring the state of the world, named it as one of modern societies greatest threats alongside terrorism and cyber crime.

This Iltalehti article refers to an article written in English on Vice Motherboard that itself refers to the Italian study at PLOS One.

Iltalehti's first comment suggests that only the content of mainstream media represents absolutely trustworthy information, while again alternative media's "conspiracy theories" are rumor, propaganda and misinformation. Conspiracies are something like mystical fairy tales, believed only by mentally unstable persons. This kind of black-and-white thinking is typical of the authoritarian personality type, who relates to social authorities in the same naive way small children relate to their own parents.

The second comment is very worrisome. It was not long ago when the attitude towards conspiracy theories was mainly mocking. Now they are perceived as a national threat and they are compared to terrorism and Nazism: France has already set a dangerous precedent by beginning to block web sites which in the opinion of the government, publish conspiracy theories and other "dangerous thoughts". Arthur Schopenhauer stated that truth goes through three phases: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. It seems we are in stage two at the moment.

The Iltalehti news story further commented on this Italian research, in which alternative media was assessed for its "conspiracy theory" behaviors on social media:

The result was not flattering from the conspiracy theorists' point of view. Italians said that of the conspiracy site visitors over 90 percent like, comment, and spread only alternative media contents, and nothing else. According to the researchers, conspiracy theorists live in their own bubble and almost never interact with content outside of their own circle.

Complete story at - Mainstream media's schizophrenic attitude towards 'conspiracy theories' -- Puppet Masters -- Sott.net