MIGHT MAKES RIGHT — THE CASE OF VICTOR VEKSELBERG VERSUS CYNERGY BANK

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the cartoon,  Mighty Mouse was always on the defensive, repelling attacks from wicked aggressors, cats, for example, or dogs.   When the cartoon first began in 1942, the words of the theme song were also defensive:  “Mr. Trouble never hangs around, When he hears this mighty sound: ‘Here I come to save the day!’ That means that Mighty Mouse Is on the way!” After the defeat of Germany, Mighty Mouse changed his tune: he moved on to the offensive: “Here he comes, that Mighty Mouse, Coming to vanquish the foe With a mighty blow! Don’t be afraid any more ‘Cause thing won’t be like they’ve been before!” The mouse now decides who the enemy is.

In real life, in the sanctions war against Russia, the US Government has decided through the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) which Russians to attack, In the process, though unreported,  the sanctions give millions of dollars’ worth of benefits to the business rivals and competitors of OFAC’s targets. The European Union, and its member governments, claim they will protect their companies from this US Government-backed asset raiding; in practice they don’t.

A new London High Court case reveals how OFAC helped an Anglo-Indian businessman named Pradip Dhamecha default on a two-year old loan and keep more than £34 million of Victor Vekselberg’s money because Vekselberg had been sanctioned by OFAC four months after the loan was signed and Dhamecha’s bank pocketed his cash. The court ruling, issued on September 12, also declares that the British Government’s policy to stop the extra-territorial reach of the US sanctions to British law and jurisdiction is worthless. “I do not consider the alleged policy is material”, declared Mark Pelling, a practicing Queen’s Counsel serving as a High Court judge.

The outcome of the case, Pelling decided, turns on the right of might; that is, Dhamecha’s right not to pay Vekselberg what he owes because the American Government might sanction Dhamecha for doing so. “Payment,” claimed the judge, heaping conditionals and subjunctives upon each other, “has been impliedly [sic] prohibited because of the probability [sic] that the relevant sanction will be imposed if [sic] it pays [Vekselberg company] the sums it  is entitled to under the contract.” (more…)

NODDY DOES IT AGAIN — ALEXEI MORDASHOV ASKS THE PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA, ALSO THE PRESIDENT OF CYPRUS, TO BELIEVE WHAT A GOOD BOY HE IS

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Among Russian oligarchs, Alexei Mordashov (lead image, centre) holds two records. One is for empty promises: he has never told the whole truth in public or when he has visited President Vladimir Putin (right) for private conversations about his business plans and the Russian state interest. Mordashov’s other record is for losing more money invested in the US than any other Russian; that was at least $3 billion in steelmills which Mordashov bought to turn himself into a global steelmaker in case his Severstal steel group was taken over at home. 

It is therefore almost certain that when Mordashov flew to Cyprus last week to tell the Cyprus President Nikos Anastasiades (lead image, left) he intends to double the number of Russian tourists to Cyprus, it’s another empty promise. This is also the assessment of Russian and Cypriot tourism analysts.

(more…)

TO SEE MOSCOW FROM HARVARD AND DIE – ANOTHER AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALIST HISTORY OF RUSSIA

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Whoaaa Neddy! Another hack has gotten out of the stable of American exceptionalist historians of Russia.

Actually, this one, Eleonory Gilburd, is a Russian-born, US educated and employed hack of the Soviet Jewish emigration like Keith Gessen, Masha Gessen  and Yury Slezkine. Russian exiles with axes to grind.   

They have plenty to grind on – the Romanov tsars, the Orthodox Church, Bolsheviks, Communism, Soviet bureaucracy, Stalin’s Terror, the KGB, and the Russian intelligentsia – with the exception of themselves. There being almost no one in Russia for them to dare to sharpen an axe on when that would have been principled and brave, emigration to the US was the option. Gilburd’s book is a documentary, not so much of the Russia left behind, as of the generation created in the US by the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment’s exchange of Soviet trade benefits for Jewish exit permits. They are the generation who want to return to a Russia, regime-changed and shaped in their image, and not to remain forever excluded, powerless, ignored as they are as Americans. (more…)

SERGEI FRANK LOSES HIS FOOTING AT STATE TANKER COMPANY SOVCOMFLOT

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Sergei Frank (lead image, right) is being removed from control of Sovcomflot, the Russian state tanker company and one of the largest oil and gas transporters in the world.  Frank is the only senior Russian state official to have been judged by the British courts to be dishonest and vindictive in litigation; to have perjured himself in courtroom testimony; and to have obstructed justice by a scheme of evidence fabrication against former Sovcomflot executives and partners.

Frank’s removal has yet to be confirmed officially; Sovcomflot is making no comments. The chief executive who has dominated the company for almost fifteen years appeared to be fully in charge at the July 24 board meeting. (more…)

GENNADY TIMCHENKO’S CRABS HAVE VLADIMIR PUTIN’S PERMISSION NOT TO WALK STRAIGHT

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It was Aristophanes who said you can’t teach a crab to walk straight. Lenin wasn’t talking about crabs when he recommended taking one step forward, two steps back.

This summer, when President Vladimir Putin last talked to Gennady Timchenko about his family’s crab business, he said he was revising the old Lenin tract. Two steps sideways, and one step forward, Putin advised.  By sideways he meant that investigations under way in April by the General Prosecutor’s office, the Kremlin Control Directorate, and the Accounting Chamber of the Russian Fishing Company, controlled by Timchenko’s son-in-law Gleb Frank, have been called off. The federal minister in charge, Yury Trutnev, has also been advised to move sideways until after the first government auction of crab quotas start on October 7.

On that day, Rosrybolovtsvo (Rosryb), the federal Russian Fishery Agency, which is a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture. will start auctioning catch quotas for 15-year terms in 41 lots of 1,000 tonnes each; the estimated state price will be about Rb125 billion ($1.9 billion). Bidding for the fareast crab quotas will run from October 7 to 11; the northern Barents Sea crab auction will take place on October 14-15; the official results will then be issued by Rosryb and contracts with the winning companies should be signed on October 28.

The Russian Fishing Company (RRPC) is expected to take at least a third of the offer, probably more since lack of cash and state bank financing to meet Rosryb’s terms prevent industry rivals from bidding. An additional cost requirement for the winning bidders is that they must commit to building new crabbing vessels at local shipyards. In support of its quota bid, RRPC is reported to have committed to paying $500 million for 22 vessels.

“All attempts at investigating or allowing competition in the crab business are now dead,” an industry source said last week. “This is now the fashion. Timchenko got the blessing from Putin.” (more…)

PUTIN ENDORSES NETANYAHU FOR RE-ELECTION – SHOIGU AND LAVROV REACT

 

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On Friday afternoon in Sochi, President Vladimir Putin kept Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waiting for three hours, and then publicly endorsed him for re-election. Putin’s endorsement was unconditional: he could have warned against Netanyahu’s election pledge, revealed last week, to annex the West Bank of Palestine, but he didn’t. Putin could have warned against Israeli air force and missile strikes on targets in Syria, but he didn’t. “We have absolutely identical positions,” Putin declared, according to the official Kremlin record. Putin was speaking only for himself.    

That was made plain to Netanyahu during the Sochi session by the Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The Kremlin publication,   however, cut them out of the photographic record and official communiqué, as if they weren’t there at all. (more…)

PUTIN, TRUMP, JOHNSON, MACRON, MERKEL, TRUDEAU – GORILLA RADIO ASKS WHOSE ROCK OF STABILITY IS ROCKIER

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In high state politics there’s a difference between the morons and the psychopaths – between Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau on the one hand, John Bolton and Chrystia Freeland on the other. The  difference is in the ability to count the fingers on one hand. 

Bolton has been removed because, notwithstanding Trump’s mental disabilities and small hands, the President can still do arithmetic. The current US voter polls show he is running a negative approval rating of 10 points, 54% to 44%; there has been a significant decline since July.    Trump’s  domestic policy approval is positive, however. He is being pulled down by disapproval of his foreign policy, and by American voters’ fear that the future will be worse.   Bolton is the finger on Trump’s hand which must be removed for the president to count on re-election.

Compared to Trump, Trudeau, Boris Johnson in the UK, Emmanuel Macron in France, or Angela Merkel in Germany, Vladimir Putin is a rock of stability, neurologically and arithmetically speaking,  too. His approval rating, last measured by the Levada Centre in August, was trending downwards, but still a positive 36 points, 67% to 31%.  The Moscow city duma and regional gubernatorial elections of last Sunday confirm what midterm and local elections usually show everywhere – voter discontent and the readiness to signal it as loudly as possible. In my Moscow district, for example, a middle-class one, voter turnout was double the citywide average, 44% to 22%; the winning candidate was from the Communist Party. This is not the regime-change threat reported in the Anglo-American media.

In the campaign for next month’s Canadian election, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is as much of a liability, and for the same reason, as Bolton was for Trump. For Trudeau to survive in power, it is the French voters of Quebec backing him, not the Ukrainian voters who support Freeland,  who will be decisive. Freeland’s last desperate measure, to encourage the Canadian press to report the threat of Russian interference in the Canadian election, is going to fail, not because it’s false, but because Canadian voters, starting in her home province of Ontario, regard her as a threat to their future. (more…)

SERVILITY OR SELF-DEFENCE: CYPRUS CAN DEFEND AGAINST THE TURKS WITHOUT AMERICAN PROTECTORATE OR RUSSIAN ADVICE

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Russia has been warning Cyprus (lead image, left) for months to beware the risks and consequences of offering its offshore oil and gas to US companies in exchange for promises of a US military protectorate against Turkish invasion. So far the American response (lead image, centre – Secretary of State Michael Pompeo) has been to require Cyprus to block Russian Navy access to its ports; expel Russian capital from its banks; and put a stop to what Washington calls pro-Russian journalism in the Greek-language press. For details of this scheme, read this. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has denounced the Washington plan as an “artificial choice” and also a “gross violation” of Cyprus’s internal affairs. But so far the Russians have joined the Americans in accepting that what the Turks believe to be theirs is theirs, and that what the Cypriots (and Greeks) regard as theirs is negotiable.

For the first time, however, Cypriot and Greek military officers and experts have joined to plan  Cypriot military tactics against Turkey’s attempt at taking over the Cyprus offshore seabed and at fresh Turkish troop landings on the island. Not since the Cypriots fought a successful guerrilla war against the British for independence in the 1950s, and then in 1974 fought the Turkish invasion of the northern part of the island has a Cypriot military approach appeared.  Self-defence by the Cypriots – without alignment with Americans or Russians, and without backing from Athens — is unprecedented. (more…)

WHAT’S THE US UMBRELLA FOR? GORILLA RADIO INTERVIEW ON TURKISH THREATS TO CYPRUS, GREECE AND THE REST OF EUROPE

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Cover yourself. When it’s raining, you can’t borrow somebody else’s umbrella for shelter.

In September 1938, the umbrella of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain became the symbol of his foolishness in accepting Adolph Hitler’s terms for the takeover of the Sudetenland, then Czechoslovakia,  as “peace for our time” (lead image, left), then telling the British to “go home and get a nice quiet sleep”.  

The US umbrella which Nikos Anastasiades, President of Cyprus, and Kyriacos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece, have applied to borrow, to protect themselves from the terms dictated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan(lead image, right)  isn’t yet as infamous. It’s already just as futile.  For Cypriot and Greek officials to pretend to such folly is a treason before their own people.    (more…)

MARK GALEOTTI IS A FACT FAKER – HIS BOOK ON RUSSIAN CRIME IS A HATE CRIME, A WAR CRIME

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Repeating lies over and over makes old-fashioned Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda. Repeating lies, then contradicting them; moving them from one government-paid think-tank to another; footnoting a new lie to an older version; quoting policemen and gangsters saying fatuities; adding slang and the words of pop songs—this is still Goebbels-type but  stretched out and product-diversified  to make its author more money. This is Mark Galeotti’s method.

His new book on the business of Russian crime isn’t about business at all. There’s not a single item from a balance-sheet, cashflow analysis, asset trace, or financial indictment in Galeotti’s effort to exaggerate  Russian criminals to mean Russian people, all of them. 

The Russians are also the unique criminals of our world, he thinks  – no other nation on earth matches them for their criminality. So for the protection of the rest of the innocent world, and to protect the uncriminalized from being Russianized, the Russian state, that’s the “super-mafia” of Galeotti’s targeting, should be destroyed by warfare. And since Galeotti repeats the slang of the Russian streets himself to rub in his conclusion that “mainstream society” – that’s everybody –“ reflect[s] a fundamental process of criminalisation of politics and daily life”, he means that Russians deserve  more than their mouths washed out.  Galeotti is a mercenary; his book a weapon — a stun-gun for the naive,   an improvised explosive device for the unguarded, a neutron bomb for the sceptical.   Means, motive, opportunity for a hate crime in the service of a war crime. (more…)

RETURN TO THE CECOTROPICS — SEPTEMBER IS WHEN RABBITS EAT THEIR CECOTROPES ; REPORTERS EAT THEIR TWEETS; THE BEAR DOES WHAT HE CAN TO ELUCIDATE THE DIFFERENCE

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Mother Nature has arranged short life spans for rabbits, like journalists.

Rabbits have the advantage — an extra digestive cycle for foodstuffs which don’t properly give up their nutrients on the first pass-through. In the autumn, when grass and other tender plant stems give way to dry straw and bark, this comes in handy, rabbit-wise.  They cycle the stuff through their cecum – a pouch between their intestines — excrete it in lumps, and eat it for re-digestion.  The lumps are called cecotropes. You don’t need to be a veterinarian or aborigine to tell the difference between cecotropes and shit. You can tell by looking at them. Cecotropes are soft and lumpy; shit is hard and pellet-sized.

In the internet media, cecotropes are called tweets. Retweeting is the human equivalent of eating shit. But in the human anatomy, there’s no cecum, just an appendix which is quite useless unless it gets inflamed. If you lack a cecum, eating shit can cause appendicitis,  and that can lead to brain death. Most journalists eat shit without realizing the terminal damage they’ve done; being dead,  their brains are as useless as their appendixes. Readers of brain-dead journalism can tell by looking at it – is it soft and lumpy, or hard and pellet-sized?

Regular exercises are required for telling the difference between the two. Welcome back.

RED HAS TURNED YELLOW – THE GREEK AND CYPRIOT COMMUNISTS ARE FLYING A DIFFERENT FLAG IN THE UKRAINE WAR



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Ukraine war is splitting the communist parties of Europe between those taking the US side, and those on the Russian side.

In an unusual public criticism of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and of smaller communist parties in Europe which have endorsed the Greek criticism of Russia for waging an “imperialist” war against the Ukraine, the Russian Communist Party (KPRF) has responded this week with a 3,300-word declaration:  “The military conflict in Ukraine,” the party said, “cannot be described as an imperialist war, as our comrades would argue. It is essentially a national liberation war of the people of Donbass. From Russia’s point of view it is a struggle against an external threat to national security and against Fascism.”

By contrast, the Russian communists have not bothered to send advice, or air public criticism of the Cypriot communists and their party, the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL). On March 2, AKEL issued a communiqué “condemn[ing] Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calls for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Ukrainian territories….[and] stresses that the Russian Federation’s action in recognising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions constitutes a violation of the principle of the territorial integrity of states.”

 To the KPRF in Moscow the Cypriots are below contempt; the Greeks are a fraction above it.

A Greek-Cypriot veteran of Cypriot politics and unaffiliated academic explains: “The Cypriot communists do not allow themselves to suffer for what they profess to believe. Actually, they are a misnomer. They are the American party of the left in Cyprus, just as [President Nikos] Anastasiades is the American party of the right.” As for the Greek left, Alexis Tsipras of Syriza – with 85 seats of the Greek parliament’s 300, the leading party of the opposition – the KKE (with 15 seats), and Yanis Varoufakis of MeRA25 (9 seats), the source adds: “The communists are irrelevant in Europe and in the US, except in the very narrow context of Greek party politics.”

(more…)

IF IT SMELLS ALLURING, IT’S RUSSIAN – IN WARTIME L’ORÉAL (FRANCE) AND ESTÉE LAUDER (US) MAKE A BAD SMELL



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The war plan of the US and the European allies is destroying the Russian market for traditional French perfumes, the profits of the French and American conglomerates which own the best-known brands, the bonuses of their managers, and the dividends of their shareholders. The odour  of these losses is too strong for artificial fresheners.

Givaudan, the Swiss-based world leader in production and supply of fragrances, oils and other beauty product ingredients, has long regarded the Russian market as potentially its largest in Europe; it is one of the fastest growing contributors to Givaudan’s profit worldwide. In the recovery from the pandemic of Givaudan’s Fragrance and Beauty division – it accounts for almost half the company’s total sales — the group reported “excellent double-digit growth in 2021, demonstrating strong consumer demand for these product categories.”    Until this year, Givaudan reveals in its latest financial report, the growth rate for Russian demand was double-digit – much faster than the  6.3% sales growth in Europe overall; faster growth than in Germany, Belgium and Spain.    

Between February 2014, when the coup in Kiev started the US war against Russia, and last December, when the Russian non-aggression treaties with the US and NATO were rejected,   Givaudan’s share price jumped three and a half times – from 1,380 Swiss francs to 4,792 francs; from a company with a market capitalisation of 12.7 billion francs ($12.7 billion) to a value of 44.2 billion francs ($44.2 billion). Since the fighting began in eastern Ukraine this year until now, Givaudan has lost 24% of that value – that’s $10 billion.  

The largest of Givaudan’s shareholders is Bill Gates. With his 14%, plus the 10% controlled by Black Rock of New York and MFS of Boston, the US has effective control over the company.

Now, according to the US war sanctions, trade with Russia and the required payment systems have been closed down, alongside the bans on the importation of the leading European perfumes. So in place of the French perfumers, instead of Givaudan, the Russian industry is reorganizing for its future growth with its own perfume brands manufactured from raw materials produced in Crimea and other regions, or supplied by India and China. Givaudan, L’Oréal (Lancome, Yves Saint Laurent), Kering (Balenciaga, Gucci), LVMH (Dior, Guerlain, Givenchy), Chanel, Estée Lauder, Clarins – they have all cut off their noses to spite the Russian face.

(more…)

THE WAR AGAINST FOOD – WHO IS TO BLAME



By Nikolai Storozhenko, introduced and translated by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

This week President Joseph Biden stopped at an Illinois farm to say he’s going to help the  Ukraine ship 20 million tonnes of wheat and corn out of storage into export, thereby relieving  grain shortages in the international markets and lowering bread prices around the world.  Biden was trying to play a hand in which his cards have already been clipped. By Biden.  

The first Washington-Kiev war plan for eastern Ukraine has already lost about 40% of the Ukrainian wheat fields, 50% of the barley, and all of the grain export ports. Their second war plan to hold the western region defence lines with mobile armour, tanks, and artillery  now risks the loss of the corn and rapeseed crop as well as the export route for trucks to Romania and Moldova. What will be saved in western Ukraine will be unable to grow enough to feed its own people. They will be forced to import US wheat, as well as US guns and the money to pay for both.

Biden told his audience that on the Delaware farms he used to represent in the US Senate “there are more chickens than there are Americans.”  Blaming the Russians is the other card Biden has left.  

(more…)

EXILE



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The problem with living in exile is the meaning of the word. If you’re in exile, you mean you are forever looking backwards, in geography as well as in time. You’re not only out of place; you’re out of time — yesterday’s man.

Ovid, the Roman poet who was sent into exile from Rome by Caesar Augustus, for offences neither Augustus nor Ovid revealed, never stopped looking back to Rome. His exile, as Ovid described it, was “a barbarous coast, inured to rapine/stalked ever by bloodshed, murder, war.” In such a place or state, he said, “writing a poem you can read to no one is like dancing in the dark.”

The word itself, exsilium in Roman law, was the sentence of loss of citizenship as an alternative to loss of life, capital punishment. It meant being compelled to live outside Rome at a location decided by the emperor. The penalty took several degrees of isolation and severity. In Ovid’s case, he was ordered by Augustus to be shipped to the northeastern limit of the Roman empire,  the Black Sea town called Tomis; it is now Constanta, Romania. Ovid’s last books, Tristia (“Sorrows”) and Epistulae ex Ponto (“Black Sea Letters”), were written from this exile, which began when he was 50 years old, in 8 AD, and ended when he died in Tomis nine years year later, in 17 AD.  

In my case I’ve been driven into exile more than once. The current one is lasting the longest. This is the one from Moscow, which began with my expulsion by the Foreign Ministry on September 28, 2010.  The official sentence is Article 27(1) of the law No. 114-FZ — “necessary for the purposes of defence capability or security of the state, or public order, or protection of health of the population.” The reason, a foreign ministry official told an immigration service official when they didn’t know they were being overheard, was: “Helmer writes bad things about Russia.”

(more…)

IN THE FOG OF WAR THERE’S THE GUTERRES CERTAINTY AND THE CADIEU CERTAINTY – GORILLA RADIO SEES THROUGH THE COVER-UP



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Antonio Guterres is the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), who attempted last month  to arrange the escape from Russian capture of Ukrainian soldiers and NATO commanders,  knowing they had committed war crimes. He was asked to explain; he refuses.   

Trevor Cadieu is a Canadian lieutenant-general who was appointed the chief of staff and head of the Canadian Armed Forces last August; was stopped in September; retired from the Army this past April, and went to the Ukraine, where he is in hiding. From whom he is hiding – Canadians or Russians – where he is hiding, and what he will say to explain are questions Cadieu isn’t answering, yet.

(more…)

DID UN SECRETARY-GENERAL GUTERRES COMMIT A WAR CRIME AT AZOVSTAL?

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Antonio Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, is refusing this week to answer questions on the role he played in the recent attempt by US, British, Canadian and other foreign combatants to escape the bunkers under the Azovstal plant, using the human shield of civilians trying to evacuate.

In Guterres’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on April 26 (lead image), Putin warned Guterres he had been “misled” in his efforts. “The simplest thing”, Putin told Guterres in the recorded part of their meeting, “for military personnel or members of the nationalist battalions is to release the civilians. It is a crime to keep civilians, if there are any there, as human shields.”  

This war crime has been recognized since 1977 by the UN in Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention.  In US law for US soldiers and state officials, planning to employ or actually using human shields is a war crime to be prosecuted under 10 US Code Section 950t.  

Instead, Guterres ignored the Kremlin warning and the war crime law, and authorized UN officials, together with Red Cross officials,  to conceal what Guterres himself knew of the foreign military group trying to escape. Overnight from New York, Guterres has refused to say what he knew of the military escape operation, and what he had done to distinguish, or conceal the differences between the civilians and combatants in the evacuation plan over the weekend of April 30-May 1.May.

(more…)

THE LAST DITCH IS POLAND – RUSSIA’S PHASE-3 PLAN FOR WESTERN UKRAINE



By Vlad Shlepchenko, introduced & translated by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The more western politicians announce pledges of fresh weapons for the Ukraine, the more Russian military analysts explain what options their official sources are considering to destroy the arms before they reach the eastern front, and to neutralize Poland’s role as the NATO  hub for resupply and reinforcement of the last-ditch holdout of western Ukraine.

“I would like to note,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, repeated yesterday, “that any transport of the North Atlantic Alliance that arrived on the territory of the country with weapons or material means for the needs of the Ukrainian armed forces is considered by us as a legitimate target for destruction”.  He means the Ukraine border is the red line.

(more…)

THE MATLIN PLOT, THE BROWDER PLOT AND THE NEW YORK TIMES PLOT



By Lucy Komisar,  New York*
  @bears_with

Here’s a story the New York Times has just missed.

US politicians and media pundits are promoting the targeting of “enablers” of Russian oligarchs who stash their money in offshore accounts. A Times article of March 11   highlighted Michael Matlin, CEO of Concord Management as such an “enabler.” But the newspaper missed serious corruption Matlin was involved in. Maybe that’s because Matlin cheated Russia, and also because the Matlin story exposes the William Browder/Sergei Magnitsky hoax aimed at Russia.

(more…)

YELLOW COAL, THE FUEL MADE OUT OF RACE HATRED — MAY DAY MESSAGE FROM SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY, 1939



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In 1939 a little known writer in Moscow named Sigizmund Khrzhizhanovsky published his idea that the Americans, then the Germans would convert human hatred into a new source of energy powering everything which had been dependent until then on coal, gas, and oil.

Called yellow coal, this invention originated with Professor Leker at Harvard University. It was applied, first to running municipal trams, then to army weapons, and finally to cheap electrification of everything from domestic homes and office buildings to factory production lines. In Russian leker means a quack doctor.

The Harvard professor’s idea was to concentrate the neuro-muscular energy people produce when they hate each other.  Generated as bile (yellow), accumulated and concentrated into kinetic spite in machines called myeloabsorberators, Krzhizhanovsky called this globalization process the bilification of society.

(more…)

IS CAESARISM THE PROBLEM, THE SOLUTION, A FANCY DRESS COSTUME, OR A PROPAGANDA CARTOON?



By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In imperial history there is nothing new in cases of dementia in rulers attracting homicidal psychopaths to replace them.  It’s as natural as honey attracts bees.

When US President Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke on October 19, 1919, he was partially paralysed and blinded, and was no longer able to feed himself, sign his name, or speak normally; he was not demented.

While his wife and the Navy officer  who was his personal physician concealed his condition, there is no evidence that either Edith Wilson or Admiral Cary Grayson were themselves clinical cases of disability, delusion,  or derangement. They were simply liars driven by the ambition to hold on to the power of the president’s office and deceive everyone who got in their way.  

The White House is always full of people like that. The 25th Amendment to the US Constitution is meant to put a damper on their homicidal tendencies.

What is unusual, probably exceptional in the current case of President Joseph Biden, not to mention the history of the United States,  is the extent of the president’s personal incapacitation; combined with the clinical evidence of psychopathology in his Secretary of State Antony Blinken;  and the delusional condition of the rivals to replace Biden, including Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Like Rome during the first century AD, Washington is now in the ailing emperor-homicidal legionary phase.  But give it another century or two, and the madness, bloodshed, and lies of the characters of the moment won’t matter quite as much as their images on display in the museums of their successors craving legitimacy, or of successor powers celebrating their superiority.  

Exactly this has happened to the original Caesars, as a new book by Mary Beard, a Cambridge University professor of classics, explains. The biggest point of her book, she says, is “dynastic succession” – not only of the original Romans but of those modern rulers who acquired the Roman portraits in marble and later copies in paint, and the copies of those copies, with the idea of communicating “the idea of the direct transfer of power from ancient Romans to Franks and on to later German rulers.”

In the case she narrates of the most famous English owner of a series of the “Twelve Caesars”, King Charles I — instigator of the civil war of 1642-51 and the loser of both the war and his head – the display of his Caesars was intended to demonstrate the king’s self-serving “missing link” between his one-man rule and the ancient Romans who murdered their way to rule, and then apotheosized into immortal gods in what they hoped would be a natural death on a comfortable bed.

With the American and Russian successions due to take place in Washington and Moscow in two years’ time, Beard’s “Twelve Caesars, Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern”,  is just the ticket from now to then.

(more…)
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