By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Even Leonardo da Vinci didn’t think it was possible.

A perpetual motion machine, that is, whose construction had been attempted by Indian fakirs for five hundred years before a handful of medieval European conmen got the idea. Then Leonardo  tried knocking it on its head: “O ye seekers after perpetual motion,” he scribbled in his notebook, “how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.”

Old Lenny hadn’t met an inventor of artillery and a banker financing the warmakers’ market of his day. For those fellows had invented the perpetual money-making machine. All they needed to kick it off was a war – a long one, thirty years or one hundred years, was best for their balance-sheets.

Losing wars, however, is very bad for the business.

Right now American, British, German, and French gunmakers are fighting among themselves for the profitability of the Ukrainian battlefield. Re-sellers and smugglers from Kiev and Lvov,  too.

At the same time they have managed to drive the bad news of diminishing profit margins off the pages of the financial press. The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Der Spiegel and Die Zeit haven’t reported, for example, that the Russian Army has perfected the technology for targeting NATO artillery and rocket radars, killing their accompanying firing crews, and blinding the electronic reconnaissance systems flying above so that the Ukrainians don’t know what’s coming next in their direction, and what has hit them after it has.

One of the consequences is that the best of NATO anti-missile technology is being fired haplessly into the air and then coming down to destroy Ukrainian domestic buildings, kindergartens, etc. US and European gunmakers make the same profit from friendly fire; the friends don’t appreciate this. Another consequence is that the Ukrainian regime in Kiev is at war with itself – civilians versus generals – over acknowledging how blind they have become.  

Facing the Russian military, the US and NATO general staffs are re-learning Old Lenny’s  advice not to confuse their Russian-enemy wishful thinking, circa 2014-2021,  with the reality of losing the war on Russian-enemy terms — now and into the foreseeable future.  The US military industrial complex may believe it can afford to keep selling its alchemy for as long as the war can be prolonged on the Ukrainian battlefield. They and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington generals are calling this a “stalemate”. The German generals are not so sure American stalemate won’t amount to German rout in due course. Privately, they are trying to warn their friends and employers in the German military industrial complex. For a Swiss press report of these private talks, read this.  

In public, the outcome is a display of German generals struggling to balance their 1939-45 mindset towards Russia with the prospect of losing, not only the war on the Ukrainian battlefield, but the escalation of Russian strategy against German and US-made weapons, forward NATO commands and US bases in Germany – and the future balance-sheets of the German gunmakers – that’s Kraus-Maffei, Rheinmetall, Thyssen-Krupp.

Gorilla Radio opens the discussion on what the good Germans are afraid of — and what the bad Americans behind them are risking in this war.   

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by Editor - Tuesday, January 24th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A fresh German general has issued a public warning that the war on the Ukrainian battlefield by the US and NATO armies is lost, and that Germany will be lost next if the advance of the Russian forces toward Kiev and Lvov isn’t halted quickly by an armistice, partition and demilitarization of the Ukraine, and time to rebuild the German army.

Retired Major General Harald Kujat —  son of a Wehrmacht soldier killed fighting the Red Army who grew up to become chief of the German army and then of the NATO military staffs — is the author of a military assessment in which he blames the German press, ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, British prime minister Boris Johnson (lead image, right centre), and other NATO allies he doesn’t name for a new German version of the stab in the back (lead image, left).  

In this scheme, according to Kujat, the NATO allies have aimed at sabotaging Germany’s power in Europe. This is being carried out, he said, by escalating the “risk of a conventional attack on Germany”, and “pursuing the goal of exposing Germany to Russia in particular”. Without explicitly targeting the US,  Kujat blames Washington for establishing a direct nuclear threat to Russia in the Aegis missile batteries now installed in Poland and Romania; for making Germany a direct party to the war in the Ukraine by allowing “the US [to] train Ukrainian soldiers in Germany”; and for destroying the Nord Stream gas pipelines to Germany.

Kujat’s assessment was published in Switzerland on January 18;   German publication followed on January 20.  Attacked in the past by mainstream German media,  and by US government officials, Kujat’s new statement has been ignored in Germany and the US.

“The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk of expansion or escalation,” Kujat warned, adding  the German army, German territorial security,  and German industrial might will be the loser because “Russia could surpass the Western escalation at any time with its own.” Kujat meant this to include the use of nuclear weapons.

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by Editor - Sunday, January 22nd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

As democracy goes in states at war, in Russia  there is more of it —  faction fighting, public criticism,  media debate — about battlefield operations, wins and losses, than there is on the NATO side, in the US, Canada, Germany, France or England.

By contrast, on the conduct of domestic economic policy, in Russia there is much less open argument than there is on the other side.

This is surprising because the sanctions war has forced the US-controlled and NATO-allied banks and corporations to abandon their Russian business, halt production plants, close offices, cancel supply and marketing agreements, write down the value of their Russian assets, and withdraw from Russia if they can. The outcome is an opportunity, a revolutionary one, for Russia’s businessmen to take over the foreign assets and operate them for domestic profit for the first time in many years.

In theory, there has been active debate in Moscow about how this re-nationalization should be managed, and to whose profit. On one side, there has been Sergei Glazyev and his Anti-Crisis Expert Council  which includes the public economist Mikhail Khazin and Duma deputy Mikhail Delyagin. On the other side, the oligarch lobby known as the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE),    led by Alexander Shokhin.   

In practice, Glazyev has kept his government job as minister for integration and macroeconomics of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC, aka EAEU ), the bloc of former Soviet states coordinating customs, central banking, trade and fiscal management policies together.    However, Glazyev has lost the fights he has waged for change in Central Bank policy and in the priorities of the government’s war economy.  Like Glazyev, Khazin and Delyagin have kept their tribunes, but their message has proved unsuccessful.

At the same time, Elvira Nabiullina – Glazyev’s attack target as Governor of the Central Bank – has kept her Kremlin mandate and her policies.  Her former patron, Alexei Kudrin, has lost his post at the head of the Accounting Chamber but received Kremlin promotion instead to run the new presidential campaign fund created around the Yandex group of companies, owned by Arkady Volozh.  

How much then of the opportunity to convert the foreign-owned assets to new purpose in the Russian economy is being seized by the well-known oligarch faction? What evidence is there for the political defeat of the Glazyev faction? What is the current balance-sheet of foreign assets lost to Russia and Russian assets gained by the US side?

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by Editor - Wednesday, January 18th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There once was a genuine little prince whose story was a fable about the destruction of France and of civilization in Europe. Coming in April of this year, it will be eighty years since Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote Le Petit Prince in safe haven on Long Island, New York.  

The book was banned as long as the German occupation in France lasted.  Before that ended, Saint-Exupéry was shot down and killed, probably by Germans, in the Mediterranean,   off the coast of France.

This year Europe is occupied by a continuation of that war, only now it has become the war of the worlds – that’s the one against Russia and China — and New York is no longer a safe haven. Reporting, like books and podcasts, are banned there if they reveal the truth that the war in the Ukraine has been lost – and the war for Europe is going the same way.

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by Editor - Wednesday, January 18th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The media audience has been moving fast in the opposite direction from the reporters and media proprietors. The majority of US audiences, for example, believes all sides of a story deserve to be reported in a balanced fashion. The journalists strongly disagree, however.  The younger these reporters are, the more they claim to be leftwing, and the more concentrated their employment in the online media, the more committed they are to the propaganda mission of their employers, and of their governments.

This is Ass Backwards, as Mike Ryan for TNT Radio spells out in this discussion of the performance of the Australian press. There isn’t a major issue in election politics, the recent history of pandemic emergency powers, the display of Nazi symbols, and the wars against Russia and China, which Australian journalists haven’t ignored, covered up, or misreported the story in a way which would have been impossible fifty years ago. History too is Ass Backwards.

More than half of all Australian readers don’t trust what they read in the news media. That is roughly the same level of distrust of journalism as in Canada, Hong Kong and Poland. But no one distrusts journalism as much as Americans whose scepticism of the published word leads the world.   

Since readers are smarter than journalists, less gullible, less trusting, what can readers do to learn the truth and stop the lies. Start with this discussion, and then consider how to vote – and if to vote – and how to keep this a secret from pollsters and journalists until Election Day.    

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by Editor - Monday, January 16th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The German generals are trying it again. That’s the Wolf’s Lair plot of July 20, 1944.

To save themselves,  they are begging their counterparts in Washington, DC, to find a way to lose the war in the Ukraine as quickly as possible without losing the US empire in Germany. This means overruling or replacing, not only Vladimir  Zelensky’s  regime in Kiev but also the Green Party ministers in power in Berlin, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, and maybe Chancellor Olaf Scholz to boot.

The Wehrmacht plotter this time is a retired brigadier general named Erich Vad (lead image, right).  As German military officers go, he’s unusual. He was trained by a German-born Israeli infantry general turned academic.  Vad then reached general’s rank, according to a senior German politician, but “never led a battalion, never led a brigade, and was never deployed in active operations”; he is a “desk general”.

Vad’s self-advertisements  mention no active service or combat command. Instead, he has filled advisor posts at the Bundestag (2000-2006) and the Chancellery (2006-2013) when Angela Merkel was chancellor.  Since 2014 he has been selling his advice either through Vad’s own consulting firm in Munich  or a Swiss intermediary company in Zurich.  

Merkel appointed Vad for the German military and the armaments industry to have a voice  inside her office. Because they didn’t regard Vad as one of their own, Merkel promoted him to general’s rank.   

The bomb Vad has just placed under Zelensky’s table and under the Green ministers’ desks in Berlin can be spotted in an interview he published last week in Cologne.   

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by Editor - Sunday, January 15th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Australians aren’t the only democrats and allies of the US in the war of the worlds – that’s the one against Russia and China.

Australian voters aren’t the only ones revealing they want to vote against the political choices they are offered at election time.

But Australian voters are the only ones in the world defying the law which makes voting compulsory in their federal and state elections – elections for government officials (lead images, left Dominic Perrottet, right Gladys Berejiklian, premiers of New South Wales) who were the only ones in the world to operate a scheme of keeping their citizens out of the country during two years of Covid-19 emergency powers – a scheme of forcing those allowed to enter to  pay for their detention which the officials acknowledged between themselves to be illegal. So they kept it secret from parliament, the press, and the courts.

This use of force, fraud and propaganda is a case study of what is happening throughout the world of the democratic allies, the world the allied governments call the “rules-based international order”.   When force, fraud and propaganda make the rules like this,  the order which results is fascism.

Listen to the discussion on TNT Radio.

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by Editor - Friday, January 13th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A leading Ukrainian government official has admitted that a demilitarized zone (lead image, left) to divide the battlefield, protect the Russian east of the country from the US and NATO long-range assault, and partition Ukraine is in negotiation.

“’We are currently being offered the Korean scenario,” Alexei Danilov (lead image, right) announced on January 8.   Danilov, a native of Lugansk, is the deputy chairman of the National Security and Defence Council, and second in rank to President Vladimir Zelensky. “[This is] the so-called conditional ’38th parallel’”, he told local reporters.   “Here are Ukrainians, but there Ukrainians are not like that. The Russians will now invent anything. I know for sure that one of the options they can offer us is the ’38th parallel’”. Danilov claimed one of the sources for the proposal is Dmitry Kozak. Officially, he is a deputy head of the presidential staff.   In 2020-21 he was the Kremlin’s chief negotiator on the Minsk accords with the Kiev regime and in the Normandy format with Germany and France; for Kozak’s detailed record of those negotiations, read this.  

Danilov now says Kozak “meets with former politicians in Europe and conveys through them the message that the Russians are ready to make concessions in order to fix the current status quo and force Ukraine to a truce.” Danilov did not say that he, Zelensky and the Ukrainian-US general staff have rejected the idea. Instead, he claimed the Korean DMZ has proven to be a mistake: “Danilov said that during a recent meeting, Korean representatives noted that establishing the division of the Korean peninsula into two parts along the 38th parallel was a mistake as the concessions made in the 1950s after the end of the war between North Korea and South Korea are currently leading to problems.” It is unclear what meeting Danilov was referring to, if any. US press reporting has identified the mistake of Vice President Kamala Harris last September in misnaming the “Republic of North Korea”.

Moscow sources suspect Danilov is attempting to relieve the pressure now growing on the Ukrainian generals from the US and the NATO command to consider an armistice before the Russians launch their anticipated general winter offensive. By exposing and trying to sandbag the Americans, Danilov’s remark is a signal that the real US assessment is that a much bigger loss of military capacity, territory and viable economy will be the outcome of the Russian offensive – unless the Ukrainians buy time with a ceasefire and protracted armistice talks to commence.

The reaction of the Stavka  to that has been President Vladmir Putin’s explicit condemnation of the buying-time tactic after former German chancellor Angela Merkel revealed it last month,  and ex-French President Francois Hollande repeated it on December 28.  “The West lied to us about peace,” Putin said in his New Year address on December 31, “while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it and to cynically use Ukraine and its people as a means to weaken and divide Russia. We have never allowed anyone to do this and we will not allow it now.”  

Putin also confirmed the message with a Korean gloss. “Russian servicemen, militiamen and volunteers are now fighting for their homeland, for truth and justice, for reliable guarantees of peace and Russia’s security.” The narrow 4-kilometre depth and short 240-km length of the Korean DMZ are not, Putin implied, “reliable guarantees of security.”

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by Editor - Wednesday, January 11th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Angela Merkel (lead image), the chancellor who destroyed the Christian Democratic party in German politics always hated Russia and President Vladimir Putin most of all.

She concealed this for as long as she calculated she needed to preserve the votes of East Germany, German businesses and unions for her re-election. But lie after lie she leaked through her staff to the German and English press.   

She even tried to promote a German candidate to rule the Ukraine in her war against Russia – until Washington installed their own in Kiev, and told Merkel to fall in line. She did.   

The outcome of Merkel’s rule between 2005 and 2021 is her 4-election failure to win a majority of votes or seats in the Bundestag; the defeat of every German voting bloc which had supported her in power in Berlin; the rebuilding of the Berlin Wall in the minds of the remaining Germans who disagree and who resist; and the return of Russia-hating and Adolf Hitler’s war aims for Germany against Moscow. They are also the war aims of Joseph Kennedy, father financier of the US Democratic Party whose fascist line was tolerated by the White House until the fighting war started in earnest in Europe and Kennedy was gotten rid of.  

No comparable resistance to the alliance between German and American fascism exists today in the US, Europe, Berlin or London. The resistance, however, is worldwide; does not speak English as a native language; and the Russian armed forces are stronger than they ever were.   The problem for them is how wide and deep the demilitarized zone must be drawn to defend Russia for the foreseeable future – how far west of the Dnieper River? To the Oder and Neisse Rivers of Poland and Germany, or to the Berlin Wall?

With every new bombing, missile, and drone raid, the Stavka meeting daily in Moscow  conducts its experiment in drawing the lines westward to the last Ukrainian, then to the last German.

In the Russian Foreign Ministry’s final briefing for the year,  spokesman Maria Zakharova had not yet registered what Merkel said in Italian, in her interview with Corriere della Sera on December 27. That was:  “ We all knew that it was a frozen conflict, that the problem was not solved, but this gave Ukraine precious time…the Cold War never really ended because Russia was never pacified.”      

For Merkel’s “problem to be solved” and “pacify Russia” read the US and NATO war to destroy Russia. “Today we act like this under the pressure of war,” she added, “which I approve of.”         

According to Zakharova, referring to Merkel’s earlier interviews in German with Die Zeit and Der Spiegel, “Angela Merkel’s confessions that the Minsk agreements only served to buy “time for Ukraine” leads to an interesting situation. The Western countries prevented their media from visiting Donbass. At the same time, they needed time, as they say, for the Kiev regime to grow stronger. This is real evidence of what Russian leadership has been talking about. All this indicates that the Ukrainian army and the West are using unacceptable methods not only on the battlefield, but also in the information war that they have unleashed against Russia. The Kiev regime and its Western handlers are trying to hide their own crimes and the truth about what is really happening in Ukraine.”

From the American-Ukrainian gun platform aimed at Russia to the American-Australian gun platform aimed at China, this is der krieg der welten  — the war of the worlds. Listen to the discussion led by George Eliason from Donbass.

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by Editor - Friday, December 30th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

If you pay government taxes, you have done your bit and contributed to the one hundred billion dollars which the US and its allies have spent on the Ukrainian battlefield since the year began. And if you are German, you are going to be paying one hundred billion Euros in next year’s Berlin rearmament programme aimed at fighting Russia and China.

Next, if you think that in these outlays you are making a winning investment in securing the defence of your frontiers, of your democratic freedoms and your constitutional and human rights, you are suffering the first-wave blast effect of the neutering bomb.

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by Editor - Monday, December 26th, 2022
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