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.
We are in Europe’s second Hundred Years War, and at the end of the first year of Europe’s second Thirty Years War. What we have to look forward to next year is an armistice on the Ukrainian battlefield, but not an end to the war.
This is because President Biden (lead image, front 1st right) aims to fight it until Russia’s destruction, as do Olaf Scholz (rear left), Andrzej Duda (rear, centre), Vladimir Zelensky (rear, right), Giorgia Meloni (front, half, right) and Emmanuel Macron (front, full right). Like the European princelings and principates who fought each other to standstill and penury the last time around, none of them has long to look forward to, and certainly no victory-in-Europe parade.
Russia’s offer to them for the future, for mutual security without defeat on the battlefield, was tabled as treaties of non-aggression and security for Europe last Christmas, on December 17, 2021. After the Russian offer was dismissed by Biden and the others a month later, President Vladimir Putin had no choice but to launch the special military operation. This is now a general military operation because Biden and his allies have committed themselves to that. Scholz’s one hundred billion Euro rearmament of Germany to reinvigorate the war against Russia after the armistice on the Ukrainian battlefield leaves Zelensky’s Ukraine with a future shrinking as fast as his territorial capacity to threaten; Scholz’s Germany ditto.
Hitler is in this picture because the ruination of Europe and the US in fighting this war can only be sustained inside their countries by the methods of fascism – force, fraud and propaganda — which Hitler introduced more systematically than had been attempted before; and before he ran into a Russian army which was magnitudes weaker than it is today.
The Montreal Express is the one Canadian export to the United States which Americans are afraid of.
It’s the sub-zero cold wind which can stop cars, twist railroad tracks, cut power lines, cut off fingers and toes with frostbite and kill with hypothermia. On the calendar it starts to blow about now and keeps threatening until March.
Call it Canada’s General Winter fighting a rearguard action in the war for Canadian independence which has already been lost.
Matt Ehret, one of Montreal’s leading geopolitical analysts, casts a cold eye on the warfighting in which Canada and the US are engaged with the NATO allies. This is now the war against Russia in Europe, and also against China in Asia. Listen to this world view blowing out of Montreal, and watch as Michael Werbowski hosts the discussion.
Winter Storm Warning (WSW): with the traditional Montreal Express come deep accumulations of snow. This podcast will help you stop the snow job.
It may already be there on your smartphone, the wall of your smarthouse, or the computer in your lap or on your desk. Depending on where you are located, it’s Ausfash, Canfash, Greenfash (Germany), Ukronazism (Canada, Poland, Ukraine).
A generation ago, this is what the textbooks called the banality of evil – when the textbook writers said they were talking about Germans. This Gorilla Radio discussion by Chris Cook brings you up to date, to the cutting edge, and to the “new Germans” – that’s almost everybody who lives in, or who believes they live in what is being cynically called the “rules-based international order”. Cynical because there’s nothing orderly about the international order we live in now; in fact, we are at war, so the rules are the reverse of what those who publicly advocate them know them in secret to be. The real rules are force, fraud, and propaganda. They are producing lawlessness, not order – and that’s fascism.
Australia was the only country in the world to close its borders to its own citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then to force the few allowed to return into police detention for which the detainees were compelled to pay.
This dictatorship of coronavirus as a crime was created by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who seized the national health, border control and finance powers for himself in secret from parliament and from his own government; and by Gladys Berejiklian (lead images), Premier of New South Wales, who ordered the scheme to compel travellers arriving at Sydney Airport to pay several hundred million dollars for a police operation fabricated to look like a quarantine health service.
This book tells the story of a lawsuit in a Sydney court – the only one in the country to have challenged the legality of the COVID-19 quarantine fee scheme, and to uncover the lawlessness of the state camouflaged by media propaganda which most Australians have believed to be the truth — until now.
The classified government record — opened here for the first time — reveals the officials plotting, as they confided to each other, “to reduce opportunity for members of the public to dispute the application of the charging regime and proposal to impose fees for detention”. In more than a thousand pages of court files and a dozen hearings over a year, the lawsuit has exposed the attempt to shut the government’s files and close the case in violation of the state statutes and the precedents of Australian courts.
Force, fraud and propaganda – the world glimpsed in surprise what was happening in Australia when the world tennis champion Novak Djokovic was arrested on his arrival in January 2022, and then ordered out of the country after his court case was dismissed. The Djokovic case was not the exception – it was the Australian rule by force.
This book reveals how effective state autocrats were at keeping up to 100,000 Australians out of the country during the pandemic years, and then at locking them up inside the country after they returned. The story documents how the courts have accepted the lawlessness of the politicians and the police. By their acquiescence, too, Australian journalists display themselves as kapos and collabos.
Those notorious words come from the time of German fascism in Europe.
In this story you follow how, little by little, a state of Australian fascism has developed by the use of force, fraud, and propaganda so effective their targets, the inhabitants of Australia, cannot resist because they no longer recognise what it means to live in lawlessness.
To keep western children safe from being misled by Anglo-American reporters on this topic, here is a primer on what exactly the newly enacted Russian law says; what Russian public opinion thinks; what the Russian courts, judges, and lawyers have interpreted the law to mean; and what the record of enforcement so far reveals.
Adults should not underestimate the politics of this issue. Russians can see and understand the potential power of the LGBT election bloc as it is polarizing voters in the US and other western countries.
According to this just published study of the last US presidential election, LGBT identified people accounted for one in ten (11.3%) of the voting eligible population – that’s adults over 18 years of age. This bloc was “pivotal in ensuring Joe Biden’s victory in several key states—and, subsequently, in winning the Presidency. Had LGBTQ+ voters stayed home, it is likely Donald Trump would have won re-election. By 2030, one-in-seven (14.3%) voters will be LGBTQ+ identifying, representing a sharp increase from the present day. The LGBTQ+ voting bloc is projected to continue to surge in the decade following, nearing one-in-five (17.8%) voters by 2040.”
The majority of Russian voters and the Russian political consensus aim to prevent this from happening at home.
Senior Russian judges acknowledge that when there is a conflict like this one between individual, collective and political rights, and between the convictions of majorities and minorities, it is the constitutional duty of the legislature to strike a balance between them. Accordingly, the judges believe the new law reflects the current consensus, and both are lawful.
Russian pollsters add that the sharper the protests grow against the new law, especially in the West, the stronger the majority view will become and the heavier the crackdown to follow.
Tamas Gergo Samu interviews John Helmer @bears_with
Tamas Gergo Samu conducted this interview by email earlier this month. Samu, a journalist, has been a Hungarian parliament deputy in Budapest; then an adviser to the head of the Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom), a key party in the parliamentary opposition bloc known as United for Hungary (EM). He left the Jobbik party two years ago, and is now an independent Bekes county councillor. The interview is to appear in Erdélyi Napló (“Transylvanian Journal”), the leading Hungarian weekly published in Cluj-Napoca, capital of the Transylvanian region of Romania.
By Thomas Röper, introduced and translated by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (lead image, centre) and Thomas Haldenwang (extreme right) the internal security chief Scholz accepted from Angela Merkel, have pulled off a media coup in the style of the first German minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels (on knees).*
No German currently employed by the country’s mainstream or internet media dares to disbelieve that dawn raids last Wednesday by 3,000 armed police and troops, capturing 130 premises and arresting 25 individuals – conducted in secret in front of dozens of press photographers and reporters – was a successful strike against the German state’s internal and external enemies. The official press release by the federal prosecutor adds that another 27 individuals have been targeted but not yet captured. “In addition, premises of non-suspects are searched,” the federal government statement said.
Even the leftwing Berlin newspaper, Junge Welt, reported its conviction that the operation was “reminiscent of the 1920s: A nobleman, military personnel and a judge belonging to the AfD wanted to instigate a coup with a group of Reich citizens.”
No one in Germany is remembering the operation of June 29-July 1, 1934: that’s when Adolph Hitler, already chancellor but not yet fuhrer, with Heinrich Himmler of the SS, and Goebbels, arranged the liquidation of his critics and opponents led by Ernst Röhm, who was accused of receiving a large bribe from France to replace Hitler in a coup. Operation Hummingbird, Goebbels called it, to remove several dozen of the “politically unreliable”. The Night of the Long Knives the operation has been called ever since.
Speaking for Scholz, the German federal prosecutor’s office has announced the plotters were a terrorist organization planning to overthrow the state “through the use of military means and violence against state representatives; this also included commissioning killings.” The German Interior Minister of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party said the arrests prevented an “abyss of terrorist threat”. The Free Democratic Party in Scholz’s ruling coalition declared: “This is not about Germany at all, it is in truth about the destruction of parliamentary democracy.” The spokesman of Die Linke, the German left opposition, said the raid was “further evidence of the worrying presence of a militant, armed and internationally networked right-wing scene in Germany.”
Reported immediately by FinancialTimes, the Japanese propaganda organ in London, Scholz had struck against “the threat posed to western states by far-right extremism turbocharged by radical conspiracy theories such as QAnon”. The Washington Post uncovered experts to reassure Germans who have received Covid-19 vaccinations or who are Jewish that they are now safe from the “alleged plot to topple the German government, led by a self-styled prince, a retired paratrooper and a Berlin judge, had its roots in a murky mixture of post-war grudges, antisemitic conspiracy theories and anger over recent pandemic restrictions.”
The New York Times uncovered not only a German plot but evidence of how farsighted the New York Times itself had been in advance. “Among the items uncovered was a list containing 18 names of politicians considered enemies, possibly to be deported and executed, among them Chancellor Olaf Scholz, people familiar with the raids told The New York Times, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation. This was the latest of a series of plots discovered in recent years of extremist networks preparing for a day the democratic order collapses, a day they call Day X, the subject of a New York Times podcast series last year.”
In Warsaw the Poles are laughing.
Polish officials and independent analysts in Warsaw have judged the German government operation preposterous, incompetent, unoriginal. “It reminds me of the plot in Poland in 2015,” noted Stanislas Balcerac, “where an instable academician was propped up by Polish secret service agents to prepare a false-flag plot to attack the Polish parliament – the Brunon Kwiecien affair.” The Polish media are editorialising that the Germans who have been sharply critical of the Polish government for its attempts to lift the immunity of bad judges, are now silent while the German police have just now arrested Brigit Malsack-Winkemann, who is still a judge in Berlin. “If the Poles did the same,” according to Balcerac, “there would be an immediate international outcry.”
In Moscow, Dmitry Medvedev, the former president and currently deputy secretary of the Security Council, also laughed.
“Evidently the Germans have a shortage of black pudding”, he said on his Telegram account. “Everywhere there’s only baloney. And this is a good reason to add live blood to the liver sausage of the current chancellor. Scholz clearly benefits from such a switch. He is both a cook and a diner in the meal. Naturally, they hint at a connection with the Russians. And how else? All the malicious conspiracies, world wars, devastating earthquakes, and deadly epidemics are from us. We can be proud of this even though we have not yet succeeded. We will continue to test the strength of Germany. Maybe it will become a monarchy again? But seriously, this is a clear sign of a hereditary disease of the entire management model in Germany.”
Thomas Röper ** is the only German journalist to have investigated the truth of the matter. In Germany he and his Anti-Spiegel blog, published in St. Petersburg, where he lives, are considered a propagandist for Germany’s enemies. Here’s his report.
Introduced by John Helmer, Moscow, and reported by Christopher Black, Toronto @bears_with
There will be no Russian appeal to the high Dutch courts in the case of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.
A district court judge, Hendrik Steenhuis, ruled on November 17 to acquit one Russian and convict two other Russians and a Ukrainian, all fighting for the Donbass separatists against the Kiev regime. The four men were charged with murder in the destruction of the aircraft and deaths of its 298 passengers and crew on July 14, 2014.
The Ukrainian and Dutch case has created a new legal doctrine of “functional co-perpetration” in combat – guilt by association in civil war and wars of national liberation when one side puts the opposing side on trial, applying evidence created by secret intelligence services and heard by state agents behind closed doors. In English legal history this is known as a Star Chamber proceeding; in France, Lettre de cachet; the Yamashita doctrine in the US Supreme Court; and in Australia, a kangaroo court.
Steenhuis ruled that “Moscow”, the “Russian Federation”, and “high-ranking persons in the Russian Federation” had directed the accused men to commit war crimes. But he also judged there had been no war in eastern Ukraine; no right of self-defence on the Donetsk battlefield; and that because of their “lack of combat immunity, the suspects, like any other civilian, were not entitled to shoot at any aircraft, including a military aircraft, and thereby kill the military occupants.”
The Haagse Rechtbank reported on Thursday that no filing in the case 0909/748007-19 had been received.
This means that no Russian appeal will be presented to challenge the legality in Dutch and international law of the findings and convictions of Colonel Igor Girkin, Colonel Sergei Dubinsky, and Leonid Kharchenko. On December 1, Dutch state prosecutors had announced they would be filing no appeal in the case.
The judgement in the case has been analysed here, together with links to the court’s judgements as read out and later written down.
They concluded with the order: “To the extent permitted by law, an appeal may be lodged against this decision within fourteen days.” Counting court working days from the date the judgement was published on November 17, this deadline expired at the end of Wednesday this week, December 7.
Anatoly Kovler, a former European Court judge and founder of the Moscow law firm Kovler & Partners, supervised the legal preparations for the defence of Lieutenant-Colonel Oleg Pulatov, and instructed the two Dutch defence lawyers in court, Boudewjin van Eijck and Sabine ten Doesschate. Pulatov was acquitted in last month’s ruling.
Kovler had refused to respond to questions or make comments on the case until November 17, when Vzglyadreported him as saying: “Russia was not included in the international investigation team, although Australia and Malaysia were included only because among those killed in the crash of flight MH17 were citizens of these countries. But excuse me, where is Australia and where is the crime scene area?…Nevertheless, the court showed some objectivity and noted the lack of evidence that Russia, as a state, was involved in the commission of this catastrophe…[Kovler also points out that] the investigation included only convenient witness statements in the evidence base, ignoring information about the missile launch from the village of Amvrosiivka – the location of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The reason for the refusal was that this zone is too far from the point where the plane disappeared from radar. This practice is called selective application of evidence. The trial must use all the evidence that the lawyers demanded to provide. Although Dutch justice is characterized by a high degree of meticulousness and scrupulousness, but in this case, apparently exceptions were made…Unfortunately, there was no such objectivity in the MH17 case.”
Kovler, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Russian Ministry of Justice, which the Kovler firm has represented, declined to answer questions on whether the Russian side was considering an appeal in the case. The Russian Foreign Ministry said it was studying the legal documents but has said nothing since.
The Dutch Government is continuing a claim it filed in July 2020 against the Russian Government in the European Court of Human Rights, where several cases have been launched but suspended for several years.
An attempt by the European Commission to create a new international tribunal to start proceedings against Russia has also commenced. Christopher Black, a Canadian barrister and specialist in war crime tribunal law, explains.
When the US economy was in collapse in 1929, the advertising copywriters for Coca Cola were told to come up with a new slogan. The chief executive of the beverage company thought that for Coke to beat its rivals, it was necessary to persuade Americans who were desperate financially to pay five cents for a bottle of something to calm themselves down and cheer up. This is how the slogan “The Pause that Refreshes” was born (lead image, top).
General Patience, in league with the Russian Stavka (lead image, bottom), have a bottle of something similar. Calming down and cheering up are not what it’s meant to do, particularly if you have been drinking the Kool-Aid bottled in Kiev, Berlin and Washington, DC.
This is what it tastes like. Take a pause to refresh your understanding. In the conditions of this war, understand also that refresh is not the word for it.
