The Saker

■ Russia appears to be openly shipping war materiel to Novorossiya forces in a bid to deter Ukrainian attack
■ Squabbles between Novorossiya commanders continue, some notable names are being sidelined
■ The Ukrainian side has strengthened its position for a possible attack but so have the opposing forces

There is an interesting word in Russian: вялотекущий. It can be translated as "creeping" or "sluggish". It is composed of the word вяло which means "lethargically", or "torpidly" or "apathetic" and текущий which means to flow, to progress.

This word comes to my mind when looking at the war in the Ukraine, it is progressing towards some kind of worsening, but it does so in a slouching, slowly creeping way.

Novorussian side - On the Novorussian side the recent elections did not solve the constant infighting between the various commanders. To my great regret, this nonsense is still going on.

Bezler was removed from his command, Mozgovoi was told that his brigade had to be incorporated into the Novorussian Armed Forces (NAF), which he gladly accepted, and that this would be done by breaking up his brigade into various units of the NAF, which he categorically rejected.

Then there was the news that Zakharchenko had decorated Strelkov and Borodai as with the Medal of "Hero of the Donetsk People's Republic". Strelkov denied that adding that he would not take that medal from Zakharchenko anyway. The news was then "corrected" to say that this decision had been made about Bezler and Borodai.

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Harry J. Bentham

With phantom Russians haunting the shores of Sweden and Britain, NATO still can’t explain its cavalier 70% of global military spending.

We can expect more Russian specters to haunt British shores in the coming years, as the valiant so-called “west” wages a fevered and completely unjustified Cold War 2.0 against enemies who don’t exist.

Recently, on 29 October, the Royal Air Force swept to the rescue when a supposed Russian bomber came into British airspace. The bomber, which the RAF even threatened to destroy, turned out to be a Latvian Soviet-era cargo plane, on a routine flight.

Latvia, which used to be part of the Soviet Union, is officially a member of NATO. Officially, that means, an ally of the United States and the United Kingdom. This seems to have been of little interest to the RAF, who threatened to shoot down the poor plane and thereby do more damage to their own supposed ally than the Soviet (now Russian) menace ever threatened to do.

The incident in British airspace follows a similarly pointless chase in the Baltic Sea for a Russian submarine that never materialized. Foolishly, Sweden’s navy wasted huge amounts of military spending chasing a supposed underwater intruder due to rumor and hearsay.

Media were quick to identify the intruder as a Russian vessel, despite there being no evidence to support the existence of any vessel whatsoever, and no reason for a dispute between Russia and Sweden. The sole beneficiary of the entire situation is the United States, which seeks to enlarge and continue its military occupation of Europe and will invent any excuses and any enemies it needs to justify its presence.

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Sam Kriss

An enigmatic figure, common to all great mythologies: the blue
demon, the sower and reaper of blood...

Conspiracy theory: British imperial history, in its entirety, is the result of a dark and ancient plot on the part of the poppies; a Papaveraceaen pact ranged against humanity. For centuries they schemed in their hedgerows and pastures, dreaming up strange and cruel ideas in those ugly flaring heads of theirs, communicating their vegetable conspiracies through codes carried on unwitting bees (while the rest of us just innocently assumed them to be having sex), until the time came to strike. Wherever empire goes, poppies seem to follow: maybe we’ve got it the wrong way round. Our ruling classes have had their alliance with these plants for a long time now; in a state of opiate suggestion, it’s very possible that the flowers could do whatever they wanted with them. The poppies wanted China: we took them there, and forced millions into somniferous slavery. The poppies wanted to grow undisturbed, and our artillery obediently churned up the fields of Europe for them. Even this century they’ve reclaimed Afghanistan with British helicopter support. Now the poppies, and their puppeted politicians, are so sure of their angiospermic power over us that they can demand we peons each wear their plastic sigil every November, to remind us who we belong to. Now angry mobs will descend on anyone who insults our overlords by burning them in effigy, or else these iconoclasts will be legally imprisoned for crimes against the dignity of plants that (let’s not forget) grow in shit. Poppies have been a symbol of death since the Greeks; the fury of the pro-poppy partisans is the fury of death against life; it’s almost certain that the poppies are trying to lure us into a nuclear war, so that when the dust clears from the sky and all the humans are dead, the scorched scrublands of the future will flower with nothing but giant irradiated poppies, twisting happily in the wind as it howls an unheard threnody through the shells of ruined cities.

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Gilad Atzmon (A Short Comment)

The leader's 'principled' stance on Palestine deters backers,
forcing party 'to go to unions with begging bowl'. (Source)

The Times Of Israel reported today that British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband is losing the support of Jewish donors due to his party’s pro-Palestine stance.

The spineless Labour leader has been zigzagging for a while. He criticises Israel when he believes that such a ‘principled’ move would be popular amongst Labour supporters.

Yet, the same Ed too often describes himself as “the son of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.”

He then changes his spots and becomes the mouthpiece of the Israeli Lobby. He would swear allegiance to Israel’s security but also to the Jews and the primacy of their suffering.

Last June, ‘principled’ Ed announced at a Jewish Lobby gathering:

“I want you to know that if I become Prime Minister in less than a year’s time, I will be proud to do so as a friend of Israel, a Jew and, most of all, someone who feels so proud to be part of the community gathered here today.” (Ed Miliband speech to Labour Friends of Israel, June 2014)

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William Blum

November 9 will mark the 25th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. The extravagant hoopla began months ago in Berlin. In the United States we can expect all the Cold War clichés about The Free World vs. Communist Tyranny to be trotted out and the simple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeated: In 1961, the East Berlin communists built a wall to keep their oppressed citizens from escaping to West Berlin and freedom. Why? Because commies don’t like people to be free, to learn the “truth”. What other reason could there have been?

First of all, before the wall went up in 1961 thousands of East Germans had been commuting to the West for jobs each day and then returning to the East in the evening; many others went back and forth for shopping or other reasons. So they were clearly not being held in the East against their will. Why then was the wall built? There were two major reasons:

1) The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: “West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.”[1]

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Paul Craig Roberts

RT, one of my favorite news sources, has fallen for a fake story put out by the Pentagon to support the fantasy story that a SEAL team killed Osama bin Laden, who died a second time in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a decade after his first death from illness and disease.

This fake story together with the fake movie and the fake book by an alleged SEAL team member is the way the fake story of bin Laden’s murder is perpetrated. Bin Laden’s alleged demise at the hands of a SEAL team was a propaganda orchestration, the purpose of which was to give Obama a hero’s laurels and deep six Democratic talk of challenging his nomination for a second term.

Osama bin Laden died in December 2001 of renal failure and other health problems, having denied in his last recorded video any responsibility for 9/11, instead directing Americans to look inside their own government. The FBI itself has stated that there is no evidence that Osama bin Laden is responsible for 9/11. Bin Laden’s obituary appeared in numerous foreign and Arabic press, and also on Fox News. No one can survive renal failure for a decade, and no dialysis machine was found in the alleged Abbottabad compound of bin Laden, who allegedly was murdered by SEALs a decade after his obituary notices.

Additionally, no one among the crew of the ship from which the White House reported bin Laden was buried at sea saw any such burial, and the sailors sent messages home to that effect. Somehow a burial was held onboard a ship on which there are constant watches and crew on alert at all hours, and no one witnessed it.

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Pål Steigan
(Translated from the Norwegian by Tanja Barth)

No, this is not a funeral, it just looks like one. The picture is from
the signing of EU's association agreements between the EU and
Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. From left to right: J.M. Barroso &
H. van Rompuy (EU), P. Poroshenko, Prime Minister of Georgia,
Irakli Garibashvili, and Moldovan Prime Minister Iurie Leancă.

Ukraine's black earth belt may probably have the most fertile soil on our planet. Ukraine has been called the "bread basket of Europe", and international agribusiness is drooling over the chance to get hold of it. The combination of an economic catastrophe and the corrupt regime in Kiev provides a golden opportunity for Monsanto, GMO to carry out large-scale land-grabs.

The scramble for natural resources - Among other things, the conflict in Ukraine concerns natural resources. These include uranium and other minerals, and especially Ukraine's fertile soil. The country has been the world's third largest exporter of corn and the fifth largest exporter of wheat. The Ukrainian "black soil" forms a thick layer and is rich in nutrients. It is difficult to find land that can be more easily farmed. Global cooperations are looking to control it. This struggle is nothing new. More than 1.6 million hectares (nearly as much as the area of the state of New Jersey) have already been sold to foreign agro-business. The largest contracts have been handed o companies based in Luxemburg, Cyprus (perhaps as a cover for Russian or Ukrainian oligarchs) and in France. China signed an agreement to buy more than 3 million hectares (30 000 square kilometers) in 2013 (equivalent to the size of Belgium, comprising 5 % of all of the fertile soil in Ukraine), but at present there are doubts whether this deal will be finalized. (Please read Land concentration, land grabbing and people’s struggles in Europe.)

The oligarchs see the agricultural sector as yet another source of profits, and they are the people that have taken control of most of the resources. The richest man in Ukraine, Rinat Achmetov, owns a large section of land. The same goes for Oleg Bachmatjuk, one of the world's largest producers of eggs. His company is registered in Cyprus. Some of the largest foreign land owners are US NCH Capital (400,000 ha) and Russian Ukrainian Agrarian Investments (260,000 ha). (Please read Land concentration, land grabbing and people’s struggles in Europe.)

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Alimuddin Usmani interviews Gilad Atzmon for Egalité et Réconciliation

Alimuddin Usmani: Alain Soral recently stated that Jews who are brave and honest enough to delve into Jewish tribalism understand that Soral is far from anti Semitic. Soral said that he is trying to get the Jews to understand that by acting as a racist and brutal community, the Jews will eventually bring disaster on themselves. What is your opinion of Soral’s statement?

Gilad Atzmon: I have no doubt that Soral’s ‘issue’ with ‘the Jew’ has nothing to do with ethnicity or race. Soral is critical of Jewish culture and politics and his thoughts on the subject are both valid and timely.

We’ve been trained to believe in the value of a consistent critique and continual revision of politics and culture. However, it seems that many Jews believe that Jewish politics and culture are beyond criticism. For some bizarre reason, a number of major institutions of the Left agree that Jewish culture and politics are not open to evaluation. I guess this affirms that, at least in the eyes of the Left and the Jews, the chosen people are actually chosen for real.

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Philip Giraldi

So Israel is building 2,610 new housing units in East Jerusalem and in contiguous areas on the West Bank at a time when international sentiment against its unending occupation of Palestine is growing, particularly among Europeans if one goes by recent developments in Sweden, Britain and in Ireland. The administration of President Barack Obama is reported to be “deeply concerned” and even seriously annoyed by the latest Israeli thumb inserted squarely in the American eye, but has not taken any action to pressure Tel Aviv into reversing course.

Pardon me while I yawn. In the absence of any serious consequences coming from Washington Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will do whatever he wants in the firm belief that there is no one who can force him to do otherwise. Israel owns Congress and the mainstream media while its proliferating think tanks and promoters in a score of major Jewish organizations continue to spew out self-serving nonsense. So who is going to say nay?

Obama’s mistake lies ultimately in his apparent belief that Israel is somehow a nation guided by tangible interests much like any other, which is particularly ironic as he shares the same type of delusion as the Israeli leadership. Both he and Netanyahu somehow believe that their respective countries are not bound by any internationally accepted standards that determine how one should behave, Washington somehow having designated itself as “leader of the free world” while Tel Aviv defines itself as a chosen people living in a land granted by covenant from Yahweh himself.

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John W. Whitehead

We want no Gestapo or secret police. The FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. J. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him. -Pres. Harry S. Truman

Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Intimidation tactics. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment schemes.

These are the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime from the Roman Empire to modern-day America, yet it’s the secret police—tasked with silencing dissidents, ensuring compliance, and maintaining a climate of fear—who sound the death knell for freedom in every age.

Every regime has its own name for its secret police: Mussolini’s OVRA carried out phone surveillance on government officials. Stalin’s NKVD carried out large-scale purges, terror and depopulation. Hitler’s Gestapo went door to door ferreting out dissidents and other political “enemies” of the state. And in the U.S., it’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation that does the dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.

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Stephen Lendman

Russia prioritizes cooperative relations with all countries. Washington provocatively seeks confrontations, threatening world peace.

New NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg mimics his predecessor. A convenient US stooge. A CIA asset. Beholden to America's imperial interests. Mindless of rule of law principles.

Repeating one Big Lie after another. Wrongfully claiming Donbass democratic elections were unlawful. Shamelessly accusing Russia of threatening Ukraine's border. Groundlessly saying it "continues to support, train and equip" Donbass self-defense forces. Ludicrously "call(ing) on Russia to make genuine efforts toward a peaceful solution."

No country anywhere did more for it responsibly since conflict erupted in Ukraine. None exerted more genuine efforts tirelessly.

Polar opposite Washington's rage for war. Along with its rogue NATO partners. What Stoltenberg didn't explain. Washington's man at NATO. A convenient US stooge. Chosen for that reason. For sure not for world peace.

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Pål Steigan
(Translated from the Norwegian by Tanja Barth)

"Victory for the democratic, pro-Western forces" - This was the message that most of the Norwegian and Western media sent when commenting on the elections in Ukraine, claiming that the Nazi and fascist elements have been completely marginalized. The truth is quite the opposite – never have the Nazi & fascist groups been as strong as they now are in Ukraine.

Election results for the openly fascist parties - The Nazi/fascist party "Svoboda" got 4.71% of the votes and did not pass the national election threshold of 5 %. But the party will still have 6 delegates that have been elected in single constituencies.

The even more extreme fascist party "Right Sector" only got 1.81 % of the votes, but their leader, Dmitro Jarosj, personally won the election in his constituency in the Dnepropetrovsk region. In this region, he is closely allied with the oligarch Igor Kolomoiskij, who has financed several fascist battalions in the East. So in this case there is a fusion in Ukraine between Nazi ideology and Nazi militia on the one side, and robber barons on the other.

"The Radical Party", lead by Oleh Lyashko, got 7.45 % of the votes, which resulted 22 seats in the national assembly. So the openly fascist phalange thus will be represented by 29 seats in the national assembly.

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Bill Van Auken

A rebel fighter calls on his comrades during clashes with
regime forces in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

Washington’s strategy in its three-month-old war in Iraq and Syria appeared to suffer another humiliating blow over the weekend as one of the last remaining strongholds of US-backed “moderate rebels” in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib fell to the Nusra Front, the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda.

The collapse of the US-backed force in Syria came amid reported plans for a major retraining of the Iraqi army in preparation for a US-orchestrated offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq sometime next year.

Both developments underscore the unreliability of the proxy forces the Obama administration has indicated are to serve as the “boots on the ground” in the two countries and point to the inevitable expansion of the number and role of US troops deployed to prosecute the new Middle East war.

Washington Post correspondent Liz Sly, who has been one of the most enthusiastic media propagandists for the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the so-called “moderate rebels,” questioned whether the FSA would “manage to survive the trouncing inflicted in recent days” by the Nusra Front. She described the events in Idlib as “throwing the rebels into disarray and upending the Obama administration’s hopes for a moderate alternative to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”

The “trouncing” was accomplished without a shot being fired. Two US-backed groups, the Syrian Revolutionary Front and Harakat Hazm (Steadfastness Movement), surrendered without opposing the Al Qaeda-linked militia. It was reported that a large number of their members went over to the Nusra Front, while others fled.

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Finian Cunningham

In an insightful geopolitical speech this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the US of instigating global instability and insecurity.

As if to underline Putin's point was the backdrop of major news stories during recent days: the national security alert that gripped Canada over the killing of two military personnel in Ottawa and Quebec; the near panic in New York City over an Ebola disease outbreak; and the Swedish hunt for a mystery submarine in its territorial waters.

To say that there was over-reaction in each instance is an understatement. But the disproportionate public response reflects the atmosphere of global insecurity that the US and other Western governments have engendered. The stoking of insecurity has partly been cynical as a way of manipulating the public into accepting greater state control measures or to promote a geopolitical agenda.

This was clearly the case in Canada, where the rightwing government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper framed the two deaths as a full-blown national terror alert, thus invoking more state powers over the public while at the same time justifying the recent deployment of Canadian military forces in the illegal US-led bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria.

When the public has been whipped up into a fervour of insecurity, all sorts of irrational reactions can then become possible, as in the widespread anxiety over the Ebola disease that has broken out in West Africa. One or two cases of infection in the US and Europe has created a stampede-like fear of a pandemic - despite the fact that patients, such as the Dallas nurse, can be successfully treated with adequate medical care.

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Paul Craig Roberts

If you require more evidence that the United States is a dysfunctional society, observe American elections. Election season is slander season. Each party’s attack teams focus on misrepresenting, defaming, and ridiculing the opposing party’s candidates. Attack ads have replaced debates and any discussion of what the issues are, or should be, and how candidates perceive the public’s interest. Each attack team tells lies designed to enrage various voters about the other team’s candidate.

Whoever is elected is indebted not to voters but to the special interests that provided the campaign money. Once elected the official serves the private interest groups that put the official in office. In America the government can be bought and sold just like everything else. In its Citizens United ruling, a Republican Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on the right of corporations to purchase the US government.

Each state has its own dominant interest groups that win every election. In Florida real estate developers routinely defeat the environment and local communities. Developers have even been known to form organizations that pose as conservation supporters in order to misrepresent and defeat conservation measures.

Yet, despite their long string of losses to special interests, voters still participate in elections. I once read a theory that elections are a form of entertainment. President Clinton’s encounter with the young woman on MTV–”boxers or briefs”–is one indication of the lack of seriousness that Americans bring to politics.

Perhaps the lighter moment of a young woman’s interest in the president’s underwear should be cherished. The Clinton years will be remembered as scandal after scandal with dark events unresolved and covered up. The Clinton years were transformative. For those who don’t remember and those too young at the time to be aware, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories (1997), will be an eye-opener. Perhaps the Democrats should read the book before nominating Hillary as the party’s presidential candidate.

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