fahrenheit451:350

BBC News Online reported :-

Turkey and Russia have agreed what they say is a "historic" deal aimed at keeping Kurdish forces away from Syria's border with Turkey.

It comes during a pause in Turkey's offensive to drive Kurdish forces out, creating a "safe zone" in the area. Under the deal, Syrian and Russian forces will immediately oversee a withdrawal of Kurdish forces. There is no word from the Kurdish fighters, whom Turkey regards as terrorists. The deal sets out plans for joint Turkish-Russian patrols along the border next week. The agreement was announced after six hours of talks on Tuesday between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian host, Vladimir Putin, in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

And so it goes..

At last it appears the international Law -breaking USA and its western satrapies have satiated their vicarious bellicose cravings and it's left up to the grown-ups in the international diplomatic arena to assume the providential role of katechon and enforce the restoration of a sense of order and stability in what had up to only days previously been the most virulent and potentially cataclysmic of all regional imbroglios to have erupted in the Middle East.

Having systematically and cynically violated every heretofore accepted and recognised norm of international law on the conduct of armed hostilities, the US,UK,France,Germany and Canada achieved absolutely nothing of any effect or value by their wantonly irrational and manifestly dangerous behaviour of arming and funding Al Qaeda in its myriad forms  as well a ISIS and the various bandit formations constituting the Kurdish insurgency.

Israel and Iran, those two equally otiose, mentally disturbed dwarves of irrational arcane religiosity have also been put back into their proper historic context of virtual irrelevance. What kind of imbecile wants a faux- armageddon ?

The British House of Commons certainly was one of "them" that did when it debated,but providentially failed to approve, the bombing of Syria and in particular President Assad's forces as well as some tokenism around hitting ISIS- though their main target was always what they condescendingly referred to as the Damascus Regime's forces.

Let's not forget that the same assembly of 650 cretins has proven itself,over 4 long years, utterly incapable of voting in favour of exiting a continental tyranny of which the UK is but one of 28 vassals.

That aside, the deluded US liberal interventionist Clintonites and their conservative neocon war hawks have also both been equally frustrated in carrying out their own dystopian vision of wiping another heretofore stable and reasonably prosperous nationalist arab state off of the Middle eastern map.

Oh, and the disparate, far from heterogenous Kurds who were given carte blanche  by the illegal US invaders to create a mythical Kurdish statelet on the borders with Turkey ; they too are being put back in their box and back in the cupboard that's already teeming with lots of other skeletons.

fahrenheit451:331

Occasionally,very occasionally  a leading world statesman articulates a point of view so cogently as to encompass one 's own outlook on an issue that it makes sense just to copy & paste verbatim. A couple of days ago The President of Russia launched a swingeing critique of prevailing  western metropolitan elitist values. To wit-

 

Vladimir Putin has trumpeted the growth of national populist movements in Europe and America, crowing that liberalism is spent as an ideological force. In an FT interview in the Kremlin on the eve of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, the Russian president said “the liberal idea” had “outlived its purpose” as the public turned against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism. Mr Putin’s evisceration of liberalism — the dominant western ideology since the end of the second world war in 1945 — chimes with anti-establishment leaders from US president Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the Brexit insurgency in the UK.

 

 “[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades,” he said. Mr Putin branded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than 1m refugees to Germany, mainly from war-ravaged Syria, as a “cardinal mistake”. But he praised Donald Trump for trying to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from Mexico.

 

 “This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.” Recommended The Big Read Putin: friendship with China, ‘Donald’ and the end of liberal ideas He added: “Every crime must have its punishment. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”

 

 Donald Tusk, the European Council president, said he “strongly disagreed” with Mr Putin. “What I find really obsolete is authoritarianism, personality cults and the rule of oligarchs,” he said.

 As the de facto ruler of Russia for almost two decades, Mr Putin, 66, has been regularly accused of covertly supporting populist movements through financial aid and social media, notably in the 2016 US presidential election, the Brexit referendum and the recent European Parliament elections.

 

 Mr Putin emphatically denied this. He dismissed the conclusion by special counsel Robert Mueller that Russia had systemically interfered in the 2016 US presidential election as “mythical interference”.

 

 Turning to the US-China trade war and geopolitical tensions in the Gulf between the US and Iran, Mr Putin said the situation had become “explosive”. The problem, he said, stemmed from American unilateralism and the lack of rules underpinning world order. Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin talking to FT editor Lionel Barber and Moscow bureau chief Henry Foy © Press office of the President of Russia He expressed concern about the threat of a renewed nuclear arms race between the US and Russia. “The cold war was a bad thing . . . but there were at least some rules that all participants in international communication more or less adhered to or tried to follow. Now, it seems that there are no rules at all,” he said.

 

 On a positive note, Mr Putin said there were tentative signs of a thaw in Anglo-Russian relations ahead of his meeting in Osaka with Theresa May, her farewell summit as UK prime minister. “I think Russia and UK are both interested in fully restoring our relations, at least I hope a few preliminary steps will be made.” Relations between London and Moscow have been frozen after the attempted assassination of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England. Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it . . . but traitors must be punished The UK government blames the Russian government for the nerve agent attack, but Mr Putin said there was no evidence to support this. Mr Skripal had served a sentence in Russia before being released in a spy swap with the UK, he noted. Mr Putin made clear, however, that he had zero tolerance for spies who betrayed their country. “Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it . . . but traitors must be punished.”

 

Echoing nationalist populists such as Mr Salvini and France’s Marine Le Pen, Mr Putin said liberal governments had not acted to reassure citizens. Instead they had pursued a mindless multiculturalism embracing, among other things, sexual diversity. “I am not trying to insult anyone because we have been condemned for our alleged homophobia. But we have no problem with LGBT persons. God forbid, let them live as they wish,” he said. “But some things do appear excessive to us. They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles.” “Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with that,” he added. “But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”

 

 

 

P.S.

My deepest schadenfreude goes to,amongst others :-

#PeoplesVote #MeToo #Bame The pro-death Abortion Lobby #ExtinctionRebellion

 

 

 

fahrenheit451:245

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

Two weeks after Mr Johnson gave an interview to the German broadcaster DeutscheWelle, and was asked why he believed the chemical came from Russia.

He said: "When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory..."
Mr Johnson was asked if they had samples.

He said: "They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, 'Are you sure?' And he said, 'There's no doubt'."

Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down, said scientists had not "identified the precise source".

The Foreign Secretary was urged to explain the answer he gave when asked why he was certain the novichok nerve agent originated in Russia.

And in the meantime, the entire corporate MSM domiciled in the UK ( notionally "right" and notionaly  "left" ) have spent the past few weeks lambasting the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn MP who urged caution and circumspection in regard to making accusations against Russia prior to establishing the facts and presenting the evidence.

Which naturally enough the decrepit,bumbling minority Tory regime were never ever going to hang around for before attempting to single-handedly re-ignite the Cold War. None of this habeas corpus,due process,let the Police investigate the crime,establish the facts,uncover the empirical evidence to give to the CPS to present in court at a trial -none of that nonsense.

Just wantonly defame and slander a sovereign nation state with whom the UK is officially, at least for now,still at peace and instigate hand in glove with the US neocon State Department a co-ordinated wave of diplomatic expulsions involving most but not all EU and NATO satrapies who accept the " evidence " as  vouched for by a deluded haridan and Thatcher impersonator.

I'm no longer sure that Schadenfreude covers it.

fahrenheit451:241

And still it rumbles on.The Salisbury imbroglio. The tiniest molehill has over this last few days been assiduously turned into a proverbial mountain.

Tory Minority Westminster Regime Leader May even went walkabout in the erstwhile largely overlooked Wiltshire County Town,as if she was Margaret Thatcher at the height of the Falklands conflict.

Opposition Leader Corbyn ( barely two years on from being massively no-confidenced by 90% of his parliamentary  "colleagues" who still want nothing to do with him as their Party's duly elected leader after all this time ) has tried to inject  a dose of reason and level-headedness into the hyperbole strewn bluster aired from all directions in the House of Commons chamber as if it were the set of " The Darkest Hour ".

And still it rumbles on. Expulsions of Russian embassy staff has been ordered;the nature of the incident itself has now Orwellian like been recategorised as a  direct attack on UK sovereignty and the first use of a chemical weapon attack by one state on another in europe, the first since 1945.

The very same utterly detestable venal politicians and parties that for decades now have systematically betrayed the UK's sovereignty and independence and ensured our enslavement to the EU and USA are now the ones prattling on about attacks on our sovereignty.

The corporate MSM are strutting and posturing, filling cyberspace and the airwaves and diminishing acres of newsprint with fatuous drivel and archaic references to a Russian menace.And most itinerant Westminster benchwarmers are also behaving and acting as expected. Labour worse than the Tories since it is Labour,historically, that is the party of war and foreign interventionism.

And to cap it all ,the Minority regime's Secretary of State for Defence. the jejeune Gavin Williamson uttered the immortal phrase that Russia ought to shut up and go away.

Russia has just won,again. Schadenfreude!

fahrenheit451:240

Every so often journalist,commentator,columnist non-pareil Peter Hitchens hits the proverbial nail on the head.

The other week in the otherwise not terribly important Wiltshire county town of Salisbury a most unfortunate incident occurred. A former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter were apparently subjected to poisoning by what authorities describe as a deadly nerve agent. This incident happened,so it seems,whilst they were having dinner at a local restaurant.

MSM and social media platforms went ballistic over this. Boris Johnson, the Minority May Regime's Foreign Affairs Secretary even more so. Boycott of the FIFA World Cup, A myriad of potential targeted and general sanctions against  Russia and so on and so forth.

In his Mail on Sunday column ,Peter Hitchens ,as usual, managed to put some perspective on the entire burgeoning imbroglio.

" 10 March 2018 10:18 PM

PETER HITCHENS: We're goading Russia into a 'dirty war' we CANNOT win

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column As I so often tell you not to be taken in by the current anti-Russian frenzy, you might expect me to have some opinions on the horrible events in Salisbury. And so I do.
I was reluctant to believe without proof that this was a Russian state operation. I still think some people have jumped too readily to conclusions without facts.
But the more I look at it, the more I think that the message from this outrage is as follows. If Britain really wants a war with Russia, as our Government seems to, then Russia will provide that war.
But it will not be fought according to the Geneva Conventions. It will be fought according to the law of the jungle.
Before we embark on this, could someone explain why we actually want such a war? We are a minor power on the edge of Europe. What national interest does it serve? What do we gain from it? And will we win it?
What will we do? Withdraw from the World Cup? Break off diplomatic relations? That will make them cringe, in the SVR’s Yasenevo headquarters in the birchwoods on the south-western edge of Moscow, won’t it?
Despite the lack of conclusive proof, I have to accept that the Russian state quite deliberately killed Alexander Litvinenko in the most public and memorable way possible. I think this was a message to anyone who might choose to act in the same way.
But it was also a warning to the Government and people of this country.
If the attack on Sergei Skripal was also a Kremlin operation, then it was done to tell us this: If we want to play tough guys with Moscow, we had better be prepared for the worst.
If this wasn’t its purpose, then it was remarkably stupid to harm the courageous and selfless police officer, DS Nick Bailey, and also to harm Mr Skripal’s innocent daughter, Yulia.
But what if it was the idea? What if this is a deliberate and conscious escalation of menace? Why are we even in this violent, expensive and dangerous game against people far more ruthless than we would dare to be?
We are not morally perfect ourselves, with our head-chopping aggressive Saudi friends, our bloodstained Iraq and Libyan adventures, and our targeted drone-strike killings of British citizens who joined IS.
But we also have no real quarrel with Russia. We have made it up out of nothing, and now we are losing control of it.
Since aggressive war was outlawed in 1945, European nations have tended to use devious methods to destroy, weaken, undermine, deter or attack their enemies, rather than openly send their tanks across borders.
The old Soviet Union financed communist movements and their front organisations in Western countries.
And both sides also ran a secret war – submarines sneaking into each other’s territorial waters, secret support for dissidents by us, and for strikers and ‘peace campaigners’ by them, and of course spying.
Spying is a hostile, dangerous and cruel activity which infuriates its targets, including us. Remember the 42-year prison sentence for George Blake, one of the few Soviet agents we managed to catch and prosecute?
You don’t spy on friends and you don’t spy on people you’re afraid of, or people you owe money to. I doubt very much that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) tries to recruit agents, or to finance opponents of the government, in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Washington DC, Riyadh, or Peking. I expect its main activity in these places is lunch.
But what the Skripal case tells us is that, long after the Cold War ended, we still choose to treat Russia as the sort of country where we should continue active, aggressive spying and efforts to bring down the government.
Not only did we pay Colonel Skripal a lot of money for the names of Russian agents in the West, we financed opponents of the Russian government (and we complain that they mess around in our politics!).Why do we do this?
Now that communism, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact are on the scrapheap, I am at a loss to see what reason we have to be Russia’s enemy, or what reason they have to be ours. We have no common border, we have no colonial rivalries, we barely even trade any more since our oil deals collapsed. We cheerfully get on with equally nasty despotisms elsewhere, especially China.
Yet the Cold War had been over for nearly five years, and we were on good terms with Boris Yeltsin, when the SIS hired Colonel Skripal of the Russian GRU (Main Military Intelligence Directorate).
It took the Russians nine years to catch him, and a year of presumably pretty savage interrogation before they hit back by exposing MI6’s comical ‘fake-rock’ operation in Moscow.
The Kremlin could easily have had Skripal killed during his years in Russia’s disease-ridden, violent prison system. But they didn’t. They are much angrier with us now than they were then.
Yes, what they apparently did in Salisbury is a filthy, inexcusable thing. But it is the face of modern combat, in a war our government chose to fight. What answer do we have to it that will not make it worse? "

The West,or rather the since 1945, USA and its host of european NATO satrapies have become woefully unskilled and increasingly incompetent in matters of diplomacy and wider international relations.Their OCD reliance on acts of egregious violent blitzkrieg campaigns as the sole means of reinforcing Washington's failing hegemony marks them out as deluded psychopaths and a menace to the future of the entire planet.

Hence this Monty Pythonesque over reaction to what seems a little peripheral household cleaning, albeit in an inappropriate public space on the territory of one of a wannabe enemy.

A tisket a tasket.

fahrenheit451:213

On Friday 13,November 2015 this happened in Paris (  gleaned from Reuter's online ).

#WORLD NEWS

NOVEMBER 14, 2015 / 12:06 AM / 2 YEARS AGO

France in shock after Islamist attacks kill 129

Ingrid Melander, Marine Pennetier

 PARIS (Reuters) - French prosecutors said on Saturday that three coordinated teams of gunmen and suicide bombers carried out a wave of attacks across Paris that killed 129 people in what President Francois Hollande called an “act of war” by Islamic State.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two years on and ISIS/DAESH  inspired/instigated Islamic Terrorism still runs rampant across western europe.

 

Two years on and a BBC News investigation uncovers the previously secret deal between ISIS/DAESH and the US /NATO led  Syrian Democratic Forces.

An agreement allowing some 250 battle hardened islamic fanatics,their families and a 6 kilometers long truck convoy of weapons & sundry logistics to depart the city of Raqqa unmolested .

 

The day after the BBC News' journalistic coup is the news across MSM and social media platforms,what does tottering UK Prime Minister May choose to do?

That's right, launch an unbridled bellicose tirade against Russia and Putin's foreign policy.

 

Not the wisest, let alone most strategically savvy diplomatic thing any leader can do given the prevailing circumstances.

MI5 estimate, at least in public , that there are some 23,000 islamic extremists active within the UK of whom they consider 3,000 to pose an immediate threat.

 

And so Machiavelli May and her indolent,tawdry regime expend their energies to conspire with the other subservient satrapies of the Teutonic European Union in imposing,at the behest of their US masters, unlawful sanctions against named individual Russian citizens and organisations.

Supposedly in connection with Russia's actions regarding the existential crisis in the Crimea or some such peripheral matter of interest to the western kleptocracies.

 

In May's partially paralysed mind all the aforementioned is  of a far greater and more urgent priority than the on going imbroglio ( or should that be farrago ) that is Syria.

 

Where the US and its european NATO satrapies embeded their armed forces on Syrian sovereign territory to bolster and maintain the anti-government Syrian Democratic Forces in contravention to accepted International Law.

As in fact did NATO member Turkey; but their in-theatre confederates are in active competition with the SDF.

 

And both those US/NATO backed lumpen aggregations of armed rabble are vying with ISIS/DAESH as well as the legitimate sovereign government of Syria and its international allies.

 

The city of Raqqa utterly flattened by US/NATO air force bombing, was subsequently faux-liberated by the SDF and the western MSM cheered it to the rafters!

 

And now we know why the SDF managed to stroll relatively unmolested into what had served as the ISIS/DAESH capital.

 

It's also worth noting, as if any of this actually mattered,that the US insists that it is inside Syria in accordance with International Law.

 

Good luck with that!

 

fahrenheit451:189

Here's a terrific quote :-

It is difficult to talk to people who confuse Austria and Australia. But there is nothing we can do about this; this is the level of political culture among part of the American establishment. As for the American people, America is truly a great nation if the Americans can put up with so many politically uncivilised people.

Vladimir Putin

As of Wednesday,September 5th. 11:00 ,the DPRK is still standing. That this fundamental existential state might alter at any given moment ought to be a cause for worry among most rational minds.

But if you look back at the introductory paragraph,the quote from Putin, it is precisely the absence of rational minds within the United States Leadership echelon that is the cause of our present predicament regarding the sovereign nation of North Korea aka DPRK and the development of its nuclear weapons capabilities.

Something seen as alarming by the US Ruling Elites and their NATO satrapies. Who not entirely incidentally have,on entirely falacious grounds unilaterally imposed, as a kneejerk reaction to some other imaginary impropriety committed against the US, a plethora of economic and financial sanctions against Russia and its government and various private citizens.

These self same western ruling elites are currently, as part of their supposed containment strategy against DPRK, trying to inveigle Russia into agreeing that sanctions be imposed against DPRK!

Russia and more so China ( and truth be known probably 90% of UN member states  besides ) are endeavouring on a heretofore heroically diplomatic scale, to de-escalate what is a one-sided escalation of tension between DPRK and an increasingly irrational and bellicose USA.

The fact that venal,posturing globally unimportant non entities such as  the UK Defence Secretary Fallon or the equally vapid Prime Minister May have waded into this imbroglio by shooting off vacuous platitudes and otiose cant in all directions does nothing to stabilise this faltering regional house of cards.

I'm not quite sure whether schadenfreude, a usual response to such a pantomime is necessarily apt in this instance.

fahrenheit451:170

The other day in Warsaw,as a precursor to the scheduled G-20 summit being held in Hamburg the following day, President Trump made a speech. Whilst it was heralded in some quarters with varying degrees of anticipation, the symbolism was as cumbersome and telegraphed as any denouement in  third rate murder novel. Quite what Trump was trying to get across that was unique,remarkable or unexpected remains at best a mystery; then again perhaps he really wasn't trying to do any of the aforementioned at all. Heavily underlined were the rather otiose notions of western values and civilisation and the will of the people. His actual audience on the spot in  the EU-subsidised satrapy were cohorts bussed in from the countryside by the ruling Law & Justice Party ( PIS  being there Polish acronym). And Trump's speech writers really did seem to be taking the proverbial P,I,S. Russia was officially admonished for its support of the governments of Syria and Iran,as well as its own dealings and involvement in The Crimea and The Ukraine.None of which please the dominant NeoCons of Washington.Russia really is being most unhelpful. And that was about it, all to the sound of synchronised cheering. The allusions didn't work; the hoped for referencing of Trump in Warsaw with Kennedy in Berlin,June 26 1963 let alone Reagan in Berlin 12 June 1987- was never going to happen either. the world isn't actually holding its breath.Syria/Iraq.ISIS/Yemen/Qatar/Kurdistan/Libya/North Korea/Afghanistan will simply be allowed carry on. Anti-climax!!

fahrenheit451:115

Even as 2016 was drawing to its conclusion, there was one final footnote to be added to it by of all people, the outgoing president of the USA.In the wake of the joint announcement by the governments of Russia and Turkey on their joint initiative to bring about a cessation of hostilities in the Syrian crisis /civil war, Obama's response is to expel 35 Russian diplomats from the USA on the charge of involvement in cyberhacking. That's it.How utterly bizarre; probably more bizarre that Secretary of State Kerry's denunciation of Israel which made the headlines just the other day.  On the allegations of Russian involvement in the hacking of Clinton's emails and other parts of the Democratic Party's failed presidential campaign, the response of Russia's President Putin has been steadfastly rational and measured; there will be no anticipated tit for tat expulsions of US diplomats from Russia. Sidelined in Syria, made to look amateurish by Clinton's own ludicrously hostile anti Russian rhetoric in her failed White House bid and now a grandiose Cold war style diplomatic slap across another Country's face which yields precisely zilch by return. America isn't well is she? NATO has lost its venal strutting posture and the EU is sinking slowly slowly beneath the waves of history. I don't think the Yanks get Schadenfreude.If they did they'd be really upset.

fahrenheit451:113

The following is gleaned from the 1965- Cold War era -popular hit single by Barry MacGuire

"The eastern world, it is explodin',
Violence flarin', bullets loadin',
You're old enough to kill but not for votin',
You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin',
And even the Jordan river has bodies floatin',
But you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

Don't you understand, what I'm trying to say?
And can't you feel the fears I'm feeling today?
If the button is pushed, there's no running away,...  "

 

Yesterday, Monday 19th December the Russian ambassador to Turkey,Andrei Karlov was gunned down whilst attending a gallery viewing. The murderer,a serving Turkish police officer was himself despatched in the immediate aftermath. Then almost as a kind of corollary to the slaying of the Russian diplomat, hours later in Berlin, a traditional and well attended Christmas market was subjected to an islamic terrorist atrocity where a  hijacked goods lorry was used as the weapon.The death toll was at least 12 with scores more injured. The term Casus belli  springs immediately to mind ; the term refers to an incident or an act of provocation which the offended side uses subsequently to undertake military action usually with a formal decleration of war against the perceived offending party. Killing ambassadors counts as  Casus belli.  As you can, but need not overly, imagine, MSM as well as social media went into hyperdrive at the conjunction of these two separate acts of terrorism. The proverbial button really got pushed this time around. Fortunately, Presidents Putin and Erdogan are both committed to playing the long game diplomatically and strategically. And that's more than the world can expect from the stupid Yanks however.You can imagine it being the US ambassador getting gunned down ; Washington DC would've ordered massive instant retaliation, probably aimed at the entirely wrong target in Afghanistan as a result. Whichever way this does pan out, the Merde that the great powers and their various recalitrant satrapies are mired deep within just got deeper and messier.