Thursday 28th of March 2024

the end of western domination…...

The Ukrainian conflict, presented as a Russian aggression, is only the implementation of the Security Council resolution 2202 of February 17, 2015. If France and Germany did not keep their commitments during the Minsk II Agreement, Russia prepared itself for seven years for the current confrontation. It had foreseen the Western sanctions well in advance and needed only two months to circumvent them. These sanctions disrupt US globalization, disrupt Western economies by breaking supply chains, causing dollars to flow back to Washington and causing general inflation, and creating energetics in the West. The United States and its allies are in the position of being the hosers hosed: they are digging their own grave. Meanwhile, the Russian Treasury’s revenues have increased by 32% in six months.

 

The conflict in Ukraine is precipitating the end of Western domination

 

by Thierry Meyssan

 

For the past seven years, it has been the responsibility of the guarantor powers of the Minsk II Agreement (Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia) to enforce it. They had been endorsed and legalized by the United Nations Security Council on February 17, 2015. But none of these states have done so, despite the rhetoric about the need to protect citizens threatened by their own governments.

While there was talk of possible Russian military intervention, on January 31, 2022, the Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, defied Germany, France, Russia and the UN Security Council by stating, "Compliance with the Minsk agreements means the destruction of the country. When they were signed under the armed threat of the Russians - and under the eyes of the Germans and the French - it was already clear to all rational people that it was impossible to implement these documents" [1].

When, after seven years, the number of Ukrainians killed by the Kiev government amounted to more than 12,000 according to the Kiev government and more than 20,000 according to the Russian Investigative Committee, only then did Moscow launch a "special military operation" against the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" (as they claim), who were described as "neo-Nazis".

Russia declared from the start of its operation that it would stick to rescuing the populations and “denazifying” Ukraine, not occupying it. Yet the West accused it of trying to take Kiev, overthrow President Zelensky and annex Ukraine, which they obviously never did. It was only after the execution of one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Denis Kireev, by his own country’s security services (SBU) and the suspension of talks by President Volodymyr Zelensky that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, announced that he was toughening his demands. From now on, the Federation claims Novorussia, that is to say all of southern Ukraine, historically Russian since Tsarina Catherine II, with the exception of thirty-three years.

It should be understood that if Russia did nothing for seven years, it was not because it was insensitive to the massacre of the Russian-speaking population of Donbass, but because it was preparing to face the predictable Western response. According to the classic quotation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Tsar Alexander II, Prince Alexander Gortchakov: "The Emperor is determined to devote, preferably, his solicitude to the well-being of his subjects and to concentrate, on the development of the internal resources of the country, an activity which would be poured outside only when the positive interests of Russia would require it absolutely. Russia is reproached for isolating itself and keeping silent in the presence of facts that are not in accordance with either law or equity. Russia is said to be sulking. Russia is not sulking. Russia is taking stock".

This police operation was called "aggression" by the West. One thing leading to another, Russia was portrayed as a "dictatorship" and its foreign policy as "imperialism". No one seems to have read the Minsk II Agreement, which was endorsed by the UN Security Council. In a telephone conversation between Presidents Putin and Macron, revealed by the Élysée Palace, the latter even expressed his lack of interest in the fate of the population of Donbass, i.e. his contempt for the Minsk II Agreement.

Today, the Western secret services are coming to the aid of the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" (the "neo-Nazis" in Russian terminology) and, instead of seeking a peaceful solution, are trying to destroy Russia from within [2].

In international law, Moscow has only implemented the 2015 Security Council resolution. It can be blamed for its brutality, but neither for rushing (seven years), nor for being illegitimate (resolution 2202). Presidents Petro Poroshenko, Francois Hollande, Vladimir Putin and Chancellor Angela Merkel had pledged, in a joint statement attached to the resolution, to do the same. If any of these powers had intervened earlier, they could have chosen other modalities of operation, but none did.

Logically, the UN Secretary General should have called the members of the Council to order so that they would not condemn the Russian operation, which they had accepted in principle seven years earlier, but that they would determine the modalities. It did not do so. On the contrary, the General Secretariat, stepping out of its role and siding with the unipolar system, has just given oral instructions to all its senior officials in theaters of war not to meet with Russian diplomats.

This is not the first time that the General Secretariat has violated the UN statutes. During the war against Syria, it drafted a 50-page plan on the abdication of the Syrian government, involving the forfeiture of Syrian popular sovereignty and the de-Baathification of the country. This text was never published, but we analyzed it in these columns with horror. In the end, the Secretary-General’s special envoy in Damascus, Staffan de Mistura, was forced to sign a statement acknowledging its invalidity. In any case, the note from the General Secretariat prohibiting UN officials from participating in the reconstruction of Syria [3] is still in force. It is the note that paralyzes the return of the exiles to their country, to the great displeasure not only of Syria, but also of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

During the Korean War, the United States took advantage of the Soviet empty chair policy to wage its war under the United Nations flag (at that time, the People’s Republic of China did not sit on the Council). Ten years ago, they used the UN staff to wage an all-out war against Syria. Today, they are going further by taking a stand against a permanent member of the Security Council.

After becoming an organization sponsored by multinationals under Kofi Annan, the UN has become an annex of the State Department under Ban Ki-moon and António Guterres.

Russia and China are aware, as are all other states, that the UN is no longer fulfilling its function. On the contrary, the Organization is aggravating tensions and participating in wars (at least in Syria and the Horn of Africa). So Moscow and Beijing are developing other institutions.

Russia is no longer focusing its efforts on the structures inherited from the Soviet Union, such as the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Eurasian Economic Community, or even the Collective Security Treaty Organization; nor is it focusing on the structures inherited from the Cold War, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. No, it is focusing on what can redraw a multilateral world.

First of all, Russia highlights the economic actions of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). It does not claim them as its achievements, but as joint efforts in which it participates. Thirteen states hope to join the BRICS, but they are not, for the moment, open to membership. Already, the BRICS have much more power than the G7, they act, while for several years the G7 has been declaring that it will do great things that we never see coming and awarding good and bad points to those who are absent.

Above all, Russia is pushing for greater openness and a profound transformation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Until now, it was only a contact structure for the countries of Central Asia, around Russia and China, to prevent the troubles that the Anglo-Saxon secret services were trying to foment there. Little by little, it allowed its members to know each other better. They extended their work to other common issues. In addition, the SCO has expanded to include India and Pakistan, and later Iran. In practice, it now embodies the Bandung principles, based on state sovereignty and negotiation, as opposed to those of the West, based on conformity to Anglo-Saxon ideology.

The Westerners are ranting, while Russia and China are moving forward. I say "ranting" because they believe their ranting is effective. Thus, the United States and the United Kingdom, then the European Union and Japan have taken very tough economic measures against Russia. They did not dare to say that this was a war to maintain their authority over the world, so they called them "sanctions", although there was no court, no defense case, no sentence. Of course, these are illegal sanctions because they were decided outside the United Nations. But the West, which claims to be the defender of "international rules", has no use for international law.

Of course, the right of veto of the five permanent members of the Council prevents sanctions from being taken against one of them, but this is precisely because the aim of the UN is not to conform to Anglo-Saxon ideology, but to preserve world peace.

I come back to my point: Russia and China are moving forward, but at a very different pace than the West. Two years passed between the Russian commitment to intervene in Syria and the deployment of its soldiers there; two years that were used to finalize the weapons that ensured its superiority on the battlefield. It took seven years between the Russian commitment to Minsk II and the military intervention in Donbass; seven years that were used to prepare the circumvention of Western economic sanctions.

This is why these "sanctions" did not succeed in bringing the Russian economy to its knees, but deeply affect those who issued them. The German and French governments are anticipating very serious energy problems that are already forcing some of their factories to idle and soon to close. In contrast, the Russian economy is booming. After two months in which the country was living on its stocks, the time has come for abundance. The Russian treasury’s revenues have boomed by 32% in the first half of the year [4]. Not only did the West’s rejection of Russian gas drive up prices to the benefit of the leading exporter, Russia, but this departure from liberal discourse frightened other states, which turned to Moscow for reassurance.

China, which is presented by the West as a seller of junk that sends its prey into a spiral of debt, has just cancelled most of the debts owed to it by 13 African states.

Every day we hear the noble Western speeches and accusations against Russia and China. But every day we also see, if we look at the facts, that the reality is the opposite. For example, the West tells us without proof that China is a "dictatorship" and that it has "imprisoned a million Uyghurs". Although we do not have recent statistics, we all know that there are fewer prisoners in China than in the USA, even though the US has four times less population. Or we are told that homosexuals are persecuted in Russia, while we see bigger gay discos in Moscow than in New York.

Western blindness leads to ubiquitous situations where Western leaders no longer perceive the impact of their contradictions.

Thus, President Emmanuel Macron is currently in Algeria. He is trying to reconcile the two nations and to buy gas to counteract the shortage he has helped to cause. He is aware that he is a little late, after his allies (Italy and Germany) have done their shopping. On the other hand, he tried to believe wrongly that the main Franco-Algerian problem was colonization. He does not realize that trust is impossible because France supports Algeria’s worst enemies, the jihadists in Syria and the Sahel. He does not make the link between his lack of diplomatic relations with Syria, his eviction from Mali [5]and the coldness with which he is received in Algiers.

It is true that the French do not know what jihadists are. They have just judged, in the biggest trial of the century, the attacks on Saint-Denis, the terraces of Paris and the Bataclan (November 13, 2015), without being able to ask the question of state support for jihadists. In doing so, far from showing their sense of justice, they have shown their cowardice. They have shown themselves to be terrorized by a handful of men, while Algeria experienced tens of thousands during its civil war and still does in the Sahel.

While Russia and China are advancing, the West is not standing still, it is retreating. It will continue to fall as long as it does not clarify its policy, as long as it does not put an end to its double standards of moral judgment and as long as it does not stop its double dealing.

 

Thierry Meyssan

 

 

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https://www.voltairenet.org/article217850.html

 

 

SEE ALSO: the nefarious grand plan……..

 

 

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the vector of change…….

 

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

 

I bore first-hand witness to the birth of the Perestroika “revolution” unleashed on the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev, and to its eventual demise. Love him or hate him, one thing is certain — the first and only president of the Soviet Union has a permanent place in the annals of world history.

Gorbachev passed away earlier this week. He was 91 years old.

I became acquainted with him the way most Americans did, when he emerged as the new, fresh face of the Soviet Union after a succession of old, stolid Communist apparatchiks — Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko — passed away in the span of less than three years, between November 1982 and March 1985. 

Gorbachev was unlike any Soviet leader who had come before — brash, modern and surprisingly upbeat about the potential of good relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. This didn’t mean that everything was a bed of roses between the U.S. and the Soviet Union — far from it. 

My own view as a Marine was that the Soviet Union was still very much the top threat to the United States and I trained hard to close with and destroy the Soviet enemy through firepower and maneuver. In the summer of 1985, I was selected to attend a week-long program entitled “Soviet Military Power Week” hosted by the Defense Intelligence Agency, where I was thoroughly indoctrinated into the threat posed by the Soviet armed forces.

Gorbachev’s name was barely mentioned during the conference.

Around two and a half years later, on Dec. 8, 1987, I watched on television as Gorbachev, seated next to my commander in chief, President Ronald Reagan, signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, ushering in a new era of U.S.-Soviet relations.

Six months after that, I found myself in the Soviet Union, part of an advance team of U.S. experts sent to the formerly closed city of Votkinsk, some 750 miles east of Moscow, in the foothills of the Ural mountains. We were tasked with making preparations for the arrival of 30 American inspectors who would call Votkinsk home while they implemented the perimeter portal monitoring provisions of the INF treaty regarding the production of the now-banned SS-20 missile.

The INF Treaty was very much Gorbachev’s baby — he conceived it together with Ronald Reagan and then underwent the difficult process of birthing it despite staunch opposition from old-school Soviet bureaucrats rooted in the belief that the United was, is and always would be “enemy No. 1.”

 

For Gorbachev, however, disarmament was more than the vitally important task of ridding the world of its most dangerous weapons. Gorbachev believed strongly that the Soviet economic system, weighted heavily toward defense production, was unwieldy, ineffective and ultimately harmful to a vibrant Soviet economy and society.

Gorbachev wanted to break the hold that the defense industry had on the Soviet economy and to liberate economic capacity for civilian goods designed to increase the quality of life for Soviet citizens.

To accomplish this goal, Gorbachev would need even more far-reaching arms control agreements with the U.S. And to get the Soviet bureaucracy to agree to these new agreements, Gorbachev needed to lead a revolution which fundamentally restructured how the Soviet Union was governed.

Grand Restructuring

That revolution began shortly after I arrived in Votkinsk, when Gorbachev convened the 19th All-Union Party Conference on June 28, 1988. As an outsider schooled in the notion of Soviet totalitarianism, I watched the Gorbachev “revolution” unfold in wonder, both in terms of what was transpiring live on the television screen, but also in terms of how my Soviet colleagues were reacting to the spectacle of open disagreement among the senior-most levels of Soviet authority.

For all who watched, the confrontation between Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Ligachev was as shocking as it was instructive, portending as it did the future of the Soviet Union itself.

Gorbachev used the 19th All-Union Party Conference as a springboard for launching his grand restructuring plan, one which would replace the old Communist Party-dominated bureaucracy with a new democratically elected leadership in which a president would supplant the general secretary as the leader of the Soviet Union. Of course, Gorbachev fully intended that he would be that first president.

The process of political, economic and societal change that Gorbachev was embarking on was collectively known as Perestroika, or restructuring. One of the prerequisites of the Gorbachev “revolution” was to conduct nation-wide elections for a new legislative body known as the Congress of People’s Deputies, which in turn would elect a second body, the Supreme Soviet, which would play a major role in shaping future policies under the leadership of a president, Gorbachev, who would be selected, not elected.

I bore witness to the elections for the new Congress of People’s Deputies and can testify to the spirit of the citizens of Votkinsk as they participated in this new democratic process. Simultaneously nervous and excited, they did their duty, voting for a representative they believed would best represent them in the new Soviet government.

[Related: SCOTT RITTER: Sometimes Humanity Gets it Right]

While Gorbachev worked to get his “revolution” in gear, however, the economic reality of the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev was trying to implement sweeping changes to the centrally planned economic system that had been in place for decades, conspired to dash the prospects of any successful implementation of Perestroika. In short, the economic portion of Perestroika was a complete shambles, leading to the serious disruption of the lives of the average Soviet citizen.

 

This was to be the undoing of Mikhail Gorbachev — the political forces he unleashed through the institutionalization of democracy were intended to be used by the future “president” of the Soviet Union to bring about the necessary reforms needed to make Perestroika a success.

Instead, the economic collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed political forces that became disenchanted with the Gorbachev “revolution” and instead started turning to political alternatives, such as Boris Yeltsin, whose vision for the future had more to do with furthering the interests of Russia and less with the propping up of Soviet institutions.

Watching the demise of the Soviet Union from the perspective of one living there was a painful process; the stable socio-economic-political environment that existed in the summer of 1988 had, by the summer of 1990, deteriorated markedly. The hope that existed in July 1988 had been largely replaced by despair.

And Mikhail Gorbachev was to blame.

It didn’t come as too much of a shock to me when, in August 1991, there was an attempted coup against Gorbachev carried out by Soviet hardliners. And it didn’t take a political scientist to realize while watching Boris Yeltsin climb on top of a Soviet Army tank outside the Russian parliament that Gorbachev’s moment in history was rapidly fading.

Gorbachev resigned from the presidency on Dec. 25, 1991. Shortly after his televised speech, the Soviet flag that had flown over the Kremlin for more than seven decades was taken down, to be replaced by the tricolor of the Russian Federation.

The collapse of the Soviet Union upended the global geopolitical balance of power, thrusting the United States into the position of sole-remaining superpower, a job description it unfortunately proved unworthy of. The consequences of the uncontrolled elevation of the U.S. to global hegemon, combined with the precipitous decline in the power and prestige of the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union’s logical and functional heir, set in motion a sea of change which is still unfolding today.

This is the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev. He presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union which was prompted — and accelerated — by his own arrogance, which blinded him to the need to change direction when it became clear that Perestroika, at least how it was originally envision, was not, and could not, succeed.

But there is another legacy. From the ashes of failure, a new world order is arising some 30 years after Gorbachev and the Soviet Union entered the history books as has-beens. The multi-polar challenge to U.S. singularity that is being mounted by Russia, China and others was only made possible by the forces of change that were unleashed because of Gorbachev’s spectacular failure as a Soviet leader.

While this was not the objective of Gorbachev when he initiated his Perestroika-based “revolution,” it is an undeniable consequence. History is made by what can best be described as vectors of change.

For better or for worse, that emerges as the most fitting epitaph for the man: Mikhail Gorbachev, a vector of change who shaped world history.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

 

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/01/scott-ritter-mikhail-gorbachev-a-vector-of-change/

 

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