Category Archives: USA

Fjordman: A Convergence of Catastrophes

Posted on by

If you appreciate this essay by Fjordman, please consider making a donation to him, using the button at the bottom of this post.

A Convergence of Catastrophes

by Fjordman

Pierre Brochand is a former director of the French Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), tasked with intelligence gathering and safeguarding France’s national security. He has also been a diplomat, the French ambassador to Hungary, Israel and Portugal, and has served his country in various positions for decades. In an interview with the national newspaper Le Figaro in March of 2022, Brochand sounded an alarm bell over the damage immigration is doing to France and to other European nations.[1] He judges that Europe is currently the only part of the world to deny the importance of ethnic and cultural homogeneity for stability, peace, and prosperity.

France has for more than half a century experienced large-scale immigration from what used to be called the Third World: countries in the Islamic world, Africa, and other parts of the global South. Brochand notes that this recent mass immigration is unprecedented in our history, and observes that it is fracturing France into various competing tribes. While it has become taboo to say so in Western countries today, experience indicates that Multicultural societies of competing ethnic groups are often inherently unstable and tend to break down into violence. Brochand compares France to Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia. These were Multicultural countries with large Muslim populations that collapsed into horrific civil wars.

Pierre Brochand has harsh words for the political leaders in France and the rest of Western Europe. In his view, they have for decades allowed the situation to grow worse and worse due to cowardice. He fears that the country could be heading for some form of collapse unless a complete reversal of public policy is implemented immediately. The politicians must say loud and clear that France will not for the foreseeable future be a country that welcomes large-scale immigration. However, Brochand believes that political leadership in France and Europe still underestimates the seriousness of the situation. Time is running out if we want to avoid a disaster. With his decades of accumulated experience, Pierre Brochand fears a dark future for our children and grandchildren.

In April of 2021, one thousand French soldiers, including more than twenty retired generals, signed a public letter warning that France could face a bloody “civil war” fueled by Islamic separatism.[2] Several other observers have voiced similar worries.[3] Some fear that war has become inevitable.[4] A few, such as the author Michel Onfray, state that a civil war has already begun.[5]

The American writer Ned May quotes the American science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein with what he terms The Year of the Jackpot. This is when several negative happenings converge in time and cause a systemic collapse in society. May wrote an essay about this at his website Gates of Vienna in 2007, and in 2022 this emerging chaos appears to be drawing closer.[6] A toxic mix of negative factors could cause dramatic ripple effects throughout the entire Western world. Right now, we are witnessing a combination of mass immigration, Islamization, terrorism, unparalleled money printing by the central banks, massive public debt, disrupted economies after lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, outsourcing of industries and jobs to an increasingly powerful China, war between Russia and the Ukraine, social decay, decadence and cultural decline, dissolution of families, a spike in violent crime, increasing censorship, surveillance and ideological indoctrination, harmful environmental policies plus a steep rise in the prices of energy and food. Every one of these problems is bad by itself. Combined, they could be disastrous.

Continue reading →

The West’s Goals in Ukraine

Posted on by

Emmet Scott sends his analysis of the causes and goals of the Russo-Ukrainian war, as seen from the perspective of the architects of the New World Order.

The West’s Goals in Ukraine

by Emmet Scott

In a speech delivered, or stumbled through, in Poland on March 26, Joe Biden declared that Russia was in need of regime change, a sentiment echoed throughout the Western media. Many commentators and media talking-heads agreed that “regime change” is and should be a fundamental goal of Western policy towards Russia. One or two went so far as to argue that this is the reason for the West’s effort to prolong the war by continuing to pour arms into Ukraine — rather than call for an immediate ceasefire, as is the normal procedure in modern wars.

One such commentator has been Niall Ferguson, who has cautioned Western leaders that the desired regime change will almost certainly not be materializing in the foreseeable future. Writing in Bloomberg News, Ferguson concludes that the Biden administration “is making a colossal mistake thinking that it can protract the war in Ukraine, bleed Russia dry, topple Putin and signal to China to keep its hands off Taiwan.”

But is regime change the primary goal at all?

The is no question whatsoever that the Western elites loathe and despise Vladimir Putin, and they would indeed be glad to see him go — into retirement, or better still, into the grave. The source of that animosity, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with Putin’s real or alleged brutality, far less with his warmongering or aggression.

The “West” itself has been a reasonably enthusiastic warmonger over the past few decades, invading and destabilizing dozens of countries in numerous parts of the globe, often under the most mendacious of pretexts. The destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and yes, Ukraine, can all be chalked up to Western “humanitarian” interventions over the past thirty years. Nor is Putin’s (alleged) contempt for the democratic rights and freedoms of his own people a problem: Western “elites” have displayed a commendable contempt for the rights and freedoms of their own citizens, or subjects, over the past two years. None of these things bother Western “elites” at all. Whence then comes the loathing for Putin? That’s a question I’ll address presently.

Notwithstanding the Western elites’ hatred of Putin, do they really think a prolonged war in Ukraine will achieve the goal of removing him? That is highly unlikely. As Niall Ferguson pointed out, wars tend to unite countries behind their leaders, and this is particularly the case with Russia, which has a “heroic” national narrative that glorifies the sacrifice of its people and its soldiers in wartime situations. This narrative, Ferguson notes, can be traced back to the time of the Russian people’s struggles against the Mongols, and manifested itself again during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and during the Nazi invasion in 1941. Western leaders, I assume, are as aware of this as Ferguson, and must know that nothing short of catastrophic casualties, involving the loss of quite literally millions of men, is likely to shift the Russians away from their patriotic support for their army and their leader. But if this is the case, what then do Western leaders hope to achieve by prolonging the war?

And that point is very much worth emphasizing: It is the West which is prolonging the conflict. Indeed, it was the West which provoked the conflict in the first place. If the West had wished to avoid war, all it had to do was give Moscow a guarantee that Ukraine would not be joining NATO and insist that Kiev implement the provisions of the Minsk Accord, which provided a limited autonomy for the ethnic Russian populations of Donetsk and Lugansk. This was never done; on the contrary, the West encouraged Kiev to provoke the Russians by launching periodic attacks upon the inhabitants of the above two regions, and by providing the Ukrainians with high-tech weaponry to launch those attacks.

So, we are back to the original question: What does “the West” — or the West’s leadership — hope to achieve by a prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine? This was a topic I touched upon in an article published towards the end of January this year (“The Great Reset: Why Now?” New English Review, February), where I predicted a war in Ukraine within a few months. As it turned out, the war kicked off even earlier than I had imagined. In that article I said that the “West” actually wanted war with Russia, which is what made its occurrence all the more likely. I explained at length that when we speak of “the West”, we are actually talking about an immensely wealthy oligarchy comprising no more than a few thousand people, an oligarchy which effectively dictates the policies of Western governments. It does this through its control and ownership of 90% of the world’s wealth, a stranglehold which is augmented by its near-total control of the media. The latter allows the oligarchs to shape the narrative and therefore, to a great extent, what people think. “Public opinion” is therefore ultimately what the billionaire and trillionaire class decrees it to be.

Continue reading →

Mene, Tekel, Perish!

Posted on by

Our Dutch correspondent H. Numan draws on historical parallels to analyze the likely consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Mene, tekel, perish!

by H. Numan

We’re about one month into the Russian invasion. The fog of war covers everything. It’s pretty clear Russia is not winning this war. Let’s have a look at the big picture.

Germany, before that the German Empire, and before that the Kingdom of Prussia, developed Blitzkrieg. Not the word; that was coined by British journalists in 1939. The Germans called it (still do) Bewegungskrieg. It was their answer to most of their military problems. Attack aggressively with everything you’ve got as fast as possible. It worked pretty well for them.

Russia has a very different strategy. They made sure their borders were far, far away. Really far away. No matter who attacked, they would invariably get stuck in the snow before reaching Moscow. Even Napoleon capturing the city didn’t deter them. They burned it down themselves, and continued the fight. That worked pretty well for them. Supposing the Wehrmacht had captured Moscow, it certainly wouldn’t have ended the war.

After World War 2 the USSR set up a large security zone to extend that wide border. Most of it consisted of occupied countries and Nazi allies during WW2, turned into vassal states. Other states, Finland, for example, were forced into benevolent neutrality. All gaps were closed or under Soviet control. Mother Russia was finally secured!

Socialists know nothing about economics. That’s a given. All they can do is spend money. Eventually they run out of it. A major contribution to the collapse of the USSR was the Chernobyl disaster. The cleanup costs exceeds $700 billion. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The USSR collapsed soon afterwards in 1991. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved. Many former republics within the USSR gained their independence. Among others, Ukraine.

The date 1991 is important. That’s forty-one years, or in Gettysburg terms: two score and a year ago. In other words: a very long time. That’s where Putin got it wrong. You see, people change over time. So do nations. Wishing for something doesn’t make it right. Putin firmly believes Russia deserves secure borders. Nothing wrong with that. So do I. In my opinion, the Dutch borders are only secure when we can observe German and French movements from our trenches just outside Paris and Berlin. (That’s a joke, folks!) See where Putin is wrong? He looks at a map. Picks the largest extent ever of Russia’s borders and works to reestablish them again. Regardless of what others think about it. Most do not want to be part of Russia again.

Times change. As simple as that. Time hasn’t been kind to Russia. One of the reasons why Ukraine among others does not want to be part of Russia again is the economy. Russia and North Korea have more in common than Putin likes to admit. Both have a pathetically small economy supporting way too big an army. The only real difference is the number of nukes. North Korea has just enough to secure its existence. Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Both use theirs to prop up their economy. It’s not a coincidence that from the start of the war Putin threatened to use nukes, if he doesn’t get his way. To give you an idea, the German economy is slightly smaller than the Russian economy. If the Benelux together with Sweden and Austria compete economically with Russia, Russia loses.

The invasion idea wasn’t a bad one. “Let’s march into Ukraine, stomp some people and change the government.” It worked very well in the past. Kazakhstan and Belarus were reconquered that way. They are independent countries in name, but in reality parts of Russia. It worked to a lesser extent also in Georgia and Moldova. There they didn’t change the regimes, but set up “independent” enclaves. Just enough for the moment. Georgia and Moldova are more independent than Belarus, but not a lot. By the way, reconquering Moldova was also part of the invasion plan for Ukraine. The troops are already there.

At first Russia did the same in Ukraine. The Crimean peninsula was annexed, after a rather silly referendum. A referendum the way dictators always want it: with a nearly unanimous yes vote. Had Hitler and Putin been really clever, they would have invited the entire world to witness the referendum. Made scrupulously sure the referendum was fair and honest. In both cases it was certain more than 65% would vote yes, far more than required. By going for the illusive 99% they showed the world it was all bogus.

Continue reading →

Of Eyeballs and Face Masks

Posted on by

As most of you know, I have to visit the retinologist’s office every couple of months to get an injection in my left eye to treat choroidal neovascularization (wet macular degeneration). That’s where I was this afternoon, and, as usual, I’m not yet back to full functionality here at the keyboard. So I’ll just give my observations on the Corona situation as it is currently evolving.

When I got to the doctor’s office, I noticed that the “masks required” note was gone from the front door. That cheered me up no end, and I stuffed the mask back into my pocket. Everyone else in the place, however, seemed to be still wearing their face nappies. That didn’t bother me — if it’s not required, I’m not going to wear the [vulgar intensifier] thing.

I found out later that the change in rules had trickled down from the top: the retinologist himself was no longer wearing a mask, and he was the ONLY member of the staff who didn’t have one on. We got to see each other’s faces for the first time in two years.

I really like that guy, and I think his staff must like him, too, because a number of the highest-level technicians have been there since the first time I went in nine years ago.

All the patients in the waiting room were good little drones with their masks on. But after I had received my dilation drops and been ushered into the back waiting room, I noticed there was a woman there of roughly my age who was also unmasked. A few minutes later a married couple, also my age or maybe a little older, sat down opposite me. Both of them had their masks on. However, after we said hello, I think they must have noticed my (horrors!) bare face, and decided, what the heck, they’d live dangerously — they took off their masks, and the wife stuffed them into her handbag.

It made me wonder how many other people out there are like that: ready to be mask-free again, but too timid to bin the stupid things until they see someone else do it.

After my ordeal was over, with my shades on and the annoying air bubble dancing in my left eye, I went to Wegmans to do some shopping, especially for wine. I noticed that there were even fewer masked people in the store than there were last time. This maskless trend really seems to be catching on.

And, once again, people who were roughly my age — in their 60s or 70s — were more likely to be bare-faced than younger people were. I had noticed the same thing back during the height of the plague, when I was often almost the only maskless person in the store: if there were other unmasked customers, they were usually geezers in my age group. This was true both before and after the vax came in.

I don’t know why it’s that way, but it’s quite noticeable: old people are more likely to eschew the mask. Make of it what you will.

Michael Mannheimer’s Final Post?

Posted on by


Hans-Dietrich Genscher

Long-time readers will remember Michael Mannheimer, the German author and activist who was featured here a number of times beginning in 2010 (his archive is here).

A couple of days ago I received this note from a reader:

I think Michael Mannheimer (a.k.a. Karl-Michael Markle) has died. I know you have worked with him in the past.

I noticed he did not blog/comment for a week, I went looking.

His dying comments… He’d been “poisoned”, arsenic.

I don’t know where he lived (in exile), I think maybe Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam or somewhere like that. But he stated he’d never felt so bad, could not get medical assistance. And then all went silent.

It could be that he’s in hospital. But I fear the worst.

Then yesterday an obituary was posted on his website.

I have no independent verification of Mr. Mannheimer’s death. However, Hellequin GB has kindly translated what may be the author’s final post:

NATO expansion to the east: Russia was disgracefully deceived, lied to and duped. Now it is striking back in military self-defense

The reversal of what was once good into absolute evil

After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, at the time of millions of mass shootings, at the time of the Jewish-run gulags, at the time of the three Ukrainian holodomors and later, in the time of the Cold War, the bad guys were the countries of the Soviet Union. And the countries of the West, above all the USA, were considered the good guys. But the further the Cold War recedes in history, the more information from the past decades emerges, and the more questionable the above-mentioned axiom of the good West and the bad East becomes. There is no question: for the majority of the people living there, the West as a whole was considerably freer than the East. But as far as politics is concerned, I see less and less of a difference between the two power blocs. Not the USSR, but the USA is by far the most warlike country in modern times.

USA: over 200 wars since its inception

In the 231 years since its founding, the United States of America has itself fought a total of 219 wars, intervened militarily or been involved in acts similar to war, for example through secret service involvement in terrorist attacks, attempted coups and coups on the territory of another state. The USA itself was not attacked once. The list below on the sources of this chapter makes it impressively clear that the aggressive policy currently being pursued against Russia in the Ukraine conflict is no exception, but has been a tradition for centuries. The systematic warfare of the USA and its vassals has now developed into an essential and important branch of the economy, comparable to mechanical engineering in Germany. Defense companies and the finance and investment industry earn billions from wars and armed conflicts. So we have every reason to be concerned. Because a war against Russia would be just one more item on a never-ending list of more than 200 acts of war committed. Everyone should now be able to answer their own question as to who is the number one terrorist state in the world. Since the end of World War II, from 1946 to the present, US government wars have claimed nearly seven million lives. Mind you, without the dead of both world wars.

The US has eliminated all of its opponents one by one with the help of the CIA, massive arms shipments, military and economic logistics. The US Vietnam War, which is said to have started with a ridiculous attack by a small Vietnamese boat on a US aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin, was a clear false flag action by the Americans.

Henry Kissinger launched what is believed to be the largest wave of bombings since World War II in all of world history against North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. No country in the world, including Germany and Japan, has been as devastated by carpet bombing as tiny Southeast Asian Laos. Without these bombings there would have been no Pol Pot, no Khmer Rouge and no genocide in Cambodia. Nevertheless, Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize for his “peacekeeping mission”. This prize should be abolished for all time without ifs and buts. The mass murderer Arafat received it (billions of euros given to him by the EU for the construction of Palestine were found in his private accounts),Obama even received it before taking up his presidency — and as it turned out later, there was no president in US history who waged more wars during his tenure than the “Nobel Peace Prize Laureate” and Muslim-by-birth Barack Hussein Obama.

The current conflict in Ukraine also came primarily from the United States, which wants to weaken Russia and present it as an aggressor. The military media complex of the US Deep State works so perfectly that the vast majority of people fall for the lies of the media regarding alleged Russian atrocities. But it’s exactly the opposite: since Maidan 2015, the right-wing fascist government in Kyiv, which is close to National Socialism, has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of Russians. ( I reported in detail: Ukraine: “The daily and bestial terror, including mass murder of Russians living in Ukraine, which was hushed up by the West”). All of them are citizens of Ukraine who have been living there for centuries — whereby the fascist government in Kyiv is massively supported by NATO and also by the unspeakable regime of the Federal Republic of Germany, in which the “fight against the right” and against “National Socialism” is evident in a strange way that is only limited to the FRG, while it is courted with all honors in countries like the Ukraine.

Continue reading →

Scientific Insanity

Posted on by

MC’s latest wide-ranging essay addresses various aspects of the Culture Wars, most of them from the American front.

Scientific Insanity

by MC

We should by now be learning that ‘Nazism’ as such, is not an instance in history, but a logical pathway for those who seek totalitarian power. Soviet Communism destroyed itself because it assumed that ‘equity’ would overcome all difficulties, and that expertise was bourgeois, unneeded and unwanted. By killing off successful farmers, the Soviets destroyed their agriculture, failing to learn that ability needs to be rewarded, otherwise it is replaced by mediocrity; the “to each” side of the equation driving the “from each” to a degree which renders the whole instance unbalanced and unworkable.

Nazism works, and had to be taken down by overwhelming (and expensive) force of arms; it rewarded each according to his input and thus kept the workforce motivated.

We know that repeated attempts to make a losing strategy work are futile, and until one admits that failure, and accepts that there is a need to change the direction of the strategy, then failure will follow failure. To continue to try and make failure work without changing the strategy is pure insanity. In a society that forces the productive to support the unproductive there is an element of unpaid labour inflicted on those who produce. Am I therefore a 30% slave if I have to pay a third of my paycheck in extra taxes to support the idle?

Traditionally, those unable to work — the ‘poor’ — were a family responsibility, but historical Poor Laws made them a parish responsibility, and in many ways this was the start of the disintegration of the family as responsibility and duty passed to (expensive) bureaucrats. Costs increased, as did the numbers as more and more discovered that they could ride the gravy train. Thus the ‘solution’ was worse than the original problem .

This tendency for failure to repeat itself is endemic in democratic politics where the appearance of emotional intelligence is essential to winning votes, but irrational when it comes to actual lawmaking. Thus are politicians always benighted with the need for inappropriate emotional answers (lies) to rational questions.

There can be no doubt that President Trump was a highly successful President, as Presidents go, but he lacked an emotional empathy with a particularly avid but active and vocal group of powerful and immoral people for whom the ends justify the means. While they succeeded in displacing President Trump — possibly through the illegal manipulation of the vote — his compromise replacement(s) were and are totally disastrous.

The powerful voices in the Democrat party — Clinton, Sanders etc. — were unelectable, and even Democrats are wary of avowed communists and unindicted criminals.

So we got Brandon as a time-served and ranking Dem, who, they thought, could be relied upon to follow the party line. However in a divided party, the party line comes from she who shouts loudest.

But the big drawback of rigging votes is that the election concerned lacks credibility and does not help the winner’s political credibility. In the case of President Trump in 2016, it would appear that vote rigging was inconclusive and failed because Trump basically got more votes than had been predicted in (biased) pre-elections polls (poetic justice?). Still, shedding doubt on outcomes because more ‘people’ apparently voted for Clinton, did not help the Trump presidency.

In 2020 the vote rigging was much more blatant. It was based on COVID panic measures, and relied on a biased media and a bought (or blackmailed) SCOTUS for any credibility it had.

The Brandon administration started under a cloud which got blacker and blacker as Brandon lost all real credibility. He is at best senile, and at worst in the middle stages of dementia. All at a time when the USA needs strong leadership. The Veep is no better, displaying a strange idiocy even without the obvious dementia. This idiocy of the Veep is the guarantee that the dolt needs to stay in power. She is there because she is non-white, female and incompetent non-threatening.

Continue reading →

Ukraine: Field Test of the Great Reset

Posted on by

Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from the Austrian weekly Der Wochenblick:

In the shadow of war: Ukraine as the Great Reset laboratory of the global tech elite

While a very real conflict is raging in Ukraine, naturally no spotlight falls on the digital distribution battles. The advocates of radical world restructuring and total surveillance have long recognized the potential of the Eastern European country. With the strong participation of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine would not only be a Mecca for US bio-weapons laboratories, but also pave the way for digital networking, the Metaverse and the transparent citizen. The lynchpin is the digital ID app “DiiA”, an abbreviation for “The State and I”.

Zelensky’s social credit system

The journey takes us back to 2019. Zelensky had only been a few months in office, and founded a “Ministry for Digital Transformation”. Its most important task was to create a platform for the “state on a smartphone”, the DiiA app finally rolled out in February of 2020. Since then everything has been going fast: more than 50 applications, proofs and official channels are now running via the app: driver’s license, Covid vaccination pass, student card, starting a business, insurance, social benefits. A French tech portal writes: “A model that we only knew from China with its social credit system.” By the way: “ID Austria” is supposed to go in this direction in the final phase.

The social credit system is also to be taken quite literally: last year Zelensky promised every citizen who could provide proof of a full vaccination certificate in DiiA a reward of 1,000 hryvnia (roughly €30) — about a tenth of a typical monthly wage. Authorities may no longer insist on the paper form of documents — and observers assume that the dual variant is only an interim solution. The timing is hardly a coincidence: Two weeks before the release, Zelensky was the guest of honor at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit led by the “Great Reset” architect Klaus Schwab.

“Investment Mecca” for tech companies

In Zelensky’s WEF speech, the catchphrase of a “new normal” was already mentioned. The current global institutions did not work efficiently; one needed to rethink international security. His vision at the time: Ukraine should take a leading position in Central and Eastern Europe. He openly presented his country’s investment opportunity and recalled that some “big tech” companies started in garages. His stated dream was to open a kind of East European Silicon Valley and transform his country into an “investment Mecca”. Or as Zelensky put it: “Ukraine is the place where miracles are made a reality […] there is a significant opportunity to expand new industries.”

Schwab was impressed and happy with the “reforms” in the country. The WEF itself initiated some of these with its subordinate think tanks for Ukraine.

Continue reading →

Dispatches from the Killing Fields

Posted on by

Hellequin GB has translated three German-language articles that illustrate various aspects of the increasingly lethal dystopia we are all now forced to inhabit.

#1 Believe or burn

From Freischwebende Intelligenz:

In the clutches of the forced confessional community

Would you like a round of Russian hatred? A society that knows no more shades of gray is bound to be totalitarian.

by Milosz Matuschek

At the beginning of the pandemic, you were already amazed at how quickly it went. Did you notice it, too? Suddenly Islamist terror was gone. And not just a little bit gone, but completely gone. Probably killed by Corona. Or did ISIS take a short break out of pandemic piety? Well, the media kaleidoscope has just turned again. In the window “safe to hate” appears, like on the turntable of a juke box, after the man with the beard and turban and the Querdenker, now the enemy from the mothball box: “The RUSSIAN”.

Yesterday a doctor’s coat, today a camouflage patch

With the new image of the enemy, the solidarity industry immediately shifts. The cloak of virtue has changed colour, from a white doctor’s coat to camouflage with yellow and blue merchandising. It’s a bit like Carola Rackete, the sea rescue captain, who quickly retrained in green world rescue. Ukraine cheerleading has already started on Facebook and elsewhere. Nothing against real sympathy and help for war refugees, of course. But the suspicion creeps in that the new Ukraine fans are pretty much the same people who clapped frantically for the nurses on balconies two years ago before kicking them in the back with a mandatory vaccination. Instead of incidence numbers that nobody understands, there are now Ukrainian city names that nobody knows. While a real war rages elsewhere.

After the Corona cancel culture, whose most prominent final victim is the head of a German health insurance company, who warned of the greatly increased side effects of vaccination and then lost his job, it is now the turn of the Russian cancel culture. At the University of Milan, a lecture on Dostoyevsky was recently canceled. In Munich, the conductor Valery Gergiev was fired; Anna Netrebko’s performances are currently being canceled worldwide. Those who don’t distance themselves from Putin quickly enough are defenestrated. The German SPD dutifully removed the Gerhard Schröder coffee mug from their shop. The ex-chancellor has been lobbying for Gazprom for decades.

Does expulsion from the party come next?

The coffee mug with the likeness of Karl Marx, “Have a coffee with Karl”, is, by the way, still available. Yes, there is always something more ridiculous.

Shades of gray no longer fit into the picture

The first casualty of war, some say, is truth. It is neutrality. Anyone who draws the stereotype of war over society only accepts the distinction between friend and foe. Democracy, which always thrives on nuances, shades of gray and alternatives, is being transformed into a forced confessional community in the media. Anyone who has a Facebook profile, please contact their responsible propaganda unit immediately. In such a situation we would need more competence in complexity instead of boastful declarations of certainty. Incidentally, neutrality does not mean indifference or total non-partisanship. Above all, neutrality is the sovereign right to freedom from compulsory confession. Just as it is part of freedom of opinion not to have an opinion or to have to express a specific one.

Stratagem number 6 of the Chinese theory of lists reads: “Make a noise in the east, attack in the west”. The winner for the last two years has clearly been China. No matter what happens: lockdowns, compulsory testing and vaccination, expansion of surveillance methods or now the war in Ukraine. All of this helps China to quietly scale the summit as the new world superpower. While everyone is watching the bloodshed in Ukraine, the West is bleeding itself dry. Inflation is skyrocketing, the middle class is going to the dogs, their own identity is blurring, Western values only count in the right camp.

The war has long been in people’s minds and hearts; it’s raging among us, globally and under the guise of fighting the pandemic. It is a war against the citizens of the West which officially must not exist. How convenient that there is now a real, visible war that distracts from exactly that.

All that’s really missing now is an extremely contagious Russian mutant variant, which is born as a result of a cyber-attack and is spread around the world through Russian gas and Russian vodka.

#2: Where has the harshness of the law been for the past seven years?

From the news portal T-Online:

Continue reading →

The Nothing Tree

Posted on by

The following post is a personal side journey. It’s unrelated to the mission of this blog, so if you don’t want to stray from the main track, you may want to skip it.

Spending my sunset years as a Counterjihad blogger was not part of my life’s plan. I just kind of fell into it, joining Dymphna at the task after I was laid off in 2006. It seemed like a worthwhile endeavor, so I kept at it full-time for the next sixteen years (and counting).

Before that I had pursued numerous occupations since I graduated from college: taxi driver, tuxedo store manager, messenger for a legal firm, mathematician/programmer, systems analyst, sign painter, painter of ceramic cups, Kelly Girl, seller of mistletoe (seasonal only). I took all of those jobs just to keep the wolf from the door while I did the two things I was put on this earth to do: paint landscapes and write poetry.

I was fortunate enough to be able to paint for a (meager) living for more than twenty-five years. And I was especially fortunate to have married someone who understood my drive to create, and who was willing to help support me via her own employment. For that I will be eternally grateful to Dymphna; may she rest in peace.

As you all know, I ruined my eyesight by sitting outside in the bright sun day after day for decades. My intuition tells me that having my retinas bathed in so much ultraviolet light for all those years brought on macular degeneration at a relatively early age. Since I gave up painting in 2005 I have been reduced to programming digital images on the computer to satisfy my visual creative urge.

When I was eighteen years old I started writing poetry seriously — or as seriously as a callow clownish youth can do at that age. Almost everything I wrote before I was in my mid-twenties was dreadful stuff, and embarrassing to look at now, but a few things were worth saving, and have held up over the decades. By the time I was in my late thirties the quality of what I wrote was more consistent. I really hit my stride in the mid-’90s and early 2000s.

I encountered a fallow period after 2006, when the muse abandoned me for eleven years. I thought she was gone for good, and that my poetic career was over. Then in 2017 she mysteriously returned, and I started writing verse again. At that point it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to self-publish a volume of selected poems.

I gave up submitting my poems to periodicals thirty years ago. By then it had become clear that the type of poetry I write — traditional forms, often with a rigorous rhyme scheme and metrical structure — was out of step with the post-modern age. I got tired of the rejection slips, so I abandoned all attempts at publication. I haven’t published anything since a number of my poems (most of them lousy) appeared in William and Mary’s literary magazine back in the early 1970s.

Until now, that is. Thanks to the magic of self-publishing, I was able to put together a selection in a book entitled The Nothing Tree in Bloom. It contains all the poems from a fifty-year period (1970-2019) that I consider worth reading, and is listed on Amazon.

Self-publication turned out to be very easy, and it cost almost nothing, unlike vanity publishing. Actually, I suppose it is a form of vanity publishing, because I don’t really expect to sell any copies of the book. I just bought a few dozen author’s copies at a low price to give away to family and friends. It’s a satisfying way to wrap up a lifetime’s worth of work in a meaningful fashion. As Wallace Stevens said (in “The Lack of Repose”), the book provides “A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end / To the complication”.

I dedicated The Nothing Tree in Bloom to Dymphna. It makes me sad that she didn’t live to see it published, but she did read an early PDF version of it, which included the cover design. At that point the dedication page read: “For my wife”. In the published version it reads: “In memory of my wife”.

Since I’ve never published any poems since college, I’ve never had an editor. Fortunately, for forty years I had Dymphna to act in that capacity. As most of you know, she was an accomplished poet in her own right.

From 1979 until her death she read everything I wrote, including the most recent poem in the book. She was an incisive reader and critic, and never hesitated to point out infelicities and suggest changes. My oeuvre would have been far less competent without her input.

It was my habit to read every poem out loud to her as soon as I finished it. In later years, as her hearing deteriorated, I would print out a second copy so that she could follow along while I read it. After she died I found a pile of many years’ worth of those printed pages on the bottom shelf of the bookcase next to her side of the bed.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

When I was a teenager attending an English grammar school, I was required to study large quantities of poetry in depth for my O-level and A-level exams. It was like discovering a magnificent palace filled with treasure, and I took to it as if it were my natural environment. At the time I didn’t understand that most of my fellow students experienced it quite differently: it was just something they had to do, to memorize and analyze long enough to pass their exams, and then gratefully forget.

In the ensuing years I’ve learned the hard lesson that poetry is an acquired taste. Most people don’t get it, and aren’t interested in getting it. And that’s especially true of the type of poetry I prefer to write, which admittedly is intellectually abstruse.

With that in mind, I’ve chosen two examples from the book to post here that are somewhat more accessible.

Continue reading →

What I Understand About Ukraine

Posted on by

Karl-Olov Arnstberg is a Swedish writer, ethnologist, and retired university professor. In the following essay he provides a Swedish perspective on the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Many thanks to LN for translating this post from the blog Invandring och mörkläggning:

What I understand about Ukraine

Sunday Chronicle by Professor Emeritus Karl-Olov Arnstberg
March 13, 2022

The media reports well on what is actually happening in Ukraine, especially on Russian advances, waves of refugees and the suffering Putin is inflicting on completely innocent people. However, I am quickly getting tired of all these crying people on display, including journalists, as well as the lack of analysis. I would also like to see some more sarcastic comments about the Swedish PC elite, like the one I received in an email from a friend.

He writes that logically, Swedish feminists should react to young Ukrainian women fleeing to the safety of the West, instead of staying and defending their country, side by side with the men. If Swedish feminists think that women should have exactly the same opportunities as men, and preferably a few more, surely they should also think that women should have the same obligations, i.e. to share the risk of being maimed and killed? But no.

The same double-entry bookkeeping applies to nationalism. At home, nationalism is a shameful thing, almost the same as Nazism, but now the Swedish PC elite unreservedly praises the Ukrainian men who patriotically fight for their country.

Just as I get tired of seeing crying people on news programmes, I get tired of all these emotional comments calling Putin a monster. He is mad, he is an evil man, right up there with Hitler. Probably he is also demented.

Not that I have anything against Putin and the assault on Ukraine, but as a researcher I was taught early on that if you want to understand social processes you have to try to see the course of events from the perspective of the central actors. In fact, if I do not understand Putin’s actions to the point where I realise that I myself might well act in the same way, if I were in his position, then the analysis is incomplete. The reason why this is so important is, of course, that only then might one have a chance of understanding what will happen next. Just talking about how much you detest Putin, and how disgusting he is, becomes rather meaningless virtue-signaling.

So, like many others, I have searched for information online, and this is what I have understood and what I think all ordinary Swedes trying to understand the war should know. So I am not writing the following in the role of an “expert”. What little I think I know, I should have been told by the Swedish media, but this is not the case.

I’ll start with the Mongols. They conquered most of today’s Russia, including Ukraine. The Swedes were also astonishingly close until things went wrong in Poltava. Napoleon showed that Russia was vulnerable. Hitler attacked and got a long way into the Soviet Union.

On March 3 of this year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Napoleon and Hitler had the goal of mastering all of Europe, and now the US is trying. The Russian foreign minister has even said that the US is a new invader of Europe, following in the footsteps of Napoleon and Hitler. The Russians carry the past into the present; they do not hijack history, as modern Westerners do. When Putin talks today about having a buffer zone between himself and NATO, it is a direct continuation of the Warsaw Pact, which was created by the Soviet Union in the 1950s precisely to provide such a buffer between the enemy and themselves. According to Putin, the Russians did not lose the Cold War, because it never ended. He has also said that the fall of the Soviet Union was the geopolitical tragedy of the century. It should be remembered that he was a member of both the Communist Party and the KGB.

Continue reading →

Vladimir Putin on Election Interference

Posted on by

The following clip contains excerpts from an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin that was recorded by NBC News back in 2018. As I understand it, this footage was omitted from the final broadcast version of the interview.

Before I am denounced yet again as a Putin stooge, I must say that I find Mr. Putin’s assertion that the Russians don’t interfere with American elections to be laughable. They may not go so far as to hack into Dominion servers and similar operations — I have no expertise on such matters, so I don’t know — but they plant massive disinformation all over the Internet, and have been doing so for as long as I’ve been paying attention. I personally know a vlogger who was offered money by a Russian to propagate certain material (he refused).

More to the point is that the American intelligence services often do things that are just as bad, and sometimes worse, in an attempt to interfere with Russia.

And the idea that Russia interfered with the 2016 election to help elect Donald Trump is ludicrous on the face of it. Anyone with half a brain can see that the Russians would have had every reason to prefer Hillary Clinton over Orange Man Bad.

Many thanks to HeHa for translating it from the Italian subtitles, and to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:


Video link

Video transcript:

Continue reading →

George Soros Issues Blueprint of Globalist WW3 Propaganda

Posted on by

Our Hungarian correspondent László analyzes the latest pronouncements of George Soros in the context of the ongoing information war surrounding the Wuhan Coronavirus and the Russo-Ukrainian war.

George Soros Issues Blueprint of Globalist WW3 Propaganda

by László

George Soros posted an editorial on his blog, Project Syndicate, with the title “Vladimir Putin and the Risk of World War III” that is worth analyzing.

Far from denying their ties to Soros any more, the leftist Hungarian media outlet, Index published an article that loyally summarizes Soros’ agit-prop piece he posted in Project Syndicate, without any commentaries on the part of Index, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that we must take his words at face value. Even worse, Index zealously stretched the WW3 propaganda even further than Soros himself. While Soros talks only about the “risk” of WW3, Index gives this title to their article:

According to Soros WW3 has started

Index must have thought that the word “risk” in itself is not scary enough.

But, being a globalist media outlet, they were certainly aware that Soros’ propaganda piece is actually the blueprint of the ongoing globalist propaganda war and the motives of the Powers That Be in connection concerning “Ukraine”, coming straight from the horse’s mouth.

Perhaps the most revealing is the title Soros gave his piece:

Vladimir Putin and the Risk of World War III

If one decodes the word “risk” in this context, it translates into the globalist intention of floating the horror of a kinetic “WW3” above the head of humanity, with the implicit threat of nuclear escalation. You know, “It is not the thing yet, it is not WW3, it is the risk!” In this framework what Soros’ article is doing is no less than psychological warfare, and very similar to the Corona psy-op. They floated the horrors of the imaginary pandemic in exactly the same way.

Soros’ message here is that “It depends upon your behaviour, dear reader, whether or not that horrendous risk of total war becomes reality.” So “WW3” is the new weapon of ‘nudging’ — as the British psycho-terrorist government named the professionally-executed mass behavior modification that was based on fear, back in 2020.

At this point we can safely state that there is a WW3 psy-op at work. WW3, the ultimate bogeyman. Be afraid, be very afraid!

That is not to say that Soros and his ilk do not really mean WW3. They do. But real WW3 on the one hand, and the one they are force-feeding us with in the media on the other hand, are very different. The PTB want to make us believe that WW3 started with Russia attacking Ukraine, and it is mostly geopolitical in nature. Far from it, at least as it concerns the life of the Average Joe. The war on us started much earlier and will not end with the conclusion of any kinetic war.

The “WW3 with Russia” is just the theater of war, as it is quite appropriately called in English.

The real WW3 is ongoing against humanity, in order to make us submit and to enslave us with the “Agenda 2030” NWO vision. In this sense Soros is waging WW3 on our minds, right there in his piece, telling us that “You should think and do exactly what we are telling you, otherwise you will be guilty of collapsing our civilization via Putin’s WMDs”.

Continue reading →

Energy and Inflation

Posted on by

If you appreciate this essay by Fjordman, please consider making a donation to him, using the button at the bottom of this post.

Energy and Inflation

by Fjordman

Many countries are currently experiencing rising inflation rates. Some of this has been blamed on the Russian invasion of the Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This war between two of the world’s major food exporters will certainly make matters worse. Yet the truth is that many countries, from the USA via Russia to Germany and other European nations, had already experienced rising prices throughout 2021 and early 2022. The war between Russia and the Ukraine simply made a bad situation even worse.

What are the causes of rising inflation? In some sense, the Western world has still not fully recovered from the financial crisis in 2008. Central banks have been printing money for years without truly fixing most of the underlying problems of the economy. Many European countries have higher levels of debt now than they did a couple of decades ago. The USA suffers from enormous levels of public debt, and the U.S. Congress keeps raising the debt ceiling again and again. In this situation, the administration of President Joe Biden has irresponsibly increased government spending in 2021 and 2022.

Another factor is the coronavirus pandemic. The new coronavirus known as COVID-19 spread worldwide during 2020 and 2021. It was first recorded in late 2019 in the city of Wuhan in China. Partly due to Chinese censorship, we may never know the full truth of what happened there. However, the most likely explanation is that the coronavirus spread from the virus laboratory in Wuhan, perhaps by an accidental leak. The virus also bears indications of having been deliberately altered by humans. If that is true, the Wuhan coronavirus is the first known case of a global pandemic created by a pathogen that had been actively manipulated by humans.

The coronavirus has made many humans sick and killed millions of people. Yet its greatest negative effects have arguably been economic. Several billion people from India to Canada have been affected by strict coronavirus lockdowns imposed by the authorities. Critics argue that some of these restrictions may have caused more problems than they solved. Millions of people have lost their jobs, and hundreds of millions of people have suffered negative effects from the lockdowns. Western countries have become more authoritarian and less free in just two years.

The war between Russia and the Ukraine thus came before the world had a chance to recover from the global effects of the coronavirus pandemic. This added another layer to the international economic turmoil.

An emerging energy crisis, largely created by political decisions, seems to have contributed directly to rising rates of inflation. On both sides of the Atlantic, Western politicians proclaim that the world is threatened by alleged man-made climate change and global warming caused by greenhouse gas emission from the use of fossil fuels. The European Union has approved a European Green Deal. It is supposed to make the EU climate neutral in 2050 through huge and costly changes to the economy and energy supply. Such drastic changes are allegedly needed to save our planet. The Biden Administration promotes similar policies in the USA.

Despite claims to the contrary, not all scientists are convinced that human actions are causing big changes to the Earth’s climate. Moreover, some of the suggested policies will probably not make any major difference to future climate if they are implemented. These policies will first and foremost cause major economic harm, and undermine the energy supplies of the Western world.

The Neolithic Revolution was the great transformation that occurred when hunter-gatherers became more settled and started growing their own food through the domestication of plants and animals. This changed human societies forever. It was also a gradual change that took thousands of years, and seems to have started independently in many different places.

The Industrial Revolution was another great transformation that changed the face of this planet. However, this revolution began in one civilization only, and spread everywhere within a few generations. Britain had an early leading role, followed by other European countries, North America and eventually the rest of the world.

Continue reading →

Requiem for a Sarvisberry Tree

Posted on by

This post is off-topic. Readers who want to stick to current political trends may safely skip it.

I needed a break from all the horrible topics I have to deal with every day, so I decided to write about something that is important to me, and is only mildly melancholic.

It snowed here at Schloss Bodissey today, the sort of late-winter wet snow that is not worrying because it doesn’t stick to the roads and won’t hang around for very long.

Looking out the back door this morning reminded me of our redcurrant tree, which would normally bloom in a couple of weeks’ time. It won’t be blooming this year, however, because there is no more redcurrant tree, thanks to the blizzard of January 3.

The photo at the top of this post shows the redcurrant tree at its best, blooming in late March of 2007. But “redcurrant” isn’t even its proper name. Dymphna and I called it that for twenty-five or thirty years, because that’s how our neighbor, an old black woman, identified it. Like all poor country black people, she was an expert on anything that grew naturally and could be eaten. She told us that the fruit ripened in June, and could be made into pie or other desserts. She would come over here during the season, and she and Dymphna would pick all the berries they could get. Dymphna would make summer pudding with them, combined with other berries in season.

But it was never a redcurrant tree. Many years later we learned that it was a juneberry, which is what the local nurseries call the tame varieties they sell. It’s also known as a sarvisberry, shadbush, or saskatoon tree.

“Sarvisberry” is my favorite. In the Appalachian Highlands of Virginia, the folk etymology for the word is that the tree got its name because it blooms just after the ground thaws in the early spring, which is when graves can be dug and all the people who died during the winter get a burial service. “Sarvis” is an archaic dialect version of the word “service”, so the association makes sense. However, the word was actually brought to the New World from Europe, where “service tree” can be traced all the way back to the Latin word sorbus, or rowan.

But I prefer the highlanders’ explanation. Besides, the assimilation of words to more familiar terms is a very common process in the English language, so it’s quite possible that those early settlers gave the local tree that name for precisely that reason.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

When I first moved here in 1978, the redcurrant tree was about half the size of what it attained before it met its demise. It was all bent over, as if it had a great weight leaning on it. I found out later why that was when I watched Dymphna and our neighbor pick the fruit: they would pull the lowest branches down so they could more easily pluck the berries from them. After years of such treatment, the tree just bent in that direction, as if offering its fruit to those who came to pick it.

Over the decades the most bent-over branch would eventually die off, and a new, vigorous sprout would appear further back, growing into a second trunk, which would also become bent in turn as its fruit was harvested. I think we saw the process repeated two or three times during the life of the tree. Eventually it got ahead of the fruit-pickers, and the highest berries could not be reached from the ground. In later years Dymphna would send me up the tree with the extension ladder to pick the fruit for her.

It often happened that the tree would fill up with cedar waxwings during berry season: the juneberries are apparently one of their favorite delicacies. Suddenly one morning the tree would be alive with dozens of them, hopping around among the branches to get every possible berry. I never saw them at any other time, just during juneberry season. Dymphna, of course, used to curse at them when they arrived.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

On the morning of January 3, 2022, a major blizzard struck Central Virginia. More than ten inches of wet snow came down in a very short period of time, dropping trees and knocking out the power.

Right after the electricity went out, I thought I ought to take a photo of the storm. I didn’t want to actually venture out into the mess, so I just opened the back storm door, stuck the camera out, and took a picture. I didn’t realize until much later that I had just taken the last photo of the redcurrant while it was still standing:

Three hours later the storm had ended and the sun came out. I went out the front door to assess the situation, and then walked around back, where I was astonished to see the following sight:

Continue reading →