Battle Standards of Lepanto

“Military service, under the banner, of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, brilliant soldier of the Elite Special Forces of the Spanish Old Tercios, at Lepanto, soul of every soldier and heart of Spain, is a divine virtue.”

For the first time since the death of the “King of Spanish Literature,” 407 years later, I have the great honor of dedicating a brief study to the invincible standards of the glorious Man of La Mancha, who loved them with all his heart and soul and defended them with the highest dignity, nobility and courage because “the soldier seems more likely to be dead in battle than alive and safe in flight” (Don Quixote, II-XXIIII).

Here the words of Major General (R) Rafael Dávila Álvarez come readily to mind: “There is nothing like the Spanish soldier, and my only aspiration has always been to be at his level.”

Under threat of imminent war against the Ottoman Empire of Selim II (1524-1574), Cervantes entered his first military service in Italy, and thanks to the recommendation of Giulio Acquaviva d’Aragona and Giovanni Girolamo I Acquaviva d’Aragona (1521-1592), the tenth Duke of Atri, and that of his son Adriano Acquaviva d’Aragona (1544-1607), very good friends of General Marcantonio Colonna (1535-1584), of whom Cervantes had heard “have often heard Cardinal de Acquaviva tell of your Lordship [Ascanio Colonna, Abbot of Santa Sofia] when I was his chamberlain at Rome” (Galatea, 1585).

Indeed, Cervantes’ first military mission began under the command of Marcantonio, who led numerous naval operations before the battle of Lepanto, and whom Cervantes served for more than two years, according to the dedication of La Galatea addressed to Cardinal Ascanio Colonna (1560-1608), where he affirmed that “I may at least deserve it for having followed for several years the conquering standards of that Sun of warfare whom but yesterday Heaven took from before our eyes, but not from the remembrance of those who strive to keep the remembrance of things worthy of it, I mean your Lordship’s most excellent father.”

To Cervantes it was an opportune occasion to restore his reputation and to enter the army because “the Turk was coming down with a powerful armada and his design was not known, nor where he was going to unload such a great cloud” (Don Quixote, II-I). Therefore, on June 5, 1570, Pope Pius V (1504-1572) appointed the Roman Marco Antonio Colonna, the general in chief of the pontifical squadron, and on July 15 of the same year, the “Prince of Christendom” ordered “his commanders in Italy to place themselves under the orders of the General of the Armada of Pius V” (A.Z. c. 51 no. 2).

According to the historian Ricardo de Hinojosa y Naveros (Los despachos de la diplomacia Pontificia en España,185-86) Marcantonio was general of the pontifical galley squadron before April 1570, which was part of the twelve galleys assembled along with the sixteen galleys of the Genoese admiral Giovanni Andrea Doria on September 1, 1570 in La Suda in order to organize the relief-expedition of Cyprus and to raise the siege of Nicosia.

Cervantes joined the Pontifical Armed Forces in early 1570 and took part in the unsuccessful campaign for the relief of Nicosia, whose was launched on August 30, 1570 and then abandoned after the loss of Nicosia.

Cervantes details that they arrived “at the strong island of Corfu, where they took water” (The Liberal Lover) and then crossed the place where The Liberal Lover began: “O pitiful ruins of wretched Nicosia, scarcely wiped with the blood of your valiant and unfortunate defenders!” and tells that “looking from an outcrop at the demolished walls of the already lost Nicosia; and so he spoke with them, and compared their miseries to his own, as if they were capable of understanding him.”

Cervantes undoubtedly served in a company of Marcantonio until the arrival of his brother Rodrigo in Genoa, on July 26, 1571, who was one of the 2,259 soldiers of the company of Captain Diego de Urbina, deployed in the Tercio of the field commander Miguel de Gurrea y Moncada (ca. 1549-1612) and in that of Lope de Figueroa, who crushed the Alpujarra rebellion under the command of John of Austria and the Third Duke of Sessa.

Cervantes alludes to the arrival of John in Genoa, on August 6, 1571, who on August 9, 1571 went on to Naples, as follows: “My good fortune would have it that Senor Don John of Austria had just arrived in Genoa and was passing on to Naples to join the Venetian armada” (Don Quixote, I-XXXIX).

Military historian Juan Luis Sánchez Martín thinks that Cervantes enlisted in Diego de Urbina’s company “between August 9 and August 19, 1571 in Naples” (Los capitanes del soldado Miguel de Cervantes, 176) and the letter of August 25, 1571 from Don Juan to García Álvarez de Toledo Osorio (1514-1577), captain general of the galleys of Naples, evidences the appearance of Spanish troops in the Venetian squadron thus: “I found here Marco Antonio de Colonna with the twelve galleys of his Holiness, which are in his charge, well in order; likewise I found Sebastián Vernier, general of the navy of the Venetians, with forty-eight galleys, six galleys and two ships” (M. Fernández Nieto, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, 214-15).

On September 1, 1571 the sixty galleys from Venice arrived in Messina, and on September 8 Don Juan reviewed the fleet “in which he had boarded on his ships, the Venetians, 4000 soldiers, for the service of the king of Spain;” and on September 9 in Leguméniças he communicated that “with the occasion of a dispatch that I sent to Naples it has seemed to me to advise you that these Venetian gentlemen at the end have finished resolving to take in their galleys four thousand infantrymen of those of S. M… that is to say, 2500 Spaniards and 2500 Spaniards, that is to say, 2500 Spaniards and 1500 Italians” (J. A. Crespo-Francés, Miguel de Cervantes, 8).

On Sunday, October 7, 1571, Cervantes was part of the Third Squadron of the fifty-four ships of the Venetian commander Agustín Barbarigo (1500-1571), located on the left wing of La Real, led by Don Juan, about which on March 20, 1578, Ensign Mateo de Santisteban stated thus: “To know the said Miguel de Cervantes, which was the day that the said Cervantes served in the said battle, and was a soldier of the company of Captain Diego de Urbina in the galley Marquesa, of Juan Andrea” (K. Sliwa, Documentos De Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra, 49-50).

This statement proves that Cervantes fought in the only Genoese galley Marquesa, commanded by the Italian captain Francisco Molin, belonging to Admiral Giovanni Andrea Doria, No. 34 of the Third Squadron of the Venetian commander Augustin Barbarigo, second in the high command of the Venetian Fleet after the Venetian Admiral Sebastiano Venier (1496-1578).

At Lepanto, Cervantes was among, inter alia, the following standards:

Before ending this brief summary on the legacy of Cervantes, hero of Algiers, who infinite times, with tears of love, kissed the flag of his homeland, heart of Spain, I thank the excellent military historian and Infantry Brigadier, Miguel Angel Dominguez Rubio, decorated with the Cross of Military Merit with White Distinctive, the Cross of the Royal Military Order of San Hermenegildo and the NATO Medal, Head of the Communication Office, Infantry Regiment, “Tercio Viejo de Sicilia,” N. No. 67, and author of the exemplary book: 1719-2019 Tercio Viejo de Sicilia nº 67: 300 años de la llegada a San Sebastián (Halland Books, 2019), in collaboration with Josué del Cristo Pineda Gómez. His love, sacrifice and bravery to Spain, homeland of heroes, and his gift of the shoulder flash, the medal with the words: “Valor, Firmeza y Constancia” [Courage, Firmness and Constancy], and the pocket flag of the Infantry Regiment, “Tercio Viejo de Sicilia,” No. 67, whose words ennoble all of us, who love “our sweet Spain, beloved homeland” (Treatise on Algiers):

With this Flag on your pocket, you will always carry with you a piece of our Homeland. It will help you to keep your commitment of Service to Spain. It will remind you of all those who fight by your side and are proud of your sacrifice and it will give you the strength will give you the strength for your dedication in the defense of our Nation, its values and its freedom.

I conclude by making a special emphasis that our exemplary and excellent Infantry Regiment, “Tercio Viejo de Sicilia”, No. 67, has as a collective pride to recite every morning the Camino del Sicilia, the stanzas that form the essence of our identity, and the voice of the colonel who exhorts us loudly: “This is the old Third!” And everyone responds with the verses of the Camino del Sicilia: “This is the old third,

which in death has proven more than a thousand times its nobility!” And this compendium of virtues and commitments is sealed with our “Battle Cry,” that is answered by the three words of response: “In combat, courage!”

“In our ideals, steadfastness! In preparation, constancy!” (M. Á. Domínguez Rubio, 1719-2019, Tercio Viejo de Sicilia, 50).

Laus in excelsis Deo.

Krzysztof Sliwa is a professor, writer for Galatea, a journal of the Sociedad Cervantina de Esquivias, Spain, and a specialist in the life and works of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and the Spanish Golden Age Literature, all subjects on which he has written several books. He has also published numerous articles and reviews in English, German, Spanish and Polish, and is the Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of Cordoba and Toledo.

Featured: The Battle of Lepanto, fresco by Giorgio Vasari; painted ca. 1572-1573.

Our Interview with Seymour Hersh

Recently, Patrik Baab had the occasion to speak with award-winning investigative journalist and writer, Seymour Hersh. We are so very pleased to bring you this interview. [The views expressed remain those of Mr. Hersh and do not necessarily reflect those of the Postil].

Patrik Baab (PB): Thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed. In your Nord Stream story, you named Mr. Biden as the official who ordered the destruction, but now you’re facing a massive cover up. What’s behind that? The New York Times and German publication [Die Zeit] published the same story about a sailing yacht and named the Ukrainian crew as being completely independent from governments. Can this be?

Seymour Hersh (SH): I really don’t know how, but if I were either at The New York Times or Die Zeit I would wonder why two entities 3000-3500 miles away across an ocean had the same idea that Ukrainians did it. I don’t quite understand why. I did ask one of the reporters: if there were traces of dynamite on the yacht, why didn’t they try and find out what happened to the one mine? It’s a mine, not really a bomb. It’s a mine with the plastic to blow it up, but it’s a mining device on the water—so why didn’t they try and find it? And he said, well, because we did. The Swedes and the Danes were there within days. But the Americans had already come and taken the unexploded bomb way and I said, ‘Why do you think they did that?’ And he said, “You know how Americans are.”

They like to be first. What can I do with that? There’s another answer for why they did it. Now everybody’s chasing a piece of pipe that absolutely has nothing to do with anything. And they write stories and stories about that and not about the elephant in the room. The story I wrote, it’s not the way I would run a newspaper. But maybe that’s why I’m not editor of a newspaper or ever wanted to be. So, the answer to your question is, you’re asking the wrong person about that question. All I could do is offer speculation. And you have the same speculation I do. I’m sure it’s the same reason you can sell that story of a yacht. I don’t want to ruin anybody’s day, but it’s a 49-foot yacht. And let’s say it could go out into the Baltic Sea. It could find a pipeline and secondly, it could drop an anchor 260-feet to the bottom so they could secure the boat so divers could dive off from the back end of a boat. You can’t get a ladder on it because that’s where the engines are. And there’s other stuff on the yacht. How do you get past that?

If a yacht had anchors that go 260-feet, it would probably sink, or at least one side would be in the water. But anyway, so there you are. I can’t answer anybody not trying to deal with reality—they are so eager to have a counter story, but this is part of the business. But for each newspaper not to say, how does the other guy get this? And then wonder why I accept the reporter in Germany, who’s a very decent guy, who did come and see me to say that he never talked to the intelligence community. And I said, I changed my story to indicate that he did not talk to the intelligence community. And The New York Times people only talk to people who had access to the intelligence community. But that doesn’t change the fact that something happened that clearly has something to do with the American intelligence community on both sides of the ocean. But I can’t explain why either newspaper, they are two wonderful newspapers, and the reporters in question are perfectly competent. I mean, I know one of them well. Excellent reporter in Germany. I’ve known him for years.

I don’t know why they can’t sit back and say, well, maybe we should do some more reporting on this. But no, it’s not going to happen.

PB: Probably the reason is that the press is not part of the investigation. They are part of the cover-up.

SH: Well, but that’s making an implication that I don’t think exists. I don’t think they have any notion they’re part of a cover-up. That’s the point. I don’t think the whole purpose of having a good intelligence service like you guys certainly do, and you know how closely they work with us. If you don’t, you probably can guess. We’re allies, particularly after 9/11, strong allies. But I don’t think they’re part of the cover-up in the sense that they know they are. There’s something in the world called critical thinking. And I just don’t know why we don’t have more critical thinking on this story than we’ve had so far.

PB: In Germany the Russians were lately blamed for the explosion. Is this possible? Would they destroy their own pipeline?

SH: Well, you have the same answer I do, which is, of course not. First of all, Mr. Putin had already stopped Nord Stream I, which, as you know, has been going since 2011, and making Germany industry great, combine the largest chemical company in the world, BASF, and the great automobile makers. And you’re making Germany warm and wealthy and able to also share the wealth with the rest of Europe. Much of the gas they were getting from North Stream I was far more than they needed.

And by the way, Nord Stream II, the one that was blown up, had so much gas in it, and it had just been built and been approved. And then your Chancellor sanctioned it, I think obviously at the request of America a year and a half ago. So, it was less filled, with 750 miles of methane gas, which is why there was such an explosion.

I had a story which, when they eventually triggered the mines, they had to do with a low frequency sonar because anything high frequency gets burned up in the water. Low frequency can go, and it’s just a series of knocks. It’s not a complicated signal— anyway, the open-source intelligence people, who only see signals not photographs, in the beginning, all made it clear that there was no such airplane. But it didn’t explain why something blew up, because all you have to do is turn off the transponder, the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe System).

When you can turn it off, nobody can see you. It’s a safety mechanism. And certainly, I assure you, the people running the mission for the American president out of Norway, as I wrote earlier, knew all about how to put all the signals they wanted anywhere, and they went away in the Baltic Sea. I joke they could have recreated the Japanese armada sailing towards Pearl Harbor in 1941 to start the war right there.

I spent three months on that story. It wasn’t something I did yesterday. And the fact that they didn’t use sources—you’re talking to a man who’s been doing stories against the intelligence community and other things, let’s see, for 50 years. I think in seven or eight years I worked at The New York Times, I must have written 800 or so stories, maybe five, had a source named. Most of them were just unnamed, of course, and the two stories in The New York Times had no named sources either.

So that’s the irony of all of this.  But you’re asking the right sort of metaphysical questions about what is going on here. I can’t answer what is going on here. There’s some collective panic in the West.

PB: It’s very interesting to me that the cover-up started a few days after a visit of German chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington in early March. Do you find this interesting?

SH: The cover-up started well before Scholz’s visit—it started right away. The bombs went off in late September of last year, and the sanctioning well before the war began in February. This all started in December of 2021 with the meetings I wrote about in that first article; started in the White House or in the building next to the Executive Office Building. They all started these secret meetings looking for options to give the President to maybe get Putin to step down. And the one that came out was the bombing of the pipelines. And President Biden did say that in February 19, 2020, about 13-14 months ago, before the war with Scholz there. And at that point, I was asked immediately, did he know? I don’t know what he knew.

I don’t know whether the President told Scholz, but I know at that conversation that time, he was there, and he was asked afterwards what he thought, and he was complimentary. He said, I’m with the Americans. He didn’t say, “I hope, of course, the pipeline will not be blown up.” That’s for sure. He didn’t say anything like that, and he said nothing else.

And, yes, you’re right. A month ago, he did come and visit the president; a very strange visit. He flew over on the chancellor’s plane with no press—that’s unusual. Also, he had no public events except a 10-minute event with President Biden, where they both told each other how wonderful they were, no questions asked, and then a private 80-minutes meeting. He was treated like somebody who just walked. He’s the German Chancellor. He had no news conference with the president, no dinner. He just slunk in and slunk out. You and your guys in Germany need to worry about him. But at that point you could say, if he didn’t know, he has certainly been a collaborator in the cover-up.

You can’t ask me to guess what was is in his mind. I have no idea. But he certainly knew what the President wanted, even though I have no idea what they talked about privately. I wrote a story the other day for my Substack subscribers. I wouldn’t go to the newspapers with this because I just know the American newspapers don’t want me to write stories. The liberal ones are adverse. They’re so frightened of another Trump coming in, another Republican lunatic, that they can’t look at Biden objectively. That’s my view. But I’ll tell you when I do my reporting. Now, I’ve been around a long time. I’ve hired one of the best editors I work with here in Washington, New York, and also in the London Review. And I have a fact checker. The New Yorker had superb fact checkers. Every line was checked. I hired the very best fact checker that worked with me ten years ago when I worked at The New Yorker.

But that’s a good standard. The media in America has gone haywire. Trump did that. You’re either for Fox News or you’re against Fox News. So, it’s just irrational. What can I tell you?

PB: Could you imagine that German chancellor was blackmailed by US. Secret Services?

SH: You are very metaphysical. I don’t imagine anything; that’s my life. No, I think if anything, I don’t think he’s a dupe. I think at this point we have to assume that he’s aware what happened or certainly has a suspicion. And he’s certainly going along now with the American story that we don’t know anything.

I’ve been in Washington a long time, and Joe Biden was somebody who had a lot of experience. He’s the reason we have Clarence Thomas; he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and ignored the complaints made against him. He also supported his chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. These are big jobs. You don’t get this far by necessarily being wonderful. You get there by staying and being reelected. You outlive others and you get seniority. And he was one of those people who supported the American decision to respond to a Sunni extreme position that Osama bin Laden took: Sunni fanaticism.

We responded to a Sunni attack by bombing and attacking Iraq, which was run by an awful man, Saddam Hussein, who happened to also be as hostile to Sunni radicalisms as we were. And then we went and attacked Syria, under Bashar Assad, who also was someone who had no use for Sunni radicalism. So, you can’t explain this is a pattern. I’m sorry that Joe Biden and his immediate team fits so nicely into—we all hate Communism and we all hate Putin. We all hate Xi and we all hate, hate, hate, hate. We hate, hate, hate. That’s what we get out of America these days. We hate this and hate this. But he was putting pressure on Germany, which, as you know, since World War II has been not interested in rearming.

As much as I have had problems with German leaders, Willy Brandt in particular, the whole idea of German politics towards the East was a fantastic idea. We know we bombed you and did what German armies do, but now we’re going to be good allies. We’re going to be trading partners. We’re going to build ourselves up as an industrial base, and we’re going to prove to you we can be in NATO and we can join Western Europe, and the French can maybe pull back on their hatred of us. And he did that. Egon Bahr, I remember, used to come to Washington. I was a reporter then, I think, with The New York Times. I used to meet with him. There was really good stuff done with Kissinger, too. As awful and as immoral as he was, the whole rebuilding of Europe and putting Germany back in the picture was done very brilliantly in the 1970s and 1980s. And this guy now, my president is so fearful that the independence Germany has had and NATO with the beginning of indifference towards our commitment to the war in Iraq. I think by the time in late September, it was clear, the best America was going to get in that war with Zelensky and the corruption at the top of the military in his office, too, was going to be a stalemate. And we’ve now put $120 Billion into it in a time of inflation.

And look at you guys. Your inflation is going out of sight. It won’t get better. So, what if he told you he killed your pipeline because he was so afraid, as America has been for five generations of Russian gas and oil becoming a weapon, a political weapon in Europe for Russia. That’s been the underlying fear. Biden has given speeches about that when he was Vice-President. Jack Kennedy gave speeches about it. I’ve also written about this. And so the position we had is, well, maybe Germany and even NATO might not go all the way with us in the next six months as this war goes on and costs more money and doesn’t go anywhere. So, I’m not going to give them a chance to do that, to walk away, because I’m going to take away their gas, I’m going to blow up their pipeline. And why Germany to this point is still going along. You got through the winter because it was mild and you had reserves; but look out, it’s going to be a very bad next year for your industry. You could buy alternative gas, but there was nothing like the sweet methane gas you got from Russia.

And you don’t have as much. It doesn’t come as cheaply. You’re going to end up with liquefied natural gas. You’re going to look at renewables a little bit. Your country, BASF, is looking into China, so I understand, talking to them about maybe moving some facilities there where they can be assured of gas. And you have bakeries shutting down—six, eight, if they have a dozen ovens shutting down half of them or eight of them because they don’t have enough gas to produce the bread that they could sell. It’s going to be bad and it’s going to fall on Biden, and I think it’s going to be a disaster for him politically by the middle of this year. So, I’m content to wait. Why aren’t you?

PB: Was there a disruption in the security apparatus in America between the neocons around Biden and the CIA?

SH: Well, watch this space, as they say. I’m writing more about it right now. Not so much about that specific point, but there’s clearly a distinction between what some of the people in the intelligence community think and what the White House does. I don’t think anybody’s in support of the constant White House screaming at Russia and China and constantly exaggerating what’s going on in the war, which is there’s an extreme difference of opinion between the President and the Foreign Secretary, Tony Blinken. I mean, it’s the first time we’ve had an American Foreign Secretary of State refusing to meet with his Chinese counterpart because of a balloon. Tell me about that. What does that mean, a balloon? You’re not going to go because of a balloon that’s been flying around forever? Come on. Come on. I’m an American. I love my country as much as anybody. I’ve had every reason to. Nobody bothers me. I do my job, and I just don’t know why others in the press… I guess it’s because I only can think of it. It has to be some sort of political thing because of what the horrors we all went through with Trump.

There’s the irrational Trump. I think nobody wants that again. And so, Biden becomes the only one that can hold. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why the American Senate, which was so critical when I wrote about the Vietnam War critically, I wrote about the My Lai massacre 50 years ago. And nobody believed it then. So, the idea that the stories I write aren’t believed is not a new idea for me. I’ve been there before. It’ll all come out.

Look, it happened. What I said happened did happen, and they can’t get off it. The White House can commission a new study tomorrow that will come out in two weeks and say we’ve looked at the problem, and we and certain elements of the CIA say that we don’t know what happened; but no sign that America did it. I’m sure that’s going to be the next lie coming. Why not? But why not? But you’re not going to tell me Putin did that. I’ve read Putin’s speeches. I don’t agree with him. You can never support a man who chose war when there were other options. I know he was squeezed, but it was the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II. And we had the Balkans and we had Chechnya but this is nothing like what’s going on in the Ukraine. And Russia and Ukraine. It goes back to so many generations. But in the 1930s, remember, harvests were bad, there was starvation, and we took all of the weeds from the Ukraine and brought it into Mother Russia. Ukrainians died in 1932 while the Russians stood by, taking their food away from them. But anyway, that’s another story.

PB: Who was directly involved in the planning team for destroying the pipeline?

SH: Oh, come on, come on. Human beings. How’s that? Is that a good enough answer? No. I could just tell you on general principles, and I have been as I say, I’ve been writing about this stuff for a long time. In many ways. No, the way you do something like this is as few people as possible know, and nobody in the White House. You have a head of the CIA, and he may know whatever you want to tell him. And if he’s smart, he doesn’t want to know much; but you tell him the minimum. But he’s the one that says the President says, yes, go. The president says, no, don’t go. But how they do it is never committed. You can never trust the leadership to write a memoir and start revealing secrets. The professionals that do this stuff, it’s the very minimum. The big point that everybody misses is Norway was very important. It was Norwegian ships, Norwegian training, Norwegian involvement. We don’t know the Baltic Sea. And you’re suddenly going to have a bunch of divers jumping around the Baltic Sea where there’s been no oil or gas below the surface, ever. What? And the Russians certainly have surveillance.

There’s underwater surveillance, submarines. Everybody watches the Baltic Sea because it’s so close to the good and the bad in the world, the dirty commies and the rest of us. And so, it’s a huge sea. People forget that pipeline, that the two pipelines—one blown up and one stopped—all blown up by now was actually 760 miles long. One straight pipeline from Russia, from right near Leningrad or St. Petersburg now, from that corner of Russia, all the way down into Germany; an amazing production. It must have cost hundreds of millions, if not billions, to build, and to be all blown away. And the law on this is very interesting. I did a lot of work on the law of the sea because there were treaties signed by America and the world in the 1980s, 1984, when the first telegraph lines were made.

And we also signed both treaties. Since then, there’s no specific law saying if an oil pipeline underwater was cut, it’s a criminal act. I mean, it’s clear if a case ever arose, a court would find it to be criminal. But there’s no law. Although, beginning with coaxial cables and the TV cables and the underground cables, we now run, for everything. A lot of stuff is in the air now, too; but 30 years ago, they were cables with communication devices. I’m sure the early 19th century laws applied; but now the one thing that’s sure, if it is found that the United States did it, they’re liable to the companies. Gazprom and another group. One of the pipelines is owned by a consortium that involves the Russian oligarchs—51% oligarchs and 49% Western Europe companies that supply natural gas. I don’t know what the makeup of the second pipeline is, but we’re talking about potential billions in damages and lawsuits. And then you also have the question of whether or not it’s a violation of international law. All those issues are to be decided. And so, I can imagine that wouldn’t be something this White House wants to deal with, particularly when Biden wants to run again in 2024.

PB: Will it destroy the German American relationship?

SH: I don’t think it will. It clearly has it poisoned it on an official basis. And so far, there’s no sign that the average German is convinced that the average American is against them, because that’s absolutely not so. But it does cause diplomatic issues for NATO, too. I mean, NATO countries. This cost and this inflation that you’re now having in Germany is not going to get better. And the lack of gas, I don’t know Western Europe, Germany in particular, but air conditioning is widespread, but not as widespread here. But all of the energy for air conditioning, all of the energy to produce heat, largely the turbines are charged by natural gas because you had it, so you didn’t use coal. Gas was cleaner. Some people in France I know, friends, that are paying five times as much for electricity because it’s powered by turbines powered by natural gas, and the gas is costing more. Same in Italy. With natural gas, it’s three, four times more expensive. And so, they’re talking now in France of putting back two nuclear energy plants into business, which were shut down because of all the problems there are with not so much the mechanics of a nuclear plant, but the people who run it.

They just can’t seem to get it straight. What happened in Chernobyl? What happened in Three Mile Island in America? So, I think we’re going to start going back to, more the issue is, will West Germany go back to more renewables? The Chinese are way ahead of us on that, and that may happen; but that would be a good sign. We go back into renewables with more enthusiasm. But still, to get it done in time to mitigate the cost of not having the gas you did is not going to happen.

In Germany we have how many American troops there right now? We’ve got what, dozens of bases still, don’t we? In Germany? It’s not an occupation. I don’t think we’re going to lose person to person friendship and economic relationships. But politically, I don’t know.

I don’t do politics. I’ve never gone and testified to Congress. I just don’t do it. I’m talking to you in a political way because you’re asking me the questions. But if you’re asking different questions, I talk to you, too, about it. But you’re asking the kind of questions that the newspapers should be asking but they’re not.

PB: Why did the United States involve Norway? Was this a kind of plausible deniability?

SH: No. Norway has been our pet. They’ve been our little pet dog. Norwegian secret services were involved with us in operations in North Vietnam before the war was declared. Norway has always been terrific. Very competent seamen. They have the best PT (Patrol Torpedo) boats in the world. They have the most advanced PT boats after World War II and they were used by us, by the American CIA and the American Seals to run covert operations in North Vietnam. So, we’ve had a long relationship. But don’t forget it’s a border that’s 1400 miles from Oslo all the way to the North Pole where they meet Russia. And we have put probably hundreds of millions into Norway—it’s more in the last decade. We’ve built an amazing synthetic aperture radar—the most advanced radar that can monitor up and near the Arctic Circle.

There’s Kola Peninsula on the other side of it about 220 miles as the bird flies where there is one of the largest Russian missile sites. And we monitor that with the radar. There was a shutdown of a Norwegian submarine base that was used in World War II. We rebuilt it, way up north. This is way up north in Norway. Sweden is very close to the border there. And we built a new submarine-base, state of the art. There’s a major Norwegian air base and navy base we’ve also put money into and have share facilities with. So, they’ve become our boys, our pets. And they were very important. We couldn’t have done this operation without them.

It was the Norwegian ships that did drop the miners off. And so, it’s just a relationship that’s very secure and nobody talks about it. Most of the exercising was done near Norway in the waterways of the Baltic narrow area where there’s a major island, and at various times the pipelines were in a twelve miles limit of waters of both Denmark and Sweden. And I think both of those countries have not been very straightforward about what they know, and what they knew all along. I’ve written about it because I don’t have a piece of paper saying that. But two and two usually is four. Even if nobody counts.

If nobody’s counting, it’s nothing. There’s all this clown game going about investigating the bottom of the sea because of a rusty pipe. I mean, it’s all very silly.

PB: The Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre visited the United States in mid-September 2022 and he met the Secretary of the Navy, Carlos del Toro and the speaker of the White House (at the time), Nancy Pelosi.

SH: None of those; Nancy Pelosi, the speaker, they don’t know about these missions. They wouldn’t know about a secret mission, even if it was going then, which I don’t think it was that early in 2022. Maybe it was. I don’t know. No, of course not. No, the circle is very small. No, you would tell Congress? Are you kidding?

I think the reason that it was so secretive is that so few people knew. That’s the only way you can run an operation. You know how many divers we used for four pipelines? Two. Two very highly skilled American Navy divers. Not from the Seals, not from Special Forces. Because if you use Special Forces, you have to make a different kind of reporting. You have to report it up to Congress. But the Navy, even if the CIA is involved and they bring in the Navy, you don’t have to do that. Just a military mission. Congress doesn’t have to know about it. And they don’t want to tell Congress anyway, anything. No, it’s very few people. The Norwegians had the boats and they had the expertise.

They knew the bottom of the sea. They knew the currents. The Baltic empties every year; there’s a tremendous flow in and out. It’s pretty corrupted now because of pollution. It used to be great cod fishing.

PB: So, the Americans used the Norwegian P8-A Poseidon to verify the explosion after the attack.

SH: No, they didn’t have to verify anything. No. There was a plane used. It was a P8-A plane. It did not have its IFF on. It did not have its transponder on. So, there was no way to see it. The problem, as I said earlier, with all the people who say there was no plane, we couldn’t track a plane, is, of course, they weren’t thinking about the fact there were no transponders. And I remember within days what they called open-source intelligence, people were talking about, there was no such plane. I wrote about a plane dropping a sonar in September to trigger the bombs. But the problem was, they would all report about what they couldn’t find. But then the problem was, something blew up. How did it blow up, if they couldn’t see a plane? Well, but that wasn’t an issue. They would just write about the fact that they couldn’t find a plane, not acknowledging that it’s very easy to hide a plane. You can hide ships, too, by the same thing. They have electronic stuff they can shut down. They have emergency frequencies.

Anyway, even yachts have what they call an AIS system. A yacht of the kind of stature that allegedly was used to do it, as we’ve been reading, would have to have in case you get in trouble, you have to have some way of knowing where you are to tell the Coast Guard. So, they have to have a system that tells them where they are. It’s an electronic system that can be monitored. You can turn it off, too. But anyway, the plane could have been flown by anybody. Whatever I wrote is due to what the information I had. I think it was a P8-A, flown by Americans; in an American P8-A. And somebody said there were no such planes in Norway. Well, not to their knowledge, maybe; but there were. So, there you are. What happened, happened, period.

PB: What will happen in the next weeks? What do you think? Do you have a new aspect of the story, or do you think about new reactions in the press?

SH: Well, no, I don’t worry about the press. I can’t worry about them. Why would I worry about them? I’ve been writing stories that the press ignored all my life. They either come true or they don’t. No, I’m writing more about the whole issue, of course, because it’s my White House and my President, our policy. I’m entitled to do that. I’m surprised you’re so focused on the press, because it is not going to be a friend of this story.

It’s just not going to be; they just have drawn a line that a yacht did it. Or now, what was the other thing? That there was one story in London the other day, a trawler did it. Or they had all these boats doing it. And that’s much more fun for them, than to deal with a story somebody else wrote. I know that when I worked at The New York Times, you wouldn’t dare ask me to chase somebody else’s story. I would say, oh, no, that’s not for me. So, the good reporters at The Times, the reporters that actually do have sources, don’t want to do somebody else’s story. That’s beneath them; so, it just gets done. Some kid will be assigned to check it, and he calls the White House and they say it’s not so. You got a story. In fact, they actually ran the same story two or three times. The White House initially said it wasn’t so, and then two weeks later, another press spokesman who happened to be retired, credible, said the same thing, and they wrote the story just as if the White House had first announced it.

I liked your point of view on this, which is what’s going on here with the rest of the media and the government. Why isn’t anybody talking? That should be the question, but it’s not new to me. When I first wrote my story about a massacre of 500 civilians who were raped and maimed and brutalized, half the country not only didn’t want to believe it, they were calling me. My phone was listed, like I still do. You can still find my house phone. Guys would get in the officer’s clubs, have four or five whiskeys and call me up at three in the morning and tell me what they were going to do to my private parts. I had that for months. So, this is nothing.

PB: Thank you very much.

Russia’s Special Military Operation: After the First Year, A Paradigm Shift

From SMO to Full-Fledged War

A year has passed since the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO). If it began as a Special Military Operation, it is clear today that Russia has found itself in a full-fledged and difficult war. Not only with Ukraine—as a regime and not with the people (hence the demand for political denazification put forward initially), but also with the “collective West;” that is, in fact, with the NATO bloc (except for the special position of Turkey and Hungary, seeking to remain neutral in the conflict—the remaining NATO countries take part in the war one way or another on the side of Ukraine).

This year of war has shattered many illusions that all sides of the conflict had.

Where Did the West Go Wrong?

The West, hoping for the effectiveness of an avalanche of sanctions against Russia and its almost complete cut-off from the part of the world economy, politics, and diplomacy controlled by the United States and its allies, did not succeed. The Russian economy has held its own. There have been no internal protests, and Putin’s position has not only not wavered, but has only grown stronger. It has not been possible to force Russia to stop conducting military operations, attacking Ukraine’s military-technical infrastructure, or withdrawing decisions on the annexation of new entities. There was no uprising of the oligarchs, whose assets had been seized in the West, either. Russia survived, even though the West seriously believed that it would fall.

From the very beginning of the conflict, Russia, realizing that relations with the West were crumbling, made a sharp turn toward non-Western countries—especially China, Iran, the Islamic countries, but also India, Latin America and Africa—clearly and contrastingly declaring its determination to build a multipolar world. In part, Russia, strengthening its sovereignty, has done this before, but with hesitation; not consistently, constantly returning to attempts to integrate into the global West. Now this illusion has finally dissipated, and Moscow simply has no choice but to plunge headlong into building a multipolar world order. This has already yielded certain results; but here we are at the very beginning of the road.

Russia’s Plans have Changed Significantly

However, things did not go as expected for Russia itself. Apparently, the plan was to deal a swift and fatal blow to Ukraine, to rush to besiege Kiev and force the Zelensky regime to capitulate, without waiting for Ukraine to attack Donbass and then Crimea, which was being prepared by the West under the guise of formal agreement with the Minsk agreements and with the active support of globalist elites—Soros, Nuland, Biden himself and his cabinet. Then it was supposed to bring a moderate politician (such as Medvedchuk) to power and begin to restore relations with the West (as after the reunification with Crimea). No significant economic, political, or social reforms were planned. Everything was supposed to remain as before.

But things did not go that way. After the first real successes, certain miscalculations in strategic planning of the entire operation became apparent. The military, elite and society were not ready for a serious confrontation; neither with the Ukrainian regime, nor with the collective West. The offensive stalled, encountering desperate and fierce resistance from an adversary with unprecedented support from the NATO military machine. The Kremlin probably did not take into account either the psychological readiness of the Ukrainian Nazis to fight to the last Ukrainian, or the scale of Western military aid.

In addition, we did not take into account the effects of eight years of intensive propaganda, which forcibly inculcated Russophobia and extreme hysterical nationalism day in and day out in the entire Ukrainian society. While in 2014 the overwhelming majority of eastern Ukraine (Novorossiya) and half of Central Ukraine were positively disposed toward Russia, although not as radically “for” as residents of Crimea and Donbass, in 2022 this balance has changed—the level of hatred toward Russians has significantly increased, and pro-Russian sympathies have been violently suppressed—often through direct repression, violence, torture and beatings. In any case, Moscow’s active supporters in Ukraine became passive and intimidated, while those who wavered sided with Ukrainian neo-Nazism, encouraged in every possible way by the West (for purely pragmatic and geopolitical purposes).

Only a year later, did Moscow finally realize that this was not an SMO, but a full-fledged war.

Ukraine was Ready

Ukraine was more prepared than anyone else for Russia’s actions, which it began to talk about in 2014, when Moscow had not even remote intentions of expanding the conflict, and reunification with Crimea seemed quite sufficient. If the Kiev regime was surprised by anything, it was precisely Russia’s military failures that followed its initial successes. This greatly boosted the morale of Ukrainian society, already permeated by rampant Russophobia and exalted nationalism. At some point, Ukraine decided to fight Russia in earnest to the very end. Kiev, given the enormous military aid from the West, believed in the possibility of victory, and this became a very significant factor for the Ukrainian psychology.

The only thing that took the Kiev regime by surprise was a preemptive strike by Moscow, the readiness for which many considered a bluff. Kiev planned to begin military action in the Donbass as it prepared, confident that Moscow would not attack first. But the Kiev regime had also prepared thoroughly to repel a possible strike, which would have followed in any case (no one had any illusions about that). For eight years, it had been working uninterruptedly to strengthen several lines of defense in the Donbass, where the main battles were expected to take place. NATO instructors were preparing well-coordinated and combat-ready units, saturating them with the latest technical developments. The West did not hesitate to welcome the formation of punitive neo-Nazi groups engaged in direct mass terror against civilians in the Donbass. And it was there that Russia’s advance was most difficult. Ukraine was ready for war precisely because it wanted to start it any day now.

Moscow, on the other hand, kept everything a secret until the very last, which made society not quite ready for what followed on February 24, 2022.

Russia’s Liberal Elite has been Held Hostage by the SMO

But the biggest surprise was the beginning of the SMO for the Russian liberal pro-Western elite. This elite was individually and almost institutionally deeply integrated into the Western world. Most kept their savings (sometimes gigantic) in the West and actively participated in securities transactions and stock trading. The SMO actually put this elite at risk of total ruin. And in Russia itself, this customary practice has been perceived by many as a betrayal of national interests. Therefore, Russian liberals until the last moment did not believe that the SMO would begin; and when it happened, they began to count the days when it would end. Having turned into a long, protracted war, with an uncertain outcome, the SMO was a disaster for the entire liberal segment of the ruling class.

So far, some in the elite are making desperate attempts to stop the war (and on any terms). But neither Putin, nor the masses, nor Kiev, nor even the West, which has noticed the weakness of Russia, somewhat bogged down in the conflict, and will go all the way in its supposed destabilization.

Fluctuating Allies and Russian Loneliness

I think Russia’s friends were also partly disappointed by the first year of the SMO. Many probably thought its military capabilities were so substantial and well-tuned that the conflict with Ukraine should have been resolved relatively easily. For many, the transition to a multipolar world seemed already irreversible and natural, and the problems Russia faced along the way brought everyone back to a more problematic and bloody scenario.

It turned out that Western liberal elites were ready to fight seriously and desperately to preserve their unipolar hegemony—up to the likelihood of a full-scale war with direct NATO participation and even a full-fledged nuclear conflict. China, India, Turkey and other Islamic countries, as well as African and Latin American states, were hardly ready for such a turnaround. It is one thing to get closer to a peaceful Russia, quietly strengthening its sovereignty and building non-Western (but also not anti-Western!) regional and interregional structures. Entering into a frontal, head-on conflict with the West is another matter. Therefore, with the tacit support of supporters of multipolarity (and above all the friendly policies of China, the solidarity of Iran, and the neutrality of India and Turkey), Russia was essentially left alone in this war with the West.

All this became obvious a year after the start of the SMO.

The First Phase: A Swift Victorious Beginning

The first year of the war had several phases. In each of them, many things changed in Russia, in Ukraine, and in the world community.

The first abrupt phase of Russian successes, during which Russian troops from the north passed Sumy and Chernigov and reached Kiev, was met with a flurry of fury in the West. Russia proved its seriousness in liberating the Donbass, and with a swift rush from Crimea established control over two more regions, Kherson and Zaporozhye, as well as parts of the Kharkov region. Mariupol, a strategically important city in the DNR, was taken with difficulty. Overall, Russia, when it acted lightning fast and unexpectedly, achieved serious successes at the beginning of the operation. However, we do not fully know what mistakes were made at this stage that led to the subsequent failures. This question still needs to be studied. But for certain, they were made.

Overall, this phase lasted for the first two months of the SMO. Russia was expanding its presence, coping with sanctions and unprecedented pressure, establishing itself in the regions, and establishing a military-civilian administration.

With demonstrable and tangible successes, Moscow was ready for negotiations that would consolidate military gains with political ones. Kiev also reluctantly agreed to negotiations.

The Second Phase: The Logical Failure of the Negotiations

But then the second phase began. It was the military and strategic miscalculations in the planning of the operation, the inaccuracy of the forecasts and the failure of unfulfilled expectations, both on the part of the local population, and the readiness of some Ukrainian oligarchs to support Russia under certain conditions.

The offensive stalled; and in some ways, Russia was forced to retreat from its positions. The military leadership tried to achieve some results through negotiations in Istanbul, but this did not bring any results.

The negotiations lost their meaning because Kiev felt that it could resolve the conflict militarily in its favor.

From then on, the West, having prepared public opinion with the furious Russophobia of the first phase, began to supply Ukraine with all forms of lethal weapons on an unprecedented scale. The situation began to deteriorate little by little.

The Third Phase: Stalemate

In the summer of 2022, the situation began to stalemate, although Russia had some success in some areas. By the end of May, Mariupol had been taken.

The third phase lasted until August. During this period, the contradiction between the understanding of the SMO as a rapid and fast operation, which had to pass into the political phase, and the need to fight against a well-armed enemy, which received logistical, intelligence, technological, communication and political support from the entire West, became fully evident. And along a front of enormous length. Moscow was still trying to continue with the original scenario, not wanting to disturb society as a whole and not addressing the people directly. This created a contradiction in the sentiments of the front and the home front, and led to a dissonance in the military command. The Russian leadership did not want to let the war in, postponing in every way the imperative of partial mobilization, which had become overdue by that time.

During this period, Kiev and the West in general turned to terrorist tactics—killing civilians in Russia itself, blowing up the Crimean bridge, and then the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

The Fourth Phase: The Kiev Regime Counterattacks

Thus, we entered phase four, which was marked by a counterattack by the AFU in the Kharkov region, already partially under Russian control at the beginning of the SMO. The Ukrainians’ attacks also intensified in other parts of the front, and the mass delivery of HIMERS units and the supply of the closed satellite communications system Starlink to Ukrainian troops, in combination with a number of other military and technical means, created serious problems for the Russian army, for which it was not prepared at the first stage. The retreat in the Kharkov region, the loss of Kupyansk and even Krasny Liman, a town in the DNR, was the result of “war by half” (as Vladlen Tatarsky accurately put it). Attacks on “old” territories also increased, with regular shelling of Belgorod and the Kursk region. The enemy also used drones to hit some targets deep in Russian territory.

It was no longer possible to fight or not to fight at the same time; or, in other words, to keep society at a distance from what was happening in the new territories.

It was at this point that the SMO turned into a full-fledged war. Or, to be more precise, this fait accompli was finally realized in Russian upper circles.

The Fifth Phase: The Decisive Turn

These failures were followed by a fifth phase, which, although much delayed, has changed the course of things. Putin took the following steps: announcing partial mobilization, reshuffling the military leadership, establishing the Coordinating Council on Special Operations, putting the military industry on a tightened schedule, tightening measures for disrupting state defense orders, and so on.

The culmination of this phase was the referendum on joining Russia in four regions—the DNR, LNR, Kherson and Zaporozhye; Putin’s decision to accept them into Russia; and his program speech on this occasion on September 30, where he stated for the first time with all the candor of Russia’s opposition to Western liberal hegemony, the complete and irreversible determination to build a multipolar world and the beginning of the acute phase of the war of civilizations, where the modern civilization of the West was declared “satanic.” In his later Valdai speech, the President reiterated and developed the main theses.

Although Russia was already forced to surrender Kherson after that, retreating further, the attacks of the AFU were stopped, the defense of the controlled borders was strengthened and the war entered a new phase.

As the next step of escalation, Russia began regular destruction of Ukraine’s military-technical and sometimes energy infrastructure with missile-bombing strikes.

The purification of society from within also began: traitors and collaborators of the enemy left Russia, patriots ceased to be a marginal group, with their positions of selfless devotion to the homeland, becoming—at least outwardly—the ethical mainstream. Where once liberals used to compile systematic denunciations against anyone who showed any sign of left-wing or conservative views critical of liberals, the West, etc., now, by contrast, anyone with liberal sentiments was automatically suspected of being at least a foreign agent, or even a traitor, saboteur, and terrorist collaborator. Public concerts and speeches by outspoken opponents of the SMO were banned. Russia began the road to its ideological transformation.

The Sixth Phase: Equilibrium Again

Gradually the front stabilized and a new stalemate emerged again. None of the adversaries could now turn the tide. Russia reinforced itself with a mobilized reserve. Moscow supported the volunteers and especially the Wagner PMC, which managed to achieve significant success in turning the tide in the local theaters of war. Many necessary measures to supply the army and the necessary equipment were taken. The volunteer movement was in full swing.

The war entered Russian society.

This sixth phase lasts to the present time. It is characterized by a relative balance of power. Both sides cannot achieve decisive and breakthrough successes in such a state. But Moscow, Kiev and Washington are ready to continue the confrontation for as long as it takes.

In other words, the question of how soon the conflict in Ukraine will end has lost its meaning and its relevance. We are only now really at war. We have realized this fact. It is a kind of being-in-war. It is a difficult, tragic, and painful existence, to which Russian society had long ago become unaccustomed, and most of us did not even really know war.

The Use of Nuclear Weapons: The Latest Argument

The seriousness of Russia’s confrontation with the West has raised new questions about the likelihood that the conflict will escalate to nuclear weapons. The use of Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNWs) and Strategic Nuclear Weapons (SNWs) was discussed at all levels, from governments to the media. Since we were already talking about a full-fledged war between Russia and the West, this prospect ceased to be purely theoretical and became an argument that is increasingly mentioned by various parties to the conflict.

A few comments should be made in this regard.

Despite the fact that the issue of the actual state of affairs in nuclear technology is deeply classified, and no one can be completely sure how things really are in this area, it is believed (and probably not without reason) that Russian nuclear capabilities, as well as the means of using them through missiles, submarines and other means, are enough to destroy the United States and NATO countries. At the moment, NATO does not have sufficient means to protect itself from a potential Russian nuclear strike. Therefore, in case of an emergency Russia can use this last argument.

Putin has been quite clear about what he means by that—essentially, if Russia faces a direct military defeat by NATO countries and their allies, occupation and loss of sovereignty, nuclear weapons can be used by Russia.

Nuclear Sovereignty

At the same time Russia also lacks air defense equipment which would reliably protect it from a U.S. nuclear strike. Consequently, the outbreak of a full-scale nuclear conflict, no matter who strikes first, will almost certainly be a nuclear apocalypse and the destruction of humanity, and perhaps the entire planet. Nuclear weapons—especially in view of NSNWs—cannot be used effectively by only one of the parties. The second would respond, and it would be enough for humanity to burn in nuclear fire.

Obviously, the very fact of possessing nuclear weapons means that in a critical situation they can be used by sovereign rulers—that is, by the highest authorities in the United States and Russia. Hardly anyone else is capable of influencing such a decision on global suicide. That is the point of nuclear sovereignty. Putin has been quite frank about the terms of the use of nuclear weapons. Of course, Washington has its own views on this problem; but it is obvious that in response to a hypothetical strike from Russia, it too will have to respond symmetrically.

Could it come to that? I think it could.

Nuclear Red Lines

If the use of nuclear weapons almost certainly means the end of humanity, they will only be used if red lines are crossed. This time very serious ones. The West ignored the first red lines that Russia identified before the start of the SMO, convinced that Putin was bluffing. The West was convinced of this by the Russian liberal elite, which refused to believe that Putin’s intentions were serious. But these intentions should be taken very seriously.

So, for Moscow the red lines, crossing which would be fraught with the beginning of a nuclear war, are quite clear. And they sound like this: a critical defeat in the war in Ukraine with the direct and intensive involvement of the United States and NATO countries in the conflict. We were on the threshold of this in the fourth phase of the SMO, when, in fact, everyone was talking about TNWs and NSNWs. Only some successes of the Russian army, relying on conventional means of arms and warfare, defused the situation to some extent. But, of course, they did not cancel the nuclear threat completely. For Russia, the issue of nuclear confrontation will be removed from the agenda only after it achieves Victory. We will talk a little later about what the “Victory” consists of.

The United States and the West Have No Reason to Use Nuclear Weapons

For the United States and NATO, in the situation where they are, there is no motivation at all to use nuclear weapons even in the foreseeable future. They would only be used in response to a Russian nuclear attack, which would not happen without a fundamental reason (i.e., without a serious—even fatal—threat of military annihilation). Even if one imagines that Russia would take control of all of Ukraine, that would not bring the U.S. any closer to its red lines.

In a sense, the U.S. has already achieved a lot in its confrontation with Russia—it has derailed a peaceful and smooth transition to multipolarity; it has cut Russia off from the Western world and condemned it to partial isolation; it has succeeded in demonstrating a certain weakness of Russia in the military and technical sphere; it has imposed serious sanctions; it has contributed to the deterioration of Russia’s image among those who were its real or potential allies; it has updated its military and technical arsenal and has tested new technologies in real-life situations. If Russia can be beaten by other means, the collective West will be more than happy to do so. By any means, except nuclear. In other words, the position of the West is such that it has no motives to be the first to use nuclear weapons against Russia, even in the distant future. But Russia does. But here everything depends on the West. If Russia is not driven to a dead end, this can easily be avoided. Russia will only destroy humanity, if Russia itself is brought to the brink of annihilation.

Kiev Doomed

And finally, Kiev. Kiev is in a very difficult situation. Zelensky had already once asked his Western partners and patrons to launch a nuclear strike against Russia after a Ukrainian missile fell on Polish territory. What was his idea?

The fact is that Ukraine is doomed in this war from all points of view. Russia cannot lose, because its red line is its defeat. Then everyone will lose.

The collective West, even if it loses something, has already gained a lot, and there is no critical threat to the European NATO countries, let alone the United States itself, from Russia. Everything that is said in this regard is pure propaganda.

But Ukraine, in the situation in which it has found itself several times in its history, between the hammer and the anvil, between the Empire (white or red) and the West, is doomed. The Russians will not make any concessions whatsoever, and will stand until victory. A victory for Moscow would mean the complete defeat of Kiev’s pro-Western Nazi regime. And as a national sovereign state, there will be no Ukraine even in the most general approximation.

It is in this situation that Zelensky, in partial imitation of Putin, proclaims that he is ready to press the nuclear button. Since there will be no Ukraine, it is necessary to destroy humanity. In principle this is understandable; it is quite in the logic of terrorist thinking. The only thing is that Zelensky does not have a nuclear button—because he does not have any sovereignty. Asking the U.S. and NATO to commit global suicide for the sake of independence (which is nothing more than a fiction) is naive, to say the least. Weapons yes, money yes, media support yes, of course, political support yes, as much as you want. But nuclear?

The answer is too obvious to give. How can one seriously believe that Washington, no matter how fanatical the supporters of globalism, unipolarity and maintaining hegemony at all costs, will go to the destruction of humanity for the sake of “Glory to the Heroes!” Even by losing all of Ukraine, the West does not lose much. And Kiev’s Nazi regime and its dreams of world greatness will, of course, collapse.

In other words, Kiev’s red lines should not be taken seriously, though Zelensky acts like a real terrorist. He has taken a whole country hostage and threatens to destroy humanity.

The End of the War: Russia’s Goals

After a year of war in Ukraine, it is absolutely clear that Russia cannot lose in it. This is an existential challenge—to be or not to be a country, a state, a people? It is not about acquiring disputed territories or about the balance of security. That was a year ago. Things are much more acute now. Russia cannot lose; and crossing this red line again refers us to the topic of nuclear apocalypse. And on this issue, everyone should be clear—this is not just Putin’s decision, but the logic of the entire historical path of Russia, which at all stages has fought against falling into dependence on the West—be it the Teutonic Order, Catholic Poland, bourgeois Napoleon, racist Hitler or modern globalists. Russia will be free or nothing at all.

Small Victory: The Liberation of New Territories

Now we are left to consider what is Victory? There are three options here.

The minimum scale of Victory for Russia could, under certain circumstances, consist of putting all the territories of the four new members of the Russian Federation—the DNR, LNR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions—under control. In parallel with this, the disarmament of Ukraine and full guarantees of its neutral status for the foreseeable future. In this case, Kiev must recognize and accept the actual state of affairs. With this the peace process can begin.

However, such a scenario is very unlikely. The Kiev regime’s relative successes in the Kharkov region have given Ukrainian nationalists hope that they can defeat Russia. The fierce resistance in Donbass demonstrates their intention to stand to the end, reverse the course of the campaign, and go on a counteroffensive again—against all new oncomers, including Crimea. And it is not at all improbable that the current authorities in Kiev would agree to such a fixation of the status quo.

For the West, however, this would be the best solution, as a pause in hostilities could be used, like the Minsk agreements, to further militarize Ukraine. Ukraine itself—even without these areas—remains a huge territory, and the question of neutral status could be confused in ambiguous terms.

Moscow understands all this; Washington understands it somewhat less. And the current leadership of Kiev does not want to understand it at all.

The Average Victory: The Liberation of Novorossia

The average version of Victory for Russia would be the liberation of the entire territory of historical Novorossia, which includes the Crimea, four new members of Russia and three more regions—Kharkov, Odessa and Nikolaev (with parts of Krivoy Rog, Dneprovsk and Poltava). This would complete the logical division of Ukraine into Eastern and Western, which have different histories, identities and geopolitical orientations. Such a solution would be acceptable to Russia and would certainly be perceived as a very real Victory, completing what was started, and then interrupted, in 2014. On the whole, it would also suit the West, whose strategic plans would be most sensitive to the loss of the port city of Odessa. But even that is not so crucial, due to the presence of other Black Sea ports—Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, the three NATO countries (not potential, but actual members of the Alliance).

It is clear that such a scenario is categorically unacceptable to Kiev, although a reservation should be made here. It is categorically unacceptable for the current regime and in the current military-strategic situation. If it comes to the complete successful liberation of the four new members of the Federation and the subsequent withdrawal of Russian troops to the borders of the three new regions, both the army of Ukraine, and the psychological state of the population, and the economic potential, and the political regime of Zelensky will be in a completely different—completely broken—state. The infrastructure of the economy will continue to be destroyed by Russian strikes, and defeats on the fronts will lead a society already exhausted and bleeding from the war into utter despondency. Perhaps there will be a different government in Kiev; and it cannot be ruled out that there will also be a change of government in Washington, where any realist ruler will certainly reduce the scale of support for Ukraine, simply by soberly calculating the national interests of the United States, without a fanatical belief in globalization. Trump is a living example that this is quite possible and not far beyond the realm of probability.

In a mid-Victory situation, that is, the complete liberation of Novorossia, it would be extremely beneficial for Kiev and for the West to move to peace agreements in order to preserve at least the remaining Ukraine. A new state could be established that would not have the current restrictions and obligations, and could become—gradually—a bulwark to encircle Russia. In order for the West to save at least the rest of Ukraine, the Novorossiya project would be quite acceptable and in the long run would be rather beneficial to it—including for confrontation with a sovereign Russia.

The Great Victory: The Liberation of Ukraine

Finally, a complete Victory for Russia would be the liberation of the entire territory of Ukraine from the control of the pro-Western Nazi regime and the re-establishment of the historical unity of both an Eastern Slavic state and a great Eurasian power. Multipolarity would be irreversibly established, and we would overturn human history. In addition, only such a Victory would allow for the full implementation of the goals set at the outset—denazification and demilitarization—for without full control of a militarized and Nazified territory, this cannot be achieved.

The Atlanticist geopolitician, Zbigniew Brzezinski, quite rightly wrote: “Without Ukraine, Russia cannot become an Empire.” He is right. But we can also read this formula in a Eurasian way: “And with Ukraine, Russia will become an Empire;” that is, a sovereign pole of the multipolar world.

But even with this option, the West would not suffer critical damage in the military-strategic and even more so in the economic sense. Russia would remain cut off from the West, demonized in the eyes of many countries. Its influence on Europe would be reduced to zero, or even negative. The Atlantic community would be more consolidated than ever in the face of such a dangerous enemy. And Russia, excluded from the collective West and cut off from technology and new networks, would receive a significant not entirely loyal, if not hostile, population, whose integration into a single space would require an incredible, extraordinary effort from an already war-weary country.

And Ukraine itself would not be under occupation, but as part of a single nation, with no ethnic disadvantages and with all prospects open for taking up positions and moving freely throughout Russia. If one wished, this could be seen as annexation of Russia to Ukraine, and the ancient capital of the Russian state, Kiev, would again be at the center of the Russian world rather than on its periphery.

Naturally, in this case, peace would come by itself, and there would be no point in negotiating its terms with anyone.

Changing the Russian Formula

The last thing worth considering, when analyzing the first year of the SMO. This time it is a theoretical assessment of the transformation that the war in Ukraine has caused in the space of International Relations.

Here we have the following picture. The Clinton, neocon Bush Jr. and Obama administrations, as well as the Biden administration, have a strong liberal stance on International Relations. They see the world as global and governed by the World Government through the heads of all nation-states. Even the U.S. itself is in their eyes nothing more than a temporary tool in the hands of a cosmopolitan world elite. Hence the dislike and even hatred of democrats and globalists for any form of American patriotism and for the very traditional identity of Americans.

For the supporters of liberalism in IR, any nation-state is an obstacle to World Government, and a strong sovereign nation-state, and openly challenging the liberal elite, is the real enemy, which must be destroyed.

After the fall of the USSR the world ceased to be bipolar and became unipolar, and the globalist elite, the adherents of liberalism in IR seized the levers of management of mankind.

The defeated, dismembered Russia of the 1990s, as a remnant of the second pole, under Yeltsin accepted the rules of the game and agreed with the logic of the liberals in IR. All Moscow had to do was integrate into the Western world, part with its sovereignty and start playing by its rules. The goal was to get at least some status in the future World Government, and the new oligarchic top brass did everything they could to fit into the Western world at any cost—even on an individual basis.

All Russian universities and institutions of higher education have since this time taken the side of liberalism in the question of International Relations. Realism was forgotten (even if they knew it), equated with “nationalism,” and the word “sovereignty” was not uttered at all.

Everything has changed in realpolitik (but not in education) with Putin’s arrival. Putin was from the beginning a convinced realist in International Relations and a staunch supporter of sovereignty. At the same time, he fully shared the universality of Western values, the lack of any alternative to the market and democracy; and he considered the social and scientific and technological progress of the West the only way to develop civilization. The only thing he insisted on was sovereignty. Hence the myth of his influence on Trump. It was realism that brought Putin and Trump together. Otherwise, they are very different. Putin’s realism is not against the West; it is against liberalism in International Relations, against World Government. So is American realism, and Chinese realism, and European realism, and any other.

But the unipolarity that has developed since the beginning of the 1990s has turned the head of the liberals in International Relations. They believed that the historical moment had arrived; history as a confrontation of ideological paradigms is over (Fukuyama’s thesis) and the time has come to begin the process of unification of mankind under the World Government with new force. But to do this, residual sovereignty had to be abolished.

Such a line was strictly at odds with Putin’s realism. Nevertheless, Putin tried to balance on the edge and maintain relations with the West at all costs. This was quite easy to do with the realist Trump, who understood Putin’s will for sovereignty, but became quite impossible with the arrival of Biden in the White House. So, Putin, as a realist, came to the limit of possible compromise. The collective West, led by the liberals in IR, pressed Russia harder and harder to finally begin to dismantle its sovereignty, rather than to strengthen it.

The culmination of this conflict was the beginning of the SMO. The globalists actively supported the militarization and Nazification of Ukraine. Putin rebelled against this because he understood that the collective West was preparing for a symmetrical campaign of “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Russia itself. Liberals turned a blind eye to the rapid flowering of Russophobic neo-Nazism in Ukraine itself and, moreover, actively promoted it, while promoting its militarization as much as possible, and accused Russia itself of the same thing—”militarism” and “Nazism,” trying to equate Putin with Hitler.

Putin started the SMO as a realist. No more than that. But a year later, the situation changed. It became clear that Russia is at war with the modern Western liberal civilization as a whole, with globalism and the values that the West imposes on everyone else. This turn in Russia’s awareness of the world situation is perhaps the most important result of the SMO.

From the defense of sovereignty, the war has turned into a clash of civilizations. And Russia no longer simply insists on independent governance, sharing Western attitudes, criteria, norms, rules and values, but acts as an independent civilization—with its own attitudes, criteria, norms, rules and values. Russia is no longer the West at all. Not a European country, but a Eurasian Orthodox civilization. This is what Putin declared in his speech on the occasion of the admission of four new members to the Russian Federation on September 30, then in the Valdai speech, and repeated many times in other speeches. And finally, in Edict 809, Putin approved the foundations of a state policy to protect Russian traditional values, a policy that not only differs significantly from liberalism, but in some points is the exact opposite of it.

Russia has changed its paradigm from realism to the Theory of a Multi-polar World. It has rejected liberalism in all its forms and directly challenged modern Western civilization by openly denying it the right to be universal. Putin no longer believes in the West. And he calls modern Western civilization “satanic.” In this, one can easily identify both a direct appeal to Orthodox eschatology and theology, as well as a hint of confrontation between the capitalist and socialist systems of the Stalin era. Today, it is true, Russia is not a socialist state. But this is the result of the defeat suffered by the USSR in the early 1990s, leaving Russia and other post-Soviet countries in the position of ideological and economic colonies of the global West.

Putin’s entire reign until February 24, 2022 was a preparation for this decisive moment. But before that it remained within the framework of realism. That is, the Western way of development + sovereignty. Now, after a year of severe trials and terrible sacrifices that Russia has suffered, the formula has changed: sovereignty + civilizational identity. The Russian way.

Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.

Featured: Mother of a Partisan, by Sergey Gerasimov; painted ca. 1943–1950.

The Leviathan Leads to War: A Talk with Henri Hude

Former director of the Ethics and Law Department at the Research Center of the Saint-Cyr Military Academy, the philosopher Henri Hude has just published, Philosophie de la guerre (Philosophy of War), a book written for decision-makers who, in the tragedy of history, have an urgent need to rise to the level of the universal, in order to appreciate situations objectively, and master them effectively. Faced with the persistent risk of high-intensity war that threatens the world, Hude defends the thesis that the solution to the problem of war does not lie in the power of a planetary empire, a kind of “global Leviathan,” but in a philosophical and spiritual awakening, in which religions are called upon to take an essential place and to cooperate in view of a “cultural peace.”

[This interview was conducted by Guillaume de Prémare of the magazine, Permanences, through whose kind generosity we are able to bring you this English version].

Permanences (P): In the present state of our civilization, what are its weaknesses and strengths in the perspective of a return of the tragedy of History?

Henri Hude (HH): It was Reason that made the fortune of Western civilization. The major weakness of the West today is the loss of strong reason and the sense of truth, if that truth is objective, universal, demonstrative and binding. Human freedom, which also characterizes Western culture, is a power of rational self-determination. If reason weakens, thought becomes delirious, and freedom arbitrary.

The great modern philosophy—Kantian, for example, that held sway under the Third Republic—was idealistic; but while losing reality, it had kept objectivity, that of science and morality. Man was everything. Nature and God were who knows where, but Reason remained an impersonal principle at the core of the human soul, capable in theory of absolute truth and in practice of universal and categorical obligation.

Postmodern thinking has swept all that away. Neither God, nor Nature, nor Reason, nor Being. The individual replaces everything, and facts are only what he wants them to be. Individuals therefore spread the infinite magma of data, giving it through their discourses a form of consensual objects, temporarily consensual. It seems that shared envy and common arbitrariness, in affirmation or negation, will suffice to produce reality, even objectivity. Even science bows before desire and interests. There are only fictions left—but these fictions are also all of reality. Western society thus begins to look very much like an insane asylum. Of course, this is only a collective paranoia: one bomb falls somewhere in our country, and very real realities, which mock our discourses, are destroyed and this philosophy collapses. While waiting for war and defeat, or a revival of rationality, to restore, perhaps, realism, the West lives without foundations and plunges into a kind of blur, into a non-functional culture and a somewhat ungovernable society. The powers that be no longer have any leverage to reform—they are all-powerful to deconstruct, powerless for the rest. Let’s not be surprised that history is becoming tragic again.

P: How do you define the tragic?

HH: The tragic is not evil, it is fatal evil. The tragic is beyond the dramatic, where we still oscillate between fear and hope. The tragic is when there is no way out and we are forced to go through it. We sometimes imagine that tragedy would disappear completely if all problems could find a technical solution. This would be true, if all reality were mechanical. But it is not the case. To believe this is to institute a society in which everyone is treated as a cog in a machine. This is why technology, which solves so many problems, immediately creates other, even more serious ones. It itself becomes an unsolvable problem—through technology. This is what the invention of the atomic bomb clearly shows.

P: This tragedy, which we may have thought we could escape, was very much present in the ancient culture from which we come. Why did the Greeks write so many tragedies?

HH: The Greeks were the first humanists of the West. Aristotle said: “Man is the animal in which there is a lot of the divine.” Humanism guesses the greatness of man. Courage is part of this greatness and expresses the awareness of it.

Heroism is the depth of courage. It is the capacity to measure the tragic without dissolving it, without hiding it. It is the capacity to face death, destiny, freedom, salvation or perdition, and evil in all its forms, including war—that universal phenomenon, in time and space. It is part of human existence.

P: We thought we could overcome war, and some say that we have become somewhat soft. Can a nation and a people adapt and quickly convert their mentality and worldview in a crisis situation?

HH: Experience must answer, more than reasoning. What will happen if we have to switch from a soft dream to a hard reality? For example, if we cut electricity in Paris or Lyon for several weeks, what would happen? If the Internet stops working, how will we react? Will we be able to adapt quickly to a new situation that radically shakes up our daily lives and our gentrified mentalities? No one can know a priori. In Ukraine, which is a more rustic country, it is a return to their youth for the older people, because the memory of very difficult times is still recent and vivid.

Generally speaking, humans are built in such a way that they can cope with all sorts of hazards, but this capacity to adapt—to be resilient, as we say today—depends a great deal on the culture: to adapt to the torment, one must accept the very idea of suffering, so that suffering has a meaning, that life and death have a meaning. I fear that if culture is unable to offer us such a meaning, it is not functional—it does not put man in a position to face the hazards of his condition. There is tragedy. Perhaps we will have to bear our share of it. But if the collective meaning of our existence is reduced to consuming satisfactions and living to be old in almost good health, we will not be able to face it. We escape from this nonsense by recognizing the transcendence of man’s soul and that of the Absolute, of God.

P: This sense of transcendence is not very developed today, to put it mildly.

HH: The great philosophy of the Enlightenment, which—as we have said—still reigned in France under the Third Republic, was a religion of Man. There was no longer any Transcendence in the biblical sense of the word, but there was still one, within the Great Divine Whole that man believed to be between the impersonal universal ground that was Reason and the individuals in which it was, so to speak, always incarnated. And this Reason founded objective truth and moral obligation. This dissolved with what is called postmodernity, coming from Nietzsche or Freud among others.

The great rationalist philosophy was rejected because of its neurotic moralism; also because the evolution of sciences had made it partially obsolete; also because it was very aristocratic, elitist, not very accessible, hardly taking into account the individual, of his lived experiences, of the affective, of language, of the body and finally, perhaps especially, because this residue of transcendence constituted still a source of obligation and a limit to the pretensions of the individual freedom to a boundless independence.

Demolishing God, Nature, Reason, Being, Truth, etc., this postmodern evolution leads in practice to nihilism. Living together in confidence under these conditions becomes almost impossible and society becomes ungovernable. Without a cultural revolution, including the recognition of metaphysical foundations, the West will persevere in this nonsense and it cannot even imagine to what extent it will lose its aura and its position in the world. It is a functional culture that allows a civilization to be present in history and to stay there.

P: The prospect of a philosophical, spiritual and cultural upsurge seems rather distant today. Can a time of crisis make decision-makers arise and/or new leaders emerge who will be able to face the situation, and give meaning to events and involve all citizens?

HH: The great crisis occurs when culture does not allow solutions to be found to problems that have become absolutely vital. The non-functional character of culture is today, in my opinion, the root of all problems. I think that we will have difficulty in seeing the emergence of true decision-makers, without a cultural awakening.

P: Today, the West is still dominant, despite its non-functional culture, but it is fragile for the reasons you indicate. On the other side, there is what we can call the rest of the world, which functions according to very different mental patterns. We have the impression that, for the other civilizations, war and the tragedy of history are quite normal things. Doesn’t this create a gap between the West and these other cultural realities, confirming in a way the famous “clash of civilizations?”

HH: We exaggerate cultural relativism. There is a human universality, a community of human nature: each of us is born, dies, suffers, works, exchanges, loves, speaks, questions, invents, negotiates, wars, is cunning, meditates, is anxious. Every man in existence becomes aware of our common nature; and it is this common awareness which is the culture. In all functional cultures, the fundamentals are present, like friendship or truth. The same questions arise everywhere. Zhu Xi could dialogue with Thomas Aquinas, Socrates with Confucius.

However, the human condition also depends on technical progress. Now, in technology and in science, a whole way of thinking is forged. If this way of thinking does not manage to be in harmony with immemorial wisdom, culture becomes dysfunctional. This does not prevent the sciences from being true, nor the techniques from being efficient. And since the West is the place where science and technology first developed, Westernization is inevitably universal. But as it is the reason which made the fortune of the West, so its unreason deprived of wisdom is making its ruin. For the West is becoming the least rational fragment of the planet. If it does not return to reason and wisdom, we will see, in our lifetime, its marginalization—and its great suffering.

P: All the same, the fundamental principles are not the same in all civilizations; for example the notion of freedom in China, or that of equal dignity of persons in India.

HH: You have to look at things in the long term. The simple fact of owning, for example, an iPhone provides a feeling of individual power that was previously unimaginable. This feeling leads to the emergence of an individualism, which is not necessarily negative and anti-social in itself. Technology allows man to realize his power and nourishes the consciousness of a transcendence of the human being. This phenomenon can be devastating for all premodern cultures, and lead to non-functional ways of thinking, where we no longer understand anything about the Absolute or about God, about life, about the universe, about good and evil, about Salvation… But it can make a civilized humanism grow everywhere. The most reasonable solution is to profoundly rethink the relationship of humanist culture to the religion of the God-Man, that is, of Christ. Otherwise, the West will go out of history. But I believe that all its positive values will survive, carried by other peoples.

P: The Romans, then Christianity, developed the concept of the just war, and the Church tried to moralize war. Are there equivalent reflections in other civilizations?

HH: The Canadian researcher Paul Robinson has written a book entitled Just war in Comparative Perspective, in which he shows that all civilizations have had a similar reflection. It is easy to understand why. On the one hand, everyone realizes that goodness is found in justice, peace, mutual service, good understanding; and that war, which uses violence and trickery, is the opposite of the charity we owe each other.

On the other hand, absolute pacifism, in its pure state, seems equally immoral. For if the use of force were unconditionally immoral, intrinsically perverse, there would be no right of collective self-defense, and surrendering to an intrinsically perverse power would be a duty. Moreover, all non-violent resistance would be physically eliminated. Thus, on the one hand we have the immorality of war, on the other the immorality of pacifism. The theory of the just war is an attempt at a solution. War is evil itself; but one must be ready to defend one’s own against aggression. For it is a fact—conflict exists, not just cooperation. The world is full of transgressors, aggressors and unjust people, who take pleasure in appropriating everything and find their enjoyment in the persecution of others. One must therefore be ready to defend one’s own. This is what every functional culture must teach its members. But this is not possible if we sink into the illusion that everyone can remain quietly in his corner, in a passive individualism.

P: The classical theory of the just war has, however, been challenged by Pope Francis.

HH: I read very carefully the chapter of the encyclical Fratelli tutti that deals with war. Paul VI also said, at the UN, “Never again war!” Surely, you don’t want the Pope to be in favor of war! The text expresses, I believe, a fear of the possibility, once again very serious, of total war, therefore nuclear. In this chapter, which (with all due respect) can be described as rather vague, the only perfectly clear formula, although drowned in pacifist rhetoric, maintains the Thomistic doctrine of the just war. It seems to me, therefore, that the Pope is not changing anything in substance. In previous years, in the face of the terrorist problems of 2015, he had in fact, unlike his predecessors, a much more classical and Thomistic attitude on the question of war. What terrifies us today—for example, the atomic bomb—will be surpassed tomorrow by other, far superior means of destruction. It is in this perspective that the Holy Father’s words in Fratelli tutti are justified.

Today we do not know how to live in peace without the balance of terror. With the postmodern crisis of culture that we are experiencing, it is possible that this balance of terror will give way to what Thérèse Delpech calls the “imbalance of terror.” The preference for life makes deterrence credible; but this principle is itself suspended from the conviction that life has meaning. To wage atomic war is to commit suicide by killing one’s opponent. If suicide becomes possible because culture induces a preference for death, then nuclear war is ultimately possible. The desire for euthanasia manifests a preference for death. La Fontaine said in one of his fables, “Rather suffer than die is the motto of men.” But the postmodern culture is suicidal. It says, “Rather die than suffer.” That is why the Pope is right to draw attention to the fact that deterrence between rational actors is no longer guaranteed within the framework of this culture that the West is spreading throughout the world.

P: What is the basis for an ethics of war?

HH: The basis consists in knowing that the good is peace, and that nothing should be done in war that would give rise to a definitive hatred, making the conflictual relationship irreversible. It is a matter of, for example, not to create a hereditary enemy, but rather to use force in a measured, proportionate way, and to limit the time of the war. The ethics of war is the imperative of peace regulating war.

P: In 1945, was the use of the atomic bomb by the USA against Japan proportionate and morally acceptable?

HH: When the means are extremely debatable, the end justifies the means, if and only if the end is morally necessary, and if this means is rigorously necessary to reach this necessary end. Thus the question is: what was the end pursued by the United States? Was this end necessary? And, if so, was the bombing necessary for that necessary end? These are the principles, expressed as questions. Their application is obviously by nature more contingent and dubious than the principles themselves.

The political goal of the United States was to impose on Japan an unconditional surrender that would allow it to change profoundly, militarily, politically and culturally, and to make it a satellite in its Empire. Such an imperious goal is part of a policy aiming at imposing on mankind the Pax Americana. If one considers this goal to be morally necessary, then, in relation to such a goal, the use of the atomic bomb was certainly a necessary means. The conditions demanded of Japan by the USA were exorbitant, and it was to be expected that Japan would put up a tremendous resistance. The atrocious use of the bomb broke this resistance and certainly spared more lives, American and Japanese, than it sacrificed.

The answer to the question you ask leads back to the answer to a more fundamental question: Is the global hegemony of one state morally and politically necessary for the common good of humankind? If so, then the use of weapons of mass destruction is probably justified, at least objectively. If not, then not. In other words, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are an impressive show of force and decisive action, which are legitimate only if the United States can reasonably pretend to be the universal Empire, to be the universal hegemon bringing peace and a true flourishing civilization. Otherwise, what would have been legitimate would have been a reasonable negotiation in which the loser would have accepted to take his loss, without being totally subjugated. When a head of state judges that an end is necessary and that the means to that end is necessary, it is he who makes that judgment and assumes the ultimate moral responsibility for it—it is he who will be accountable to the Supreme Judge.

P: Today, some people seem to think that a universal empire is better than war. Does this seem justified to you?

HH: The “great game” for empire has always existed. Powers want to ensure their hegemony, out of ambition but also out of fear. Let’s think of Athens and Sparta, or Rome and Carthage. Is building an Empire, ideally building the Empire, a just cause for war? The Empire brings peace after the time of conquest, the Pax Romana for example. But every Empire will end. What chaos follows! Today, would the constitution of a planetary Empire be a just, permitted and necessary end? As the techno-scientific world becomes more and more unified, the idea that some kind of universal political authority could emerge has some logic and appeal. But this does not necessarily mean a world state, led by a universal imperial power. The “function of empire” must be fulfilled. Exploring this question is precisely what my book does.

P: How do you characterize the Leviathan and the peace it proposes to us?

HH: I reflect upon the future, from the probable state of technology, in a century or two. We must imagine that we will be able to colonize the universe. We have to imagine the military technology that goes with it. Today, it is science fiction, but tomorrow? If there has been no cultural revolution, it is highly probable that we will have such a fear of war that we will accept an absolute security tyranny. The Power will have access in real time to the brain and the whole body of each individual to take immediately, on the basis of automated and very fast anticipations, the decisions required for the collective security. The security requirement will become such that freedom will be reduced to nothing. This is what I call the “Leviathan.” People will accept it and want it, because there is apparently no other way; and there will be no other meaning to existence than to keep this miserable meaningless life.

My thesis, which I believe I have demonstrated, is that far from being a guarantee against a possible nuclear war, the advent of the Leviathan, on the contrary, will make it highly possible. It will bring us total war; and that will be the sad end of history. That is why we need another solution, without the Leviathan.

P: You are looking for the solution of a political and cultural peace without the Leviathan.

HH: If we do not take the risk of freedom, we take the risk of the Leviathan. It is a profoundly unstable regime, extremely oligarchic, concentrated, dictatorial. The dictatorship will have to rely on a kind of planetary and omniscient “Stalin,” with the right to life or death on any human being. Let us be sure that utilitarianism can justify everything, even the worst, in the name of the good. This supposes the injection of a culture of powerlessness upon the planetary people. It is necessary to develop egoism in order to kill courage. It is necessary to fear death in order to favor materialism. It is necessary to suppress all morals and laws in order to make the crimes of the Leviathan seem normal. It is necessary to fear everything in order to cling to the Leviathan as the one who will save us.

P: All current transgressions are justified in the name of the good. Western elites do not present themselves as villains who would like tyranny, on the contrary.

HH: I am not thinking only of Western or Westernized elites. I am a philosopher and my book is neither a political position nor a geopolitical interpretation. I think that any leader, both powerful and influential in the world, is tempted by the Leviathan solution. The Leviathan is not necessarily a conscious and assumed project; it is in any case an objective dynamic that unfolds, as long as the culture remains unchanged, and which can in this framework be seen as the lesser evil. If we want to avoid the Leviathan, preserving the pluralism of states is necessary, because it is the only way to ensure the division of powers. It is also the only way to have a basis for social justice and regulation. Of course, states remain rivals, with their various ambitions, their greed too. But these States, because of the danger of the Leviathan, must be able, individually, to renounce the universal Empire, whose concrete figure is the Leviathan, and, collectively, to take on the function of Empire.

P: However, one can imagine a strong resistance of the people to the Leviathan.

HH: In order to resist an excess of power or exploitation, one needs a coil—to reduce this resistance, one needs to break this coil. This is why the Leviathan must reduce the intellectual and moral strength of individuals and peoples to a minimum. It must intoxicate the masses with a “culture of impotence”: all sorts of nonsense, even monstrosities, but it must remain unharmed. Indeed, if the Leviathan’s elite began to believe in the nonsense it inoculated into the people in order to subdue them, the Leviathan would reduce itself to impotence.

For the Leviathan to exist and last, it needs a caste of hard, rational, ruthless, cruel, immoral men at its head, who are in solidarity with each other. But how to believe that beings armed with such a culture and endowed with such a psychic apparatus will be able to live in peace without devouring each other? The Leviathan cannot keep its promises of peace. We therefore need to find a culture of peace and a political system without the Leviathan, allowing a world balance, a kind of planetary civilization which does not fall into the absurdities we know. For this, we must start from what exists. The religions and wisdoms that have lost the initiative in relation to the philosophy of the Enlightenment must take the initiative again, now that the Enlightenment has gone mad.

P: However, religions themselves can cause wars.

HH: Of course, religions can cause war. Men fight for an interest, which can be material or moral, i.e., political and economic, or cultural. God, or the Absolute, being the supreme Good, religion or wisdom is also, by definition, a supreme interest. Why should men fight for oil or a piece of territory, but not for the very meaning of life? The more necessary the goal seems, the more man is theoretically inclined to use all means to reach it.

P: When Cavanaugh says that there are no wars for religious reasons, but that all so-called religious wars have a political, cultural or economic underpinning he seems to be reasoning against reality.

HH: Most wars have three aspects: economic, political and cultural. In the term “cultural,” I include the religious dimension. The so-called “religious wars” therefore always have both political and economic dimensions. When, in the 16th century, the English nobility seized the property of the Church, or when the German princes strengthened their independence in relation to the Germanic Emperor, it was not primarily out of religious sentiment. In spite of this, fighting for a metaphysical good is possible, because it touches on the absolute, an absolute for which men are willing to die. To pose the problem well and to be able to solve it, it is necessary to universalize the notion of war of religions and to speak about wars of cultures. Thus, the wars between ideologies born of the Enlightenment, although they do not have a motive that would normally be qualified as “religious,” are nevertheless battles waged for what seems to have an absolute value. These wars of ideologies have probably caused more deaths than all the religious wars. However, if religions can be a factor of wars, they can also be a factor of peace.

P: How can religions be a factor of peace and also bring part of the solution to the problem of war, and thus spare us the advent of the Leviathan?

HH: If we take into account and respect a factor of personal freedom in adherence to the truth, religion automatically leaves the logic of war. For peace to reign, a formula of equity must be found, a way of sharing power, authority, wealth, territories, natural resources, etc. This is why most of the great wisdoms and religions are capable of making an extremely positive contribution to the definition of a kind of global social pact of equity.

I am not at all sure that the current Western formulas, which are liberal extremisms, can achieve anything other than instituting selfishness and war. It would be absurd to deny the potential or actual frictions between the various wisdoms and religions; for they exist, as between the various modern ideologies. However, a very new fact has appeared—from now on, we see the Leviathan emerging; and we know that, if religions allow themselves the luxury of wars between religions, they will all “die.” Indeed, the Leviathan has two ways to impose itself against religions: to divide them in order to throw them against each other, or to dissolve them in a relativistic syncretism.

P: A kind of universal and humanitarian soft religion?

HH: Yes. Religions will be tolerated if they manufacture impotence; but they will nevertheless remain suspect, under surveillance. The important thing is that they produce power for the Leviathan and powerlessness for the citizens. The situation being what it is, with the Leviathan on the horizon, either religions will show exceptional stupidity and will be dissolved by harshly opposing each other, or they will find what I call “a non-relativistic understanding” based on a culture of philia, excluding armed struggle and discrimination, but not excluding proselytizing and conversions.

P: So, you believe that friendship between religions is possible.

HH: Yes, this philia is the natural law itself, which allows a decent public order. Natural law proposes a system of virtues, a golden rule, universal ethical principles, even if we justify them differently by our metaphysical and religious beliefs. I believe that this can work.

P: This assumes, however, that this culture of philia is shared by the different religions. Do you think, for example, that contemporary Islam, as reaffirmed since the early 1990s, could adhere to this this principle of philia?

HH: There are two options: either we practice this philia without denying ourselves, that is to say, by following our conscience and continuing to seek the Truth; or this philia is a dream, a utopia, and there will be no alternative to the Leviathan. This is my conviction.

P: For the Islamists, the West still represents Christianity, a land to be conquered.

HH: Any intelligent person who opens his eyes knows that the West is no longer Christianity, and that the present Western powers have practically nothing Christian left. As for wanting to conquer seven billion people with 5% of a billion and no up-to-date military technology, this is nonsense. This is what the Egyptian president Al Sissi once said.

P: For religions to cooperate, they would have to recognize a common enemy of sorts.

HH: The Leviathan is obviously this common enemy, which is at once a pure concept, an objective dynamic and a real potential for power. Faced with this enemy, an alliance of non-relativistic religions and wisdoms and of nations, excluding the universal Empire. If to this is added a philosophical progress which takes us out of modernity and postmodernity, but which is at the same time traditional and ultramodern, then yes, at this moment, we can hope to live an era of peace and freedom.

P: So, you include the religious question in what you call, in your book, “cultural peace.” In this perspective, Catholics fear that Christianity is moving from a reasonable humanism to an unreasonable, almost naive humanitarianism, and that interreligious dialogue is accelerating a kind of post-Christian decomposition within Christianity, even within the Catholic Church itself.

HH: If you have faith, if you believe that God is God, that Christ is truly the Son of God, that He is seated at the right hand of the Father, that He will reign in glory, you can perfectly well go to your Buddhist or Muslim neighbor and talk to him. Knowing each other is important, so that we don’t get the wrong idea about each other, without deluding ourselves about others and ourselves. Since we have the choice between surviving together or dying together, we must learn to talk to each other.

Father Bertrand de Margerie, a Jesuit theologian, a very good man whom I knew well, wrote a book entitled, Liberté religieuse et règne du Christ (Religious Freedom and the Reign of Christ). He thought that religious liberty, properly understood, was the best way to establish the reign of Jesus Christ in the future. However, without this freedom, clashes between religions or wisdoms are most likely and the Leviathan will prosper by capitalizing on these conflicts. Yet it is by taking into account the dimension of personal freedom in the religious act that a religion can extract itself from a logic of war.

You will tell me, of course, that this or that religion gives less importance to personal freedom and seems fatalistic. But one should not caricature. You will also find Augustinian texts which will give you the impression that Saint Augustine was a fatalist and that he does not really believe in human freedom because Grace does everything. But the praxis of man shows that he is nevertheless aware of his own will and of a certain capacity for self-determination. This is part of the universal human experience. If you want freedom, and if you want to save your soul and not end up as a slave of the Leviathan, you have to get out of a logic of religious war.

You ask me if I believe that the Leviathan will impose itself. I answer that it has a reasonable chance of success. But I also think that the future is very open. The more the postmodern West loses control of the world with reason, and the more diverse Asia remains, the less chance the Leviathan has in the short and medium term. The problem will undoubtedly arise again in a hundred years, but in very different terms and circumstances.

P: My hypothesis is that the extraordinary technical power on which the Leviathan relies is inseparable from economic reality. It is therefore a techno-market reality, a power of technique and money that exercises a form of tyranny. In this context, what is likely to prevent the triumph of the Leviathan is the collapse of technical civilization, as the collapsologists tell us.

HH: To the question “Will the world destroy itself?” Zhu Xi answered: “Men will one day reach such a degree in the absence of the Way, that they will fight each other, giving rise to a new chaos during which men and other beings will disappear to the very last.” Very dark perspective, but very profound. Technology however is not in itself a monstrosity.

P: In itself no, but we are reaching technical levels that are becoming monstrous.

HH: What is monstrous is not the great power of man, it is the decorrelation between science and philosophy, between technology and spiritual reality. For example, we do not see that the human body is a “body of spirit” and we treat it as if it were only a machine without a soul. It is true that, if this decorrelation persists, the future state of technology, in the next centuries, will be absolutely monstrous. More likely, History will have come to an end, despite the Leviathan’s promise of immortality, and especially because of the Leviathan’s inability to keep his promises. To re-establish the correlation, it will be a Cultural revolution which will not block technology, but will humanize it radically and will make it, paradoxically, infinitely more efficient by avoiding most of its perverse effects. But this is impossible without a return, in grace and in strength, of religions and wisdoms.

P: Nevertheless, there remains the hypothesis of an impossible control. At a certain level of sophistication of technology and the means it offers, notably in terms of absolute control of social life, it can become impossible to resist it by wisdom, by culture and politics. The task is perhaps too complex because the temptations are too powerful to resist.

HH: This is unfortunately possible, but it is always possible to hope with reason, because evil is always self-destructive. The will to power, carried to its paroxysm, wants its own death, which frees us when all seems lost. Like the scorpion that stings itself. A dark future is therefore not at all written, and we can try, with a reasonable hope, which can also be supernatural, with all that is humanly possible, to give back to our world, and particularly to the West, the cradle of modern technology, a culture and a philosophy worthy of the name. A humanized technology, too. A non-reductive, humanistic science. I believe that that is the urgent work, both necessary and possible.

Wokism: The Engine of War in Ukraine and Poland

LGBTIQ+ propaganda is developing in Poland under the influence of American show business, but also because of Ukraine and the internal tensions that the war there is causing in Poland.

On December 31, 2022, like every year since 2016, Poland organized a big New Year’s concert in the city of Zakopane with international stars. On this occasion, the public television channel TVP, which was broadcasting the event, betrayed its conservative editorial line and caused a scandal by allowing the invited American rap group Black Eyed Peas to wear LGBTIQ+ armbands on stage. LGBTIQ+ propaganda is developing in Poland under the influence of American show business, but also because of Ukraine and the internal tensions that the war in Ukraine is causing in Poland, as Polish President Andrzej Duda mentioned, in justifying the veto of the Czarnek Law.

Between 2004 and 2014, Ukraine was the scene of two color revolutions that boosted what used to be known as leftism and is now called Wokism, i.e., the defense of ethno-cultural and LGBTIQ+ mixing. The main actors in this morality revolution are George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, but also NATO, the armed wing of globalism, which also advocates “inclusive diversity” and “open society.” Thus, shortly after the Orange Revolution in the winter of 2004-2005, the Ukrainian government began to take steps to encourage massive non-European immigration to Ukraine and to re-educate Ukrainians to accept it more readily.

Among other initiatives, in 2007, the Ukrainian authorities launched an “anti-racist” social engineering program, under the name of the Diversity Initiative, with the support of the UN and its International Office for Migration (IOM). This population replacement policy, also implemented by the European Union, was supported by many Ukrainians who hoped to integrate into it and join the modern West, and its ethnomasochism.

This Ukrainian identity suicide was only stopped by the Russian military intervention, launched on February 24, 2022. However, cosmopolitanism in Ukraine continues to affect the paramilitary units, comprising Islamists waging their “holy war” against Russia, since the beginning of hostilities in 2014, with the endorsement of Kiev and NATO. The latest of these combat groups to come to the aid of Ukrainian nationalists is called the Turan Battalion, a reference to the Turkic-speaking world, and is composed mostly of Asian Muslims.

The second strand of Wokism took hold in Ukraine right after EuroMaidan, the coup d’état in the winter of 2013-2014, which allowed the new power to enshrine the whole LGBTIQ+ legal arsenal in Ukrainian law. This led to the legalization of Gay Pride in several cities, but also to the strange phenomenon of the “LGBTIQ+ soldiers,” who recruit homosexuals and transgender people willing to fight against Russia, and are organized in the Union of LGBTIQ+ Military of Ukraine sponsored by the US embassy, as can be seen on their website. More anecdotal, but nevertheless typical of the mix of genres that characterizes the era—no longer a Marilyn Monroe whom the US empire sends on tour as part of its soft power to support troop morale and the war effort—but a Ukrainian transvestite, Verka Serdutchka, whose real name is Andriy Danylko, to sing “Goodbye Russia!” with his glitzy band that evokes the world of Drag Queens.

Across the border, Poles are beginning to understand what is happening in the neighboring Ukrainian pandemonium, and the hell the Brussels regime is dragging them into—the EU and NATO together. Of course, not without some caution, lest they be accused of being “Russian spies,” but something is happening in Polish public opinion beyond the rather narrow circles of anti-globalist organizations like Rodacy Kamraci, Falanga, Zmiana or Konfederacja. A strong current of opposition to the war is emerging—equally opposed to Wokism—of which Leszek Sykulski’s Stop Amerykanizacji Polski movement and the January 21, 2023 demonstration in Warsaw are only the first steps.

Symptomatic of this evolution of mentalities in Poland is that on October 13, 2022, the Catholic media outlet Polonia Christiana commented on an article in the digital newspaper Do Rzeczy [The Essential] about the progression of the LGBTIQ+ collective in Ukraine, including in nationalist (Banderite) circles, which we translate below.

“Kiev prefers to sign a pact with the Western left rather than fall victim to Moscow’s imperialism. That is why Ukrainian patriotism increasingly adopts rainbow colors. And so do the Neo-Banderites,” writes Maciej Pieczyński in the weekly Do Rzeczy.”

The journalist points out that a part of the Polish right wing fears that Ukraine, under Western influence, will become an “outpost of globalism,” a “bastion of leftism” in these latitudes.

In the opinion of the circles cited by the editor, the main cause of the war in Ukraine was EuroMaidan, a revolution to defend the pro-Western course of the country. “Ukrainians are perhaps the only nation in the world where people have died for the European Union with the slogan ‘Ukraine in Europe!” (Україна—це Європа!) on their lips. Russia attacked to make this course impossible.

“Does this mean that in Ukraine there is a war between, on the one hand, the alliance of globalism and left-liberalism and, on the other hand, conservatism? Moscow would very much like Ukrainian and Western conservatives (including Poles) to believe in this simplistic view,” Pieczyński remarks.

Pieczyński recalls that homosexual relations were forbidden in the USSR and that Ukraine was the first of the former Soviet republics to repeal this ban. Despite the adoption by the country’s authorities in 1996 of a law in which marriage was defined as “the union of a man and a woman,” since EuroMaïdan there has been in Ukraine a clear “left turn” on this issue, a turn for which the former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko is particularly responsible, who “publicly declared,” Pieczyński continues, “that he had nothing against a Gay Pride in Kiev…. In response to a request from opponents of the parade, he stated that he shared their concern, but that his intention was to build a tolerant, democratic and European society in Ukraine.”

Maciej Pieczyński then notes that, at the beginning of his term, President Zelensky did not take a clear stance on LGBTIQ+ ideology. But this changed with the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“While in Russia,” Pieczyński continues, “propaganda of homosexuality is not allowed, in Ukraine the rainbow ideology is seeping even into the ranks of the army. Already in 2018, an NGO called LGBTIQ+ Soldiers was established on the Dnieper River to provide support for non-heterosexual soldiers.”

In foreign policy, nothing is free, and Ukraine, which absolutely needs the support of the West and longs to be welcomed into Western living rooms, must prove that it adheres to the same values of Wokism that prevail in the West.

Lucien Cerise, PhD in philosophy, writes from France, where he lives high up in a maid’s room and works in the basement of the BNF. This article appears courtesy of El Manifesto.

Featured: The insignia of the Union of LGBTIQ+ Military of Ukraine (a mythical creature for more make-belief?)

Ukraine: Part Two of the Great Reset

We indeed live in perilous times, when our politicians exuberantly want war, as if it were a grand adventure, as if it were a breath of excitement in the glut of their moneyed lives. None of them will ever march off and shoot a gun, nor will their children. They’ll tell us to do that. To them belongs the rhetoric of war. To us belongs the blood and misery, as we shoulder arms and go off to kill or be killed.

Given the war-hysteria, to speak of peace is now akin to treason. Peace is Russian propaganda.

Suddenly, the phrase “World War Three” is all the hoopla, repeated by both the doomsayers who await the “collapse of civilization” and those who can’t wait to see the destruction of arch-enemies like Russia. It is as if everyone imagines that, God-forbid, such a war actually does come about that they will be happily ensconced in front of their computers shooting out snappy comments below “important” articles, or on threads on social media.

One of the direst mental illusions that now pervades modern life is to forever live in world of make-belief, while those who refuse to go along are made to submit by force of law. Just try openly denying the transgendered their chosen sexual identity/preference, and you’ll see how “free” you are. Such has been the savage legacy of technology. It was supposed to be that everyone staring at a screen was liberated, democratized. Instead, the screen has turned into a cruel manacle, wherein humanity can only be understood through “virtual interaction,” where life must mirror online narratives.

Therefore, war is a video game, in which we can all participate. Thus, there is no end to “expertise,” as keyboard Clausewitzes declaim this strategy or that—just Google it

But why do our politicians want war? Is it about money, about feeding the Military Industrial Complex (MIC)? Is it about ego, or fulfilling some agenda that the rest of us can only guess at (aka, “conspiracy theories”)? The answers are legion and myriad.

But we are also seeing that massive change is afoot—and none of it is for the better. That which once constituted ordinary life has been relegated to the “crime” department, from the way we move about (the war on petroleum and personal ownership of cars), to where and how we live (the 15-Minute City) to what we eat (more bugs to reduce carbon emissions), and even what our money even now means (guaranteed income).

And the lie behind it all is a cruel joke—all this “change” is to make our lives better. “You’ll own nothing and be happy,” because ownership of any kind is a source of misery, and our politicians do not want us miserable. They want to free us up so we can truly pursue “life,” “liberty” and “happiness” to wherever it may lead us.

And this brings us back to the make-belief—that delusional habit that we’ve all developed by spending most of our waking hours staring at one screen or another, while the world is managed by others who know better. It’s no joke running a country, people like to say—yes, but why are more and more clowns running countries? So much for rhetorical questions.

It’s bread (guaranteed income) and circuses (more and more screen time). No one will complain. The purpose of life is to be pampered by the likes of Soros, Gates and Schwab.

We can all easily recall with what fervor politicians pushed the Covid scam that made the vaccines mandatory. “Sure,” they said, “you are free to refuse our vaccine, but we’ll make sure you’ll never board a plane or a train, and we’ll see that you get fired from your job for being unvaxed.” We all heard rants to this effect from those that ruled over us during the height of the scamdemic.

Then, Herr Schwab, told us that Covid was a great opportunity to bring about the Great Reset (as explained in his boring and really badly written book—who has the time or the inclination to give it a thorough scything).

Sadly, billions complied and got the vax, plus the various boosters—and now live in perpetual fear of “died suddenly.”

History shows us that after each war (no matter how small), there are always far-reaching social and economic changes.

Then, after Covid, along came February 24, 2022, when Ukraine, the most corrupt country on the continent of Europe, was suddenly given “hero” status. Western populations, battered by Covid hysteria, now were given something to be “proud” of, something to rally around. After the cudgel, the lollipop. And true to form, the screen-staring hordes dutifully waved the duo-colored Ukrainian flag.

To complete the theatrical effect, the president of Ukraine (a place that many still would be hard-pressed to locate on a map, were it not for Goggle on their phones) donned a “unform” of sorts to appear like a “real” freedom-fighter, because he’s the next Yassar Arafat or Fidel Castro. No doubt, Zelensky will keep wearing the costume until he “frees” his country from the Orcs (aka, the Russians). He’s the perfect meme of what we have become—followers (to borrow a phrase from “social” media).

Only make-belief is reality—only that which will get the most likes, the most clicks, the most retweets truly matters. Only make-belief can now be truth. Yes, men can have babies. The science is settled on that. Zelensky is hero. He’s wearing a hero-outfit. He’s good guy because he dresses like one.

Meanwhile, those whom we have let manage our lives are using the war in Ukraine (for “freedom” and “democracy”) as Part Two of the Great Reset (Part One, for those still not paying attention, was the politics of the Covid response).

Because all wars bring massive change, this one in Ukraine will touch each and everyone of us. In wars, there is the one constant—the “democracy” of suffering. And the suffering is piled in front of us: strange food shortages, unimaginable national debt, the constant demand on us to give up more and more of what we deem normal, the weaponization of minority groups against the majority Western populations, rigged elections, endless coercion to accept all kinds of perversions, the rapacity of criminals set free among us because their crimes are no longer crimes but expressions of their historical “oppression,” and this list can go on and on.

So, again, what is this war in Ukraine all about? The Great Reset. This is why politicians are in it, tooth and nail, and will fork over any amount of money, and will eventually send in troops (i.e., us, not them), and let’s not forget the nukes. Because the entire point of the West now is that it exists to tear everything down, in order to “build back better.” The important part of this sinister phrase is “build back.” You can only build back from destruction. There can be no building back from what already exists and is working fine. Why fix it if it ain’t broke, But breaking first everything is precisely the point—because afterwards comes the great salvation, the building back into a bright Utopia, the Great Reset, where people can be “farmed” for better management of natural resources.

Russia alone has said “No!” to the Great Reset. And that makes it the Great Villain, and this why the demons that now rule over are frothing in rage against it.

The war in Ukraine is Step Two towards our Great Enslavement.

This is why no Western politician currently holding office dare mention the word “peace”—because to say “peace” means that the Great Reset is useless and nothing needs building back. All of this is being done for you. Once Russia is destroyed, you will live a “better” life.

Are you ready to give it your all? Or, it is time to abandon our prodigality and come home to reality? It truly is all in our hands.

Thane Angus writes from a small northern Canadian town.

Featured: The Return of the Prodigal Son (Powrót syna marnotrawnego), by Jacek Malczewski; painted in 1923.

George Soros’ Last Speech: Wars of the “Open Society,” and Climate as a Combatant

Soros’ Testament

On February 16, 2023, George Soros, one of the chief ideologists and practitioners of globalism, unipolarity and the preservation of Western hegemony at all costs, gave a speech in Germany, at the Munich Security Conference, which can be called a landmark.

The 93-year-old Soros summarized the situation in which he found himself at the end of his life, entirely devoted to the struggle of the “open society” against its enemies, the “closed societies,” according to the precepts of his teacher Karl Popper. If Hayek and Popper are the Marx and Engels of liberal globalism, Popper is his Lenin. Soros may look extravagant at times, but on the whole, he openly articulates what have become the main trends in world politics. His opinion is much more important than Biden’s inarticulate babbling, or Obama’s demagoguery. All liberals and globalists end up doing exactly what Soros says. He is the EU, MI6, the CIA, the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, Macron, Scholz, Baerbock, Saakashvili, Zelensky, Sandu, Pashinyan, and just about everyone who stands for the West, liberal values, the Postmodern and so-called “progress” in one way or another. Soros is important. And this speech is his message to the “Federal Assembly” of the world—that is an admonition to all the endless agents of the globalists, both sleeping and awakened.

Soros begins by saying that the situation in the world is critical. In it he immediately identifies two main factors:

  • The clash of two types of government (“open society” vs. “closed society”), and
  • climate change

The climate we will talk about later; the climate is the end of his speech. But the clash of two types of government, in fact the two “camps,” the supporters of a unipolar world (Schwab, Biden, the Euro-bureaucracy and their regional satellites, like the Zelensky terrorist regime) and the supporters of a multi-polar world hold prime place in his speech. Let us examine Soros’ theses in order.

Open and Closed: Fundamental Definitions

Soros provides definitions of “open” and “closed” societies. In the first, the State protects the freedom of the individual. In the second, the individual serves the interests of the State. In theory, this corresponds to the opposition of Western liberal democracy and traditional society (whatever that may be). Moreover, in international relations (IR), it corresponds exactly to the polemic between liberals in IR and realists in IR. At the level of geopolitics, it corresponds to the opposition between the “civilization of the Sea” and the “civilization of the Land.” The civilization of the Sea is a commercial society—oligarchy, capitalism, materialism, technical development, with the ideal of selfish, carnal pleasure. It is liberal democracy, the construction of politics from below, and the destruction of all traditional values—religion, state, estates, family, morality. The symbol of such a civilization is the ancient Phoenician Carthage, the pole of a huge, colonial, robber-slave empire, with the worship of the Golden Calf, the bloody cults of Moloch, the sacrifice of babies. Carthage was an “open society.”

It was opposed by Rome, the civilization of the land, a society based on honor, loyalty, sacred traditions, heroism of service and hierarchy, valor and continuity of the ancient generations. The Romans worshipped the luminous paternal gods of Heaven and squeamishly rejected the bloody, chthonic cults of sea pirates and merchants. We can think of this as a prototype of “closed societies,” true to their roots and origins.

Soros is (so far) the living embodiment of liberalism, Atlantism, globalism and Thalassocracy (“power through the Sea”). He is unequivocally for Carthage versus Rome. His formula, symmetrical to the saying of the Roman senator Cato the Elder, “Carthage must be destroyed,” is: “No, it is Rome that must be destroyed.” In our historical circumstances, we are talking about the “Third Rome. That is about Moscow. That is said and done. And Soros is creating an artificial opposition in Russia itself, organizing and supporting Russophobe regimes, parties, movements, non-governmental organizations, hostile to the authorities in all the CIS countries.

“Rome must be destroyed.” After all, “Rome” is a “closed society;” and “closed society” is the enemy of the”open society.” And enemies are to be destroyed. Otherwise, they will destroy you. A simple but clear logic, which the liberal globalist elites of the West, and their “proxies”-branches over all mankind, are guided by. And those in the West itself who disagree with Soros, such as Donald Trump and his voters, are immediately declared “Nazis,” discriminated against, “canceled.” Moreover, “Nazis” according to Soros are only those who oppose him. If a Ukrainian terrorist with a swastika and arms up to his elbows in blood stands against Rome, he is no longer a “Nazi,” but simply: “they are children.” And whoever is for Rome is definitely a Nazi. Whether Trump, whether Putin, whether Xin Jiang Ping. Dual Manichean logic; but that is what the modern global elites are guided by.

Those Who Hesitate

Having divided the two camps, Soros then addressed those regimes which are in the middle, between Carthage (the USA and its satellites), close to his heart, and Rome (Moscow and its satellites), which he loathes. Such is Modi’s India, which, on the one hand, joined the Atlanticist QUAD alliance (Carthage) and, on the other hand, is actively buying Russian oil (in cooperation with Rome).

Such is the case with Erdogan’s Turkey. Turkey is both a NATO member and, at the same time, a hardliner against the Kurdish terrorists that Soros actively supports. Erdogan should, in Soros’ mind, be destroying his own state with his own hands—then he would be a complete “good guy;” that is, on the side of the “open society.” In the meantime, Erdogan and Modi are “Nazis by half.” Unobtrusively, Soros suggests overthrowing Modi and Erdogan and causing bloody chaos in India and Turkey. So “half-closed-half-open” societies will become fully “open.” No wonder Erdogan does not listen to such advice; and if he hears it, he does just the opposite. Modi is beginning to understand this as well. But not so clearly.

The same choice between slavish obedience to the global liberal oligarchy, i.e., “open society,” and the preservation of sovereignty or participation in multipolar blocs (such as BRICS), under the threat of bloody chaos in case of disobedience of the globalists, Soros gives to the recently re-elected leftist president of Brazil, Inacio Lula. He draws a parallel between the January 6, 2021 Trumpist uprising in Washington and the January 8th riots by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Soros warns Lula: “Do like Biden, and Carthage will support you. Otherwise…” Since Soros is known for his active support of “color revolutions” (in favor of “open society”) and his direct help to terrorists of all stripes, only to have them attack Rome, that is “closed societies,” his threats are not empty words. He is capable of overthrowing governments and presidents, collapsing national currencies, starting wars and carrying out coups d’etat.

Ukraine: The Main Outpost of Liberal Hegemony in the Fight Against Multipolarity

Soros then med on to the war in Ukraine. Here he claims that by the fall of 2022 Ukraine had almost won the war against Russia, which, at the first stage, Soros’s deep-encrypted agents in Russia itself were apparently holding back against the long overdue decisive action on the part of the Kremlin. But after October, something went wrong for Carthage. Rome carried out a partial mobilization; proceeded to destroy Ukraine’s industrial and energy infrastructure; that is, began to go to war for real.

Soros especially lingers at the figure of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group. According to Soros, Prigozhin was the decisive factor that turned the situation around. It is worth wondering, if a relatively small PMC, which undertook to fight “properly,” could change the balance in the great war of “closed societies” “against open ones” (and this assumes a global scale of combat operations in diplomacy, politics, economics, etc.), then who leads the actual Russian army as such? I would like to believe that Soros is wrong in his pursuit of flashy symbols. But, alas, he is too often right. Moreover, he knows what a small but cohesive group of passionaries is capable of doing. Supported by such groups, Soros has repeatedly carried out coups, won wars and overthrown unwanted political leaders. And when such passionaries are on the side of Rome, it is time to worry Carthage itself.

Soros went on to analyze the amount of military support for Kiev from the West and calls for it to be increased as much as necessary in order to defeat Russia for good. This would be the decisive victory of the “open society”—the crowning achievement of Soros’ life’s work and the achievement of the main goal of the globalists. Soros says bluntly—that the goal of the war in Ukraine is “the dissolution of the Russian empire.” For this purpose, it is necessary to gather all the forces and coerce all the CIS countries, especially Soros-dependent Maia Sandu, to join the war with Russia. Prigozhin should be eliminated, and his opponents, both internal and external, should be supported.

China, and the Balloon that Blew Everything Up

Soros then moved on to his second worst enemy, China, another “closed society. Soros believes that Xi Jinping has made strategic mistakes in the fight against covid (probably manufactured and injected into humanity on the direct orders of Soros himself and his like-minded “open society” to make it even more open to Big Pharma). Soros assesses Xi Jinping’s position as weakened and believes that, despite some improvement in relations with Washington, the story of the downed Chinese balloon will lead to a new cooling in relations. The Taiwan crisis is frozen, but not solved. If Russia is dealt with, then China will cease to be an impassable obstacle to an “open society,” and color revolutions can start there: ethnic uprisings, coups and terrorist acts—Soros knows how to do this, and has probably taught those who will remain after he himself is gone.

Trump as a Spokesman for a “Closed Society”

In the U.S. itself, Soros lashes out with curses at Trump, whom he considers a representative of a “closed society” that has adopted the role model of Vladimir Putin.

Soros dreams that neither Trump nor DeSantis will be nominated for president in 2024—but he will, as always, back up his dreams with action. This is another black mark from the World Government sent to the Republicans.

Soros as a Global Activist

Such is the map of the world, according to the outgoing George Soros. He has spent nearly 100 years of his life making it so. He played a role in the destruction of the socialist camp, in the anti-Soviet revolution of 1991, in destroying the Soviet Union and flooding the governments of the new post-Soviet countries with his agents. And in the 1990s, he completely controlled the Russian reformers and Yeltsin’s government, who loudly swore an oath to an “open society” at the time. Yes, Putin’s arrival snatched the final victory from him. And when this became obvious, Soros helped turn Ukraine into an aggressive Russophobic Nazi menagerie. It’s a bit at odds with the liberal dogma of an “open society;” but against such a dangerous “closed society” as the Russian Empire, it will do.

Everything is decided in Ukraine, says Soros. If Russia wins, it will push “open society” and global liberal hegemony far back. If it falls, woe to the losers. The Soros cause will then win for good. This is the geopolitical summary.

General “Warming”

But at the very beginning of the speech and at the very end of it, Soros turned to another factor that poses a threat to the “open society.” It is climate change.

How they came to be put on the same board with the great geopolitical and civilizational transformations, conflicts and confrontations is wittily explained in one Telegram channel, “Eksplikatsiya” (“Explanation”). Here is the whole explanation from there:

On February 16, 2023, a global speculator, a fanatical follower of the extremist ideology of “open society,” George Soros, gave a keynote speech in Germany at a forum on security issues. Much of it was devoted to geopolitics and the tough confrontation of the unipolar globalist liberal world order with what Soros and the world’s elites call “closed societies….”

I was interested, however, in how these geopolitical constructs relate in meaning to the problem of global warming, with which Soros began and how he ended his speech. Putting it all together, I came to the following conclusion. The melting ice of the Antarctic and the Arctic, along with Putin, Xin Jiang Ping, Erdogan, and Modi, are real threats to an open society; and the climate agenda is integrated directly into the geopolitical discourse and becomes a participant in the great confrontation.

At first glance, this seems a bit absurd. How a hypothetical global warming (even if we accept it as real) can be counted among the enemies of the globalists, and even get the status of “threat number 1,” since Soros declared the melting of the ice first and only second, Putin in the Kremlin and the Russian troops in Ukraine.

Here, we may be talking about the following. Recall that geopolitics teaches about the confrontation of “civilizations of the sea” and “civilizations of the land.” Accordingly, all the main centers of Atlantism are located in port cities, on the coast. This was the case with Carthage, Athens, Venice, Amsterdam, London, and today with New York. This law even extends to the electoral geopolitics of the United States, where the blue states that traditionally support the Democrats, including ultra-liberal New York, are located along both coasts, and the more traditional red Republican states, whose support brought Trump, George Soros’ chief enemy, to power, make up the American Heartland.

Roughly the same is true on other continents. It was the “civilization of the sea” that built that “open society,” which George Soros fervently defends, while the “closed societies,” opposed to it, are the civilizations of the Land, including the Russian-Eurasian, Chinese, Indian, Latin American, and even the North American (red states). So, if the ice melts, the level of the world’s oceans rises rapidly. And that means that the first to be submerged will be precisely the poles of world thalassocracy—the Rimland zone, the coastal spaces which are the strongholds of the global liberal oligarchy. In such a case, the open liberal society, also called “liquid society” (Sigmund Bauman) will simply be washed away; only “closed societies” will remain, located on the Hinterland—in the interior of the continents

The warming of the earth will make many cold areas, especially in northeastern Eurasia, fertile oases. In America, the only states left will be those that support Republicans. The Democrats will drown. And before that happens, the dying Soros announced his testament to the globalists: “it’s now or never”: either ‘open society’ wins today in Russia, China, India, Turkey, etc., which will allow the globalist elite to save themselves on the continents by moving into the interior regions, or the settled “open society” areas will end.

This is the only way to explain the obsession with climate change in the minds of globalists. No, they are not crazy! Not Soros, not Schwab, not Biden! Global warming, like “General Winter” once did, is becoming a factor in world politics, and it is now on the side of a multipolar world.

A very interesting explanation. It didn’t even cross my mind.

Soros as the Neural Network, and the Operating System of Rome

In conclusion, we should pay attention to the following. The words of George Soros, given who he is, what he is capable of and what he has already done, should not be taken lightly, that “the old financial speculator is out of his mind.” Soros is not just an individual but a kind of “Artificial Intelligence” of the Western liberal civilization. It is this code, this algorithm, upon which the whole structure of the global Western domination in the 20th century is built. Ideology is intertwined with economy, geopolitics with education, diplomacy with culture, secret services with journalism, medicine with terrorism, biological weapons with the ecological agenda, gender preferences with heavy industry and world trade. In Soros, we are dealing with an “open society” operating system where all answers, moves, steps and strategies are deliberately planned. New inputs are fed into a fine-tuned system that runs like clockwork, or rather like a supercomputer, a globalist neural network.

“A closed society,” that is, “we,” must build our own operating system, create our own codes and algorithms. It is not enough to say no to Soros and the globalists. It is necessary to proclaim something in return—and just as coherent, systemic, grounded, backed by resources and capabilities. In essence, such an Anti-Soros is Eurasianism and the Fourth Political Theory, a philosophy of a multipolar world and a full-fledged defense of sacred tradition and traditional values.

In the face of Soros, it is necessary not to justify, but to attack. And at all levels and in all spheres. Right down to the environment. If Soros thinks global warming is a threat, then global warming is our ally, just as “General Winter” once was. We should enlist global warming—this unidentified hyper-object—in the Wagner PMC, and give it a medal.

Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.

Victoria Nuland, or How the Cookie Crumbled

Ah, Vikki Nuland! Did ever Woman unite so many qualities, whether physical or moral? Those noble features, as though sprung from an ancient frieze, the shimmering ringlets, the tiny rows of teeth, that, were they not so sharp and jagged, were veritable pearls, the graceful walk like a ship breaking the waves, the grave, musical tones. Not to forget her understated elegance (who, pray, is the happy, happy tailor who may approach the august bosom with his pins?) of her attire, of her every thought and word.

Were Paris to return and judge a contest of the fairest public figure, even Prof. Dr. Sahra Wagenknecht, or the polemicist Elsa Mittmansgruber, reputed to be amongst Europe’s most beautiful women, would cut a most sorry figure.

But let not beauty blind us to Miss Nuland’s intelligence and clear judgment!

So refreshing was Miss Nuland’s frankness in the Nord Stream tempest in a teapot that one might all too easily forget her masterful role in the little matter of the murder of Ambassador Stevens at Benghazi. In the old days, was it a century or so ago? the French press noted:

(Nuland’s) interlocutors reveal unmistakably their true concerns in the course of their e-mail exchanges; for example… that one must avoid all impression that the State Department had underestimated warnings from the CIA on terrorist threats in Eastern Libya.

An e-mail from Victoria Nuland states that [certain talking points] ‘could be abused by members (of Congress) to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned.’“

As the correspondence moves on, the language is altered, to the point that a “Light” version acceptable to all emerges:

All reference to Al-Qaida is struck out.

All reference to eventual implication of the Islamist group Ansar Al-Charia disappears.

The text no longer refers to the quantity of arms and experienced fighters present in Libya.

The reference to the many warnings and reports drafted by the CIA prior to the attack and the risk of an incident owing to extremists being present at Benghazi and in the East, vanishes completely.

Now, THAT deserves promotion for a Vikki who knows where the monkey sleeps, and how to shovel under his droppings. It goes without saying that one would not dream of quoting from a nasty piece designed to dissuade Joe Biden from appointing her Under-Secretary of State, but then again, we might.

The muscle for Nuland’s $5 billion coup was Oleh Tyahnybok’s neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and the shadowy new Right Sector militia. During her leaked phone call, Nuland referred to Tyahnybok as one of the “big three” opposition leaders on the outside who could help the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Yatsenyuk on the inside. This is the same Tyanhnybok who once delivered a speech applauding Ukrainians for fighting Jews and “other scum” during World War II.” (Cf. Another little reminder from the Old Days in the French press).

Amongst Vikki’s many talents is of course her ability to choose a spouse, the Neo-Con Robert Kagan, an entourage, and thus to know how far back in modern history one need turn, for guidance in dealing with the ectoplasmic, eternal, ineffable enemy, Russia.

Alfred Rosenberg or Adolf Hitler? An Embarrassment of Riches?

Cutting it short, as we are all so terribly busy in these times of war, allow us to quote a few lines from Nicolas Werthe’s 1990, Histoire de l’URSS, starting at page 326. (One could tootle about fitting in You Know Who for “Germany” and replacing the term USSR by Russia but why deconstruct the obvious, as Seymour Hersh might say?):

As Hitler saw it, invading the USSR was not simply a military gambit. His aims were specific: liquidating Bolshevism, destroying the Soviet State, conquering vital areas to the East where Germany could move in as colonizer… Hitler considered Bolshevism to be a Great Russian and Jewish phenomenon, two equally-despicable epithets. He believed in an eternal struggle between the Teuton and the Slav, a struggle wherein Russia, no matter her political regime, was a threat to Germany. Furthermore, he considered the Slavic race to be inferior, for which reason all form of political organization was to be liquidated in Russia, forever. Slaves need no State.

As for Alfred Rosenberg, the Ostpolitik’s theoretician (A. Rosenberg), who headed the Ostministerium from 17th July 1941… his theses were more nuanced… His origins were in the Baltic States; he saw sharp racial and cultural differences between the USSR’s peoples… and suggested that the Russians be isolated, roped into their ‘historical territory” of Muscovy and walled-in by non-Russian nations (the Ukraine, the Baltic States, the Caucasus) whose State and Governmental structures were to be tightly run from Germany.

There was also a third tendency, in addition to Hitler who objected to any compromise with the USSR’ s peoples of any stripe, and to Rosenberg’s selective approach; this third tendency was for a time backed by General Jodl: the Soviet authorities had to be split from the people, whose discontent, especially amongst the peasantry, was to be leveraged…

In turn, and quite incoherently, the Nazis tried all three approached to the problem of the ‘East territories.

Germany’s Ostpolitik having shewn itself to be such a resounding triumph, Vikki and Friends have opted to deploy all three approaches at one and the same time. Where there’s a War, There’s a Way!

The kicker: although Vikki is notoriously contemptuous of Europe, she has nonetheless made Brussels, or perhaps its NATO HQ, her home, according to Wikipedia, alongside the Kagan. Would the magnet be the city’s famed restaurants? Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean?

Which begs the question: thanks to the bombing of Nord Stream and Vikki’s War, eating one’s fill in Europe costs an arm and a leg, whereas the Kagan bellies are reassuringly well-upholstered. Heigh-ho! What is the couple’s monthly revenue, and Who pays for What? As Private Eye would have said, in its glory days, We should be told.

Cf Michael Tracey’s remarkable piece, and Professor John Mearsheimer, very recently, on the USA’s “upcoming” war on China.

Post Scriptum: Michael Tracey, now attending the Munich Security Conference, has just looked up the US Government Manual from Vikki’s Early Days. The Vice-President was Dick Cheney. Vikki was his Principal Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs: “There cannot be enough reminders given of who’s actually running US foreign policy. From the US Government Manual circa 2004.”

Mendelssohn Moses is a Paris-based writer.

The Indictment of the Good Guys of the West

Part 1: The Leadership of the Good Guys in the West. Three Decades of Achievement. The Law of the Strongest

In all the conflicts that have shaken history, there have always been the good guys against absolute evil. At least, this is what emerges from the great political declarations and from the media, with its therapy via sledgehammer, when it comes to the two opposing camps. At the end of a conflict, history is written by the winner. The victor often brings his opponents before a court to condemn and execute the leaders of the losing side. Good and evil are then perfectly identified in the eyes of history.

The war in Ukraine is no exception to this universal rule. If one believes the Western politicians and media, expressing themselves in perfect connivance, the good guys are on our side, that is, USA-EU-NATO-G7, while the bad guys are those opposing us, whoever they might be.

As far as I am concerned, the political and media diet of dubious narratives is far from sufficient for me to form an opinion as to which is the good side. I prefer to refer to the achievements of the good side over a few decades and to verify that this side is, in fact, led by commendable people, before giving my opinion.

It is this analysis, carried out since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that I propose to share with you, below.

The alleged good guys are today led by an elite with political and moral practices that are questionable, to say the least.

None of my readers will dispute that the so-called “good guys” are today led by the United States of America. The governance of the “good guys” is thus ensured today by a small American elite, which it is up to us to evaluate.

In three very short videos, let’s get to know some very characteristic specimens of the leadership of these “good guys” of ours.

1. During a conference in San Francisco in 2007, well before Maïdan and the crisis that followed, the US General Wesley Clark, former commander-in-chief of NATO, introduces us, in five minutes, to the “nice neoconservatives” of the United States and their “Project for a New Century of American Hegemony.” This project is a very aggressive one which promises regime changes, wars, chaos in several countries, in order to place these countries in the US orbit. The Russophobic side of the project does not easily escape a listener of good faith, even though Russia was not in a position to pose any problem at the time:

Is this the leadership of the good guys?

2. In 22 seconds, Madeleine Albright, a kindly neo-conservative US Secretary of State at the time, assumed the death of 500,000 Iraqi children on American television, saying: “It was a difficult choice but it was worth it.” Realizing with hindsight that she had just said an enormous thing, she apologized a few hours later, but her true nature had been expressed without shame and without compunction in front of the camera:

It is necessary to remind the uninitiated that during the First Gulf War in 1991, a war conducted with the approval of the UN, but in fact under a false pretext, proven today, (the affair of the incubators in Kuwait), the American-British forces dropped depleted uranium on Iraq, resulting in the death of tens of thousands of Iraqis subjected to the embargo on medicines:

Is this the leadership of the good guys?

Sure, Madeleine Albright has gone to join her master Lucifer in hell and is therefore no longer in a position to harm humanity, but her spiritual daughter, the gentle neoconservative Victoria Nuland, made famous by her heartfelt cry of “F*** the EU,” and by her magnificent 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine, for a mere $5 billion, has risen to replace her at US Foreign Affairs:

Is this the leadership of the good guys?

3. On April 15, 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a startling statement to students at Texas A&M University. “I was director of the CIA and we lied, cheated, stole. It was like we had entire training courses to learn how to do it. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment”:

Is this the leadership of the good guys? Very free and easy, in any case.

The political and moral perversity of the small neo-conservative elite in the United States, which holds the real power in the USA and therefore leads the “US-EU-NATO-G7” good guys, has no limits.

But let’s now take a quick look at the main achievements of these “good guys” over the last three decades.

Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the main achievements of the so-called “Good Guys” have been calamitous and bloody for the planet.

We will limit ourselves to five episodes that the reader should remember.

I. The Fake Graves in Timisoara

In April 1989, the fake mass grave in Timisoara served as a catalyst for the Romanian revolution. A false narrative, repeated for six weeks by the Western media dog-pack, succeeded in bringing down the last communist regime in Eastern Europe. The media then apologized for “their mistake,” but the coup was a winner. This type of deceptive narrative, aimed at winning the decision, soon became the rule in the Western media landscape.

The concerted and “dog-pack” action of the mainstream media was thereafter facilitated by an ever-increasing concentration of said media in the hands of a few billionaires of neo-conservative and globalist persuasion. Those who control opinion through manipulation and emotion will end up controlling the world:

Of course, this revolution in Romania was not terrible in terms of loss of life (1,100 dead and 3,300 wounded), but what was calamitous was this evolution of the Western media landscape towards more and more lies, manipulations, and its concentration in the hands of a few, with the aim of taking and keeping control of the populations by making them swallow anything.

It is a sad evolution which has more than ever put wind in the sails of the good guys, to the great satisfaction of the politicians in power.

II. The First Iraq War of 1990-1991

This was begun under the false pretext of the “Kuwait incubators,” conceived and implemented by the CIA, and under the real pretext of the invasion of Kuwait

On July 25, 1990, Saddam Hussein met with the American ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie. Duplicity or not, she was well aware of what was being prepared (“we see that you have amassed a large number of troops on the border”) and suggested that the United States would not intervene in a conflict between two Arab countries. Saddam Hussein interpreted the US ambassador’s words as a green light. Had he been taken in by his American ally who used him to wage war against Iran from 1980 to 1988? In any case, it was the CIA that concocted the false pretext of the incubators.

As in the case of Timisoara, the Western media repeated the false pretext and lied wholesale to get the war launched.

The truth finally came out, once these lies had achieved their goals, namely, the vote of a resolution at the UN and the entry into war of the “good guys” who had deceived popular opinion.

If we add the deaths that occurred during military operations, a little more than 100,000, and the indirect deaths, linked to the aftermath of the war and the consequences of the use of depleted uranium and the embargoes on medicines, the death toll oscillates between 500,000 and 1 million, depending on the source.

This depleted uranium, a “dirty” weapon used without moderation and without real necessity by the Anglo-Saxons on the Iraqi population, has had long-term consequences on these populations, but also a boomerang effect on the unwary soldiers of the coalition of the good guys.

In addition to depleted uranium, economic sanctions and embargoes, including on medicines, have become the preferred weapons of war of the good guys, because they kill far more than any bombing, and discreetly, because the losses are spread out over time, well after the military operations.

Another great achievement of the good guys, based on duplicity and lies.

III. The Dismemberment of the Former Yugoslavia

The ins and outs of this conflict, which lasted 9 years, are not well known by those who claim to be experts on the subject and who rewrite history to the glory of the “good guys.”

On November 5, 1990, when the countries of Eastern Europe were in a state of near-bankruptcy, the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 101-513, deciding that all financial support to Yugoslavia would be suspended within six months, with no possibility of borrowing or credit.

This deliberate procedure was obviously so dangerous that, as early as November 27, 1990, the New York Times quoted a CIA report that accurately predicted that a bloody civil war would break out in Yugoslavia.

It was this law and the economic and financial pressure of the United States that were the source of the division in ex-Yugoslavia, and the civil war and the dismemberment of the country that followed and which ended with the bombing of Belgrade by NATO, without UN approval, in the spring of 1999.

The real human toll of this dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia, masterfully planned and carried out by the U.S. leader of the “good guys,” varies, depending on the sources and what is counted. It is between 200,000 and 250,000 dead.

Before 1990, a non-aligned federal republic After 1999, a mosaic of small states of 23.5 million inhabitants, under the control of the “good guys.”

After 250,000 to 1 million dead, the break-up of Yugoslavia. Source: Vivid Maps.

Lessons to be learned from this magnificent case study:

The Economic and Financial Weapon was the first to be used in 1990 and proved to be decisive in the execution of the dismemberment plan. “We caused the collapse of the Yugoslav economy.”

The plan could only be completed by getting recalcitrant Serbia to submit via 78 days of bombing, in the spring of 1999, according to the Five Rings strategy, with emphasis on civilian infrastructure. These bombings were justified by a false pretext: the fake Račak massacre. They did not have the approval of the UN, but NATO was already trying to substitute itself for the UN by acting as the sheriff of the planet. NATO’s overwhelming air superiority and its fear of engaging in ground combat in the Kosovar theater must be noted in this case.

The right moment for the good guys to carry out this plan of dismemberment of Yugoslavia came in the 1990-1999, that is to say when both Russia and China were weak and could not react.

This dismemberment operation brought an awareness by Russia and China, humiliated by the bombing of Belgrade, of what could happen to them one day. They therefore created alliances, SCO (2001) and BRICS (2006), which are very effective today in supporting Russia.

Moreover, Putin, who has followed these events at the highest level since 1999, quickly understood that what had happened to the former Yugoslavia would one day be applied to Russia. For more than twenty years, he prepared his country for a confrontation that he knew was inevitable, while the self-proclaimed “good guys,” arrogant, dominating and overconfident, were disarming at every turn and their US pack leader was extending his control eastwards, advancing his rockets and military bases towards the Russian borders.

Plan for the Dismemberment of Russia by the “Good Guys”

Before dismemberment: a Federation rich in resources of all kinds but difficult to control by the “good guys,” and especially standing in the way of world domination.

And just a few hundred thousand or millions of deaths later (on both sides):

After dismemberment, a new projected configuration of Russian territories: a mosaic of smaller, less populated states and easier to control, exploit and dominate by the good guys.

IV. The Second Iraq War (March 2003—December 2011)

We will not dwell on the Second Iraq War, which was also based on a false pretext: Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, that did not exist.

Everyone remembers the comedy played by Colin Powell in front of the UN Security Council, shamelessly lying to the whole world with his magic powder.

From 2003 to 2011, anywhere from 150,000 to 1 million direct or indirect victims of this Second Iraq War have been counted, depending on the source, of which 75% to 80% were civilians.

The US leader of the good guys implemented new, more discreet methods to kill, indirectly of course, the civilian population of the opponent, in order to force the leader of the opposite camp to submit.

Examples? Bombings according to the Five Rings theory which target, among other things, the infrastructures necessary for the survival of the population. This is a theory invented in the USA, morally questionable, and which the Americans find difficult to accept that it can be applied by anyone other than themselves in theaters of conflict. This strategy was already used in the bombings against Serbia.

Economic sanctions and embargoes, including on medicines, which become weapons of war because they kill much more than any bombing, and discreetly, since the losses are spread out over time, well after the military operations.

This was yet another achievement of the “the good guys,” without UN endorsement, on the basis of a lie, to which for once France, Germany and Canada refused to associate themselves, which was to their credit. At that time, some NATO countries still had some honor and sovereignty.

V. The Syrian War (2011-2023)

Launched in March 2011, according to now proven techniques, this umpteenth colored revolution, also concocted by US neoconservatives, according to the words of the former NATO commander-in-chief, US General Westley Clark (see video above), was conducted, like the two Iraq wars, for the benefit of Israel, whose very influential supporters direct US and European foreign policies.

Provisional death toll: 500,000 to date.

We could add to the above examples Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, all sovereign states attacked by the good guys and/or their allies, on the sole pretext that their leaders and their policies did not serve the interests of the good guys.

Further, over the last three decades, there are the countless US interferences in the internal affairs of dozens of countries, all attempts at colored revolutions, electoral interferences, economic pressures, with the aim of forcing this or that country to submit to the will of a nation that has gone rogue, because it is directed by a mafia-like deep state that calls the shots in US and European elections.

Beyond these various and often bloody achievements of the good guys, it is necessary to look at the methods used by these good guys, US-NATO-EU-G7, and the means at their disposal.

For the good guys, the end justifies the means. International legality does not matter. It is the law of the strongest and “the rules” that the strongest unilaterally sets that must be applied.

To impose its “rules” on the whole world, the United States, leader of the “good guys,” uses two formidable weapons: the dollar and the self-proclaimed extraterritoriality of its laws. They do not hesitate to punish their adversaries and also their allies who do not strictly apply the “rules” that only the US can set. Some French banks, for example, have had to pay fines of several billion dollars to the US Treasury for daring to circumvent US economic sanctions against Iran and several other embargoed countries.

The USA and its good-guy allies do not hesitate to steal the assets of their adversaries when these (Iran, Afghanistan, Russia) got the unfortunate idea of depositing them in US banks, or in those of NATO member states. “We lied, we cheated, we stole…”

The US does not hesitate to seize the industrial flagships of its most servile allies, going so far as to throw into high-security prisons, under false pretense, the executives of companies, in order to blackmail the management (Alstom affair, Frederic Pierucci). They go so far as to corrupt politicians and company directors (MaKron) to achieve their ends.

They even go so far as to torpedo the international commercial contracts of their most loyal allies in order to take them over and award them to their companies. ($35 billion contract for US Air Force tankers, won by Airbus in 2008 and reallocated to Boeing; $56 billion contract for Australian submarines cancelled in September 2021 to be reallocated to US companies).

They maintain a system of telephone tapping by the NSA, revealed by Snowden, to spy on the leaders of the major allied countries, to discover their weaknesses, even their misconducts, to establish files on them and to blackmail them as much as necessary, in order to better subjugate them; and this, without the interested parties even being offended by it. In fact, the opposite is true. The more the leaders of the EU are deceived, cuckolded and sodomized by those of the USA, the more they seem to be satisfied with the situation.

This is what makes the partnership and cohesion among the “good guys” so excellent.

As a hyper-power confined in its egocentrism, the United States, leader of the dog-pack of good guys, uses and abuses its strength and its monopolies. In French, we call this “abus de position dominante” (“abuse of a dominant position”). For the average American, unaccustomed to even the simplest legal terms, this translates into: “Why bother?”

This is how they remain one of the few countries in the world not to have signed and especially ratified the 1997 Ottawa Convention on the prohibition of antipersonnel mines.

They are still violating the 1992 Geneva Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, which they signed and ratified in 1997, by allowing the Ukrainian ally, a signatory of the convention, to use this type of weapon on the Donbass front.

They are violating the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons, which they signed in 1975. And, to do it more discreetly, they relocate their laboratories in allied countries with little regard for the situation (Ukraine), while keeping some ultra-secret research laboratories on their territory (Fort Detrick).

To top it all off, the USA, the undisputed leader of the good guys, is the only country in the world that has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Such is undoubtedly the beauty and the greatness of the neo-conservative and globalist model, to which the EU governance now adheres without reserve, even with enthusiasm.

Such is the leadership of the U.S. dog-pack to which our leaders have freely (?) chosen to rally and which we are supposed to follow in its Russophobic crusade in Ukraine, to hang on to world hegemony for the good guys.

But we are still far from the end of the analysis of the good guys who know how much further to go in horror, while giving lessons on morality and good governance to the rest of the planet.

There are of course the unacceptable acts of torture, murder and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners of war incarcerated in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, all perpetrated by nice American GIs who, without shame and without compunction, posted the images of their crimes on Facebook and on the Internet for the whole world to view. But the Internet has now been “cleaned” of most of the most sordid videos that might harm the honor of the “good guys,” and only a few, less horrible ones remain.

One could have imagined that these were just blunders that would be severely sanctioned by the Good Guys. Actually, no. One of the main US torturers, Lynndie England, an evocative and proudly worn name, was sentenced to 3 years in prison, but only served one. However, she executed some prisoners herself and was photographed in front of the corpses. It is true that in the article published in The New Yorker, the US investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winner, revealed the existence of “Copper Green,” a torture program used in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and approved by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself (a nice neo-conservative globalist, quoted by General Clark in the first video).

Are these the good guys who give lessons in morality and governance to the whole world and who often scream “war crime,” in more and more delirious accusatory inversions?

Twisted enough to institutionalize torture, stupid enough to brag on the Internet and get caught with their fingers in the jam. These are the good guys.

It is true that until recently, the US military authorities were rather discreet in relocating torture (like their biological laboratories) to countries with little regard for the environment, including NATO countries (Poland, Romania, Lithuania) and sending their torturers to “operate” on site.

We have already mentioned economic sanctions and embargoes which, in the long term, can be much more deadly than bombing for the most fragile civilian populations, particularly children and the elderly. This is the case of the US embargo on medicines still in force for Syria, even though this civilian population has just experienced an earthquake which caused significant losses and many injuries. Everyone can see in these rabid, stupid and counter-productive “good guys” the level of its human and moral qualities, and understand why these good guys arouss disgust, rejection and hatred in most of the planet.

Since 1990, the call by the US, leader of the good guys, for Private Military Companies (PMCs) has exploded in all theaters of operation. This system has nothing to do with mercenarism, in which individuals are recruited directly by states. In PMCs, they sign contracts with companies that have a legal status and these companies deal with the states.

A simple observation of the facts shows, for example, that the USA signed some 3000 contracts with PMCs between 1994 and 2004. The most infamous of these numerous Private Military Companies operating for the good guys is the US Blackwater Company, founded in 1997 [now Xe, trans.], and known for its countless exactions and massacres committed in Afghanistan and Iraq. But of course, the impunity is total, as it is for the military of the “good guys.”

This PMC system is particularly effective and limits the political risks of the state that uses it. Of course, the good guys would like to keep the exclusivity and tend to consider as “terrorist organization” any PMC that would compete with those of the good guys.

It is interesting to note that the Wagner Group, the first Russian PMC, was only founded on May 1, 2014, perhaps as a reaction to the Maidan coup d’état, led by the “good guys,” in which some US PMCs had played, in the shadows, the leading roles. Founded 17 years after Blackwater, Wagner is therefore 17 years behind Blackwater in what could be described as exactions, by the always presumed “honest” narratives of the media of the good guys, alas too often caught with their fingers in the cookie-jar of lies.

What everyone should understand is that the USA and its allies (the good guys) cannot stand the fact that Wagner, a young Russian private military company, less than nine years old, can distinguish itself by a military efficiency and ethics far superior to any PMC of the good guys, including Blackwater, 17 years older. This is why they denounce this competition [Wagner] as unfair.

It is therefore hilarious to see the USA classify Wagner as a terrorist organization, while the US PMC Blackwater has really been a terrorist organization for 26 years, while benefiting from the immunity linked to its work for the good guys. This is the traditional double standard. Nothing surprising from the good guys.

The first part of this “apology” of the good guys, which some will not hesitate to call an indictment, being already heavy to bear and very long, it is good to end it with the interesting question of extrajudicial executions.

In 2014, shortly after the Maidan coup and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia, an adviser to the Ukrainian Minister of the Interior (Anton Guerachenko) under the influence of the major intelligence services of the good guys (CIA, Mossad, MI6) created an online collaborative platform to establish the list of people to be physically eliminated because they oppose the interests of Ukraine, but especially the neoconservative and globalist project that proceeds via the dismemberment of Russia.

In fact this project is 100% American and lists some 289 000 people worldwide. This is what emerges from the well-documented article by Bellincioni Berti.

The originality of this project of a terrorist nature, since its purpose is to spread terror among all those who would oppose the narratives of the good guys on Ukraine, is that it is openly supported by the USA, but also by a silence, obviously complicit, of the current leaders of the EU who let it happen. Thus, academics, journalists, former military or diplomats, elected officials, are threatened with death because they openly refuse to submit to the diktats of the globalist neocons. It does not matter if they are themselves belong to “the good guys.”

Some executions have already been carried out as an example, including that of Daria Dugin, assassinated on August 20, 2022 in Russia.

This shows, if it were still necessary, the true nature of the member countries of the good guys, whose political discourse is no longer in line with their actions since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the emergence, in the upper echelons of American power, of a neo-conservative and globalist spawn that has largely swarmed the governments of the major European countries.

There is no need to mention, in order to add to the balance sheet, the instrumentalization of Daesh and Al Qaida terrorism by the good guys, with the sole aim of toppling Bashar al-Assad, a secular head of state recognized by the United Nations whose only defect is that he displeases Israel, one of the influential champions of the good guys.

There is no need to mention the illegal and provocative execution of Iranian General Soleimani by the United States, which will stop at nothing to sow chaos and death on the planet.

What cries of orphans would we not have heard in the media of the “good guys,” if one of our generals had been executed in this way by an Iranian drone?

And, yes, these are the good guys.

At this stage of the analysis, it is good to take a break to digest this first avalanche of information and undeniable facts which will be followed by a 2nd wave, then by the analysis of the “evil camp”: the one which opposes ours.

As a provisional conclusion, I can only say that I cannot belong to such good guys, as they appear up to now. I do not understand by what ethical, moral and intellectual perversion some of my brothers-in-arms have been able to offer their unconditional allegiance to good guys whose leaders have lied, cheated, stolen, killed, tortured, violated international laws, harmed the interests of our country, for the sole interests of their leader (the US), a leader who has no use for international legality and for whom the rules he himself has set must be imposed on all.

I will be told that our leaders were elected (even if they were badly elected) and that the military is subordinate to politics. But it is because of this type of thoughtless discipline that Hitler, better elected at the time than our leaders today, was followed to the end of his murderous madness by his army and by his people. Hitler’s “good, brave and disciplined” generals were justly punished at Nuremberg after the war. They should have looked at their conscience earlier and not obeyed stupidly.

There are moments in history when French soldiers have had to choose sides. General de Gaulle did so without hesitation in 1940 and I doubt that, from where he stood, he would approve of France’s slavish allegiance to what has become, over time, the empire of duplicity and lies.

I also doubt that François Mitterand, from where he is, would approve our unfortunate, slavish allegiance after having declared:

“France does not know it, but we are at war with America. Yes, a permanent war, a vital war, an economic war, a war without death, apparently. Yes, the Americans are very tough; they are voracious; they want undivided power over the world. It is an unknown war and yet a war to the death.”

It’s all there. Everyone will have to choose sides in this war to the death at one time or another. This side will not necessarily be the side that badly elected rulers, supported by the media, have chosen for us. (to be continued).

Dominic Delawarde is a General (retired) of the French army. He was educated at Prytanée militaire de La Flèche, Saint Cyr, and Ecole Supérieure de Guerre.

Featured: The Torment of Saint Anthony, by Michelangelo; painted ca. 1487-1488.

History Returns to Europe

The liberation of the Donbas by the Russian army has surprised us all, as I believe that nobody thought that the situation would end in an armed clash. Yesterday, after the commemoration of the Homeland Defense Day, the Kremlin government decided to put an end to a conflict in which the threats of the Atlanticists have been answered with facts by Russia. In these chaotic hours, we have the feeling that history has returned to Europe with the liberating advance of the Russian troops.

A war correspondent in a helmet and bulletproof vest, “reporting” from Ukraine. Behind him, a couple of tourists taking pictures. Source.

It seems that the dogmatic reverie of the foolish social democracy is collapsing, that the old and rotten liberal structure is falling down. NATO, the Western partitocracies, and also we, ordinary Europeans, find ourselves faced with the most unexpected of responses, faced with the thundering echoes of the ultima ratio regum, the motto that Louis XIV inscribed on his cannons and which graphically explains what is the essential core of the sovereignty of a State: force, the element that supports the political decision of a national community. Something the twilight Europeans do not know the meaning of, since they have long since handed over to stateless elites and organizations their ability to act as agents of history. Since the 1960s, Europe has tried to live outside the historical future, to sacrifice community identity—the being of the nation—to the opium of Welfare and the hedonistic aberrations of extreme nihilism. Russia is just the opposite example.

The End of History consisted of the forces of money, personified in the United States, imposing on the whole world the American Way of Life, the free market and democracy according to their regal whim, while Europe limited itself to assisting Washington and justifying its aggressions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or Libya. However, this unipolar conception of geopolitics is not real. In 2016, the Americans themselves showed that they did not want to be the instrument of international elites and elected Trump as president, who could only be removed after a very dubious electoral process, a real coup d’état of the globalist oligarchy.

Russia, a power with a much smaller military capability than the United States and its NATO sepoys, stood up to the attempt to sow Islamist chaos in Syria and is now challenging the Anglo-Saxon hegemony with a bold move, responding unexpectedly to the ultimatums that the U.S.-backed government in Kiev had launched against Moscow in the last month. The bluffing game of the Zelensky histrion was accepted by Russia, and Moscow’s envoy has thwarted with blood and iron all the palaver of the NATO rabbis and the Open Society millionaire bonzes and sycophants.

Today, the end of the End of History has begun. American world hegemony is in question. Russia has broken the borders of an artificial state, which was built on the union of the historical Ukraine and New Russia by Lenin, and has defended the rights of its popular community, of that half of today’s Ukraine which is and feels Russian. Faced with these facts, the stateless plutocracy of the West will have to react somehow, or else its dominance will crumble, its New World Order will become a paper tiger that no one fears. The lapsed Joe Biden already has his war—but this one has blown up in his hands, possibly much earlier than he planned; he thought Putin was going to play by Washington’s rules and timelines.

The awakening has been bitter for the decrepit figurehead of the elites. His entanglements are unleashing a disaster that is dragging down his puppet regime, established after the Maidan coup of 2014, the work of Soros, Brussels and the American embassy in Kiev. The essential objective of the Anglo-Saxon strategy, to antagonize Russia and Ukraine, to prevent concord between the two states, had been achieved. The consequences were calamitous for Ukraine itself, whose political authority was erased overnight in Crimea, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov and even Odessa. Only Putin’s excessive prudence, which limited itself to securing Russian Crimea and protecting the stable rebel nuclei in Lugansk and Donetsk, prevented the dissolution of Ukraine eight years ago. The Kremlin’s big mistake in 2014 was not to have reached out to Kyiv.

Like Poland in 1939, Ukraine has been thrown into an enterprise from which it will emerge battered and divided. This is what the Maidan “Revolution” and the political adventurism of the global plutocracy and its Ukrainian puppets have led to. America’s credibility will depend to a large extent on its response to this challenge. If it does nothing, the thesis of a unipolar world, of an American sphere, will be no more than a bad dream, a multicultural nightmare dissipated by the cold wind of the Russian steppe.

Sertorio lives, writes and thinks in Spain. this review comes through the kind courtesy of El Manifesto.

Featured: The Return of the Prodigal Son, by Bernardino Licinio; painted ca. 1530s.