Featured Story
Hugo Dionísio
August 29, 2024
© Photo: SCF

Zelensky is ordering the bombing of the Zaporozhye NPP and threatening the Kursk nuclear plant, because his health – literally – depends on dragging Russia into a long-lasting, large-scale conflict.

❗️Join us on TelegramTwitter , and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

As we witness geopolitical tensions worsening, especially in the places richest in natural resources, resulting in the breakdown of diplomatic channels and the increasing radicalization – at least discursively – among the opponents, we are in turn witnessing a clarification of the respective strategic positions and their direction. All the mechanisms that we once thought guaranteed international security have historically expired. The deep crisis of Anglo-American hegemony has decreed their obsolescence. No peace can survive a profound crisis of any system, much less one that lives on exclusivity and priority in the plundering and exploitation of world resources.

No matter how many fantastic reports are produced about how competitive the U.S. economy is, how stable and consistent the dollar is and how resilient the Wall Street-based economy is, the fact is that these reports are far from being matched where it matters most: in the lives of the people, the workers, their families, in other words, the immense majority who have been slow to benefit from such monstrous injections of democracy. The process that began with Bush’s War on Terror and was continued by Obama has found its epilogue in the current situation. The generic term “terrorism”, whose combat was already aimed at containing some and appropriating others, has evolved once again into a concrete “axis of evil”. Time has finally told us who the U.S. was hiding behind so much “terrorism”.

When the terrorist curtain came down, it revealed the real objectives of its uprising and its broad and multifaceted instrumental nature. Today, we know very well how the term terrorist condemns, above all, the enemies of the U.S. and its hegemonic drift. The U.S. is steadily losing its economic (and productive) influence, and with it its political power, which is still immense and based on a formal and informal army of agents – covered and uncovered – and “influencers” who move its immense formatting machine. The largest organizational machine in history is beginning to lack what is the basis for sustaining any political existence: the real productive economic base.

Basically, the economic base under U.S. domination no longer corresponds to the inversely disproportionate political power that it sustains. The pyramid is inverted and not all the world’s debt will sustain it. The growing inability of the political apparatus to prevent the corrosion of its relative position is forcing the U.S. to make a sustained effort to mitigate, contain and reverse its perishing and, ultimately, the bankruptcy of an entire economic base that is already in large deficit. This is the fundamental reason why tensions are worsening worldwide. In a deep crisis, naturally and gradually, the exploitative base is removing the civilizational obstacles that separate greed from its object.

One way of removing these obstacles lies in the U.S.’s subversive capacity. In particular, in overthrowing legitimate governments and installing clients and other “surrenderers” who ensure the betrayal of their peoples for the benefit of the Wall-Street-based empire. Bangladesh, Indonesia, Georgia, Serbia and Venezuela are just some of the places where, if the rulers don’t please the big corporations that finance political power in Washington, they find themselves besieged by the armies of NGOs, Think Thank, mainstream media and social networks in California. Pavel Durov, co-leader of Telegram, had left Russia because he considered Vladimir Putin’s demands for control to be a violation of freedom of expression. Now he has learned to his cost that, in liberal-fascist Macronist France, failure to provide such guarantees results in imprisonment! The rights that are imprisoned in order to protect free speech! And all in the name of the “independence” of justice.

The indicators of decadence are so evident and profuse that they alone would merit in-depth and even critical reflection. But let’s put it this way: even on its own terms, according to its own concepts and taking into account its own data, the reality narrated does not smile on the U.S. and its “leadership”. Not even in its own terms can the U.S. hide its progressive bankruptcy. The BRICS have overtaken the G7 in GDP and the volume of economic transactions that escape Washington’s control grows every day, even when these transactions are carried out in its own currency. A clear example of the insurmountable contradiction that plagues the U.S.-controlled monetary and financial system is the use of the dollar by Washington’s own “enemies” to stabilize their economies and guarantee the stability of transactions and their mechanisms.

Maduro’s Venezuela, once again faced with another episode of the Shakespearean film “To win or not to win elections, that is the question?”, has dollarized its economy, using Chinese reserves in dollars and the oil it has in quantity like no other country. China, which is making Hong Kong a hub for cryptocurrency transactions, uses Tether – a virtual currency indexed to the value of the dollar – as a stabilizing mechanism for the crypto market, guaranteeing the conversion of fiat money and without the constant fluctuations of Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana. Its capitalization value has already surpassed that of Bitcoin, for example. The much-vaunted “de-dollarization” may in fact be nothing more than, in part at least, a “de-Westernization” of the dollar and the consequent withdrawal of dollars from Washington-controlled banks.

It is against this backdrop that we should observe reality and not against the rose-colored backdrop that sings of enemy bankruptcies, insurmountable challenges and insurmountable obstacles, with which all the “mainstream” media paint us, unanimously and in unity, every day. This is the only way to understand the “desperate” and apparently suicidal maneuvers we see everywhere. Otherwise, given the rose-colored cloth, we end up saying that Netanyahu is crazy but a democrat, Zelensky is corrupt but brave, and that all the others are crooks, even though many are not corrupt, let alone crazy.

Once again, the solution to the crisis of crises, and the consequent extremism of positions, lies in resurrecting the Nazi-fascist monster, but this time in a more comprehensive and diverse guise. It is, however, the same monster that, with every crisis in the capitalist system, as in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and the U.S. after the First World War, emerges to solve by force what others denied it peacefully: access to natural resources, i.e. cheap energy, raw materials, food and labor. The solution to all crises is repeated once again. Some used the salvation of souls, others the salvation of peoples.

Immediately after the Russian revolution of 1917, the Western imperialist bloc was intent on getting its hands on that extraordinary reserve of all these things. Faced with resistance, an invasion organized by 14 imperial powers and a civil war, whose counter-revolutionary force was supported by the imperial West, were not enough to bring down this “diabolical” regime. The Russian and Soviet peoples wouldn’t let it. Perhaps it was a kind of Stockholm syndrome, which curiously has happened again and again to this day. Despite the fact that even today, according to their own accusations, these people are “besieged” by a “bloody dictatorship”.

A war had to be prepared and this was done by demonizing, stigmatizing, breaking down relationships and sowing fear and hatred among the most unsuspecting European populations. Nothing new, then. Dehumanization, fermented in the economic crisis, the concentration of wealth and the unwillingness of the elites to share what they had previously accumulated from work, gave Hitler (and all the hidden “Hitlers”) the justification he needed when he looked to the USSR as the cure for the ills that plagued Germany: oil and minerals in abundance, fertile land and cheap labor.

If it hadn’t been for their insistent fighting capacity, the U.S., Britain and Japan would have been rubbing their hands in glee at the deals to come. Once again, they were wrong. Once again, their chances were dashed. And once again, the Russian Federation had to play the aggressor. Victim of a Western invasion every 70 years, Russia has gone from invader to invaded. An agreement like Molotov-Ribbentrop, the last of its kind between Nazi Germany and a European country, turned the biggest victim of the Second World War into its co-author. A devastating and unexpected victory – by the West – over its newborn son, Nazi-fascism, transformed the USSR into a kind of 3rd Red Reich.

In any case, and as programmed by the reactionary elites who dominate – and have always dominated – the U.S., due to the game being played on both boards, even if at different times, the Second World War left this colossal country in an extremely enviable position, just as the first one had, resolving the damage caused by the crash of 1929 and transforming it into a superpower, the only one. That, and that alone, is why we haven’t seen a full-scale war in Europe to this day. Until that enviable position had been shattered or threatened and until the hopes of political domination by Russia, China and Eurasia had been definitively dashed. Once the triumph with the fall of the USSR has been exhausted and the European Union has benefited from the resulting continental cooperation, we are back to the beginning of the dehumanizing process, once again of Russia, but this time Iran and China are also rewarded. After all, until recently, the hope of political domination by China and Iran prevailed.

The loss of hope in the functioning of “soft power” and the urgency of the situation, aggravated by Russia’s economic recovery, China’s centrality and Iran’s regionality, caused the planetary “life insurance”, which many believed to be the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction”, inherited from the Cold War, to expire. The “mutual assured destruction” doctrine only worked because the U.S. soon realized that it would be able to supplant the USSR and that its hegemonic dominance would not yet be challenged. The USSR’s adherence to non-proliferation treaties and the establishment of an international power architecture that benefited Washington, gave hope and consolidated certainties of victory. The winner could afford to be magnanimous.

The U.S. only feared the USSR from a military point of view, but it knew that military power does not exist without political power, that political power depends on the economy, and that this relative economic capacity was insufficient to guarantee a victory for the USSR. On the other hand, even if that wasn’t the case, the economies were de facto separate, segregated, and the backdrop against which the U.S. was acting was not a black backdrop of crisis, but a rainbow backdrop of expansion. It was this backdrop, this all-encompassing rainbow backdrop, embraced by the “uniparty” that brings together Democrats and Republicans, that contained the fiercest hawks. Its economic dominance, its strategy of accumulation, were not deathly threatened. Soft power was enough. While the USSR remained strong, the world witnessed major crises such as the Cuban missile crisis. In the end, the U.S. had the luxury of establishing the Washington consensus and ushering in the neoliberal era.

Today, the reality is quite different. Knowing that China is not yet the military adversary that the USSR was, the U.S. nevertheless knows that China has the economy it needs to become one. And they know that, despite all the catastrophist propaganda, it is sustainable, stable and long-lasting. The threat to its dominance is simply formidable. What’s more, China is counting on Russia’s 75 million billion dollars of classified natural resources. The largest in the world, and by a lot. China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela have more, much more, than the USA, Canada and Australia. The EU doesn’t count in this statistic. On the other hand, without the economic potential of China, Russia is a formidable military adversary, with a growing political capital that can be fed – as can be seen in the case of the thousands of sanctions against Moscow – by the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is to Russia what its natural resources and military capacity are to China. They complement each other, to the point of symbiosis if necessary.

Dominating the world, the production system and its supply chains, once again, requires cheap energy; the end of fossil fuels, which was part of a strategy to contain China, didn’t work, because China didn’t take the bait and has never ceased to guarantee its domination of resources both inside and outside its borders. Hegemony requires cheap labor, which China also has in quantity. And it requires food, lots of food. Which Russia also has plenty of. To regain its hegemony, the U.S. needs Russia and Iran, at least. More than ever. At any cost. On pain of defeat! The pressure we are seeing today on Lula da Silva, particularly his betrayal of Nicolas Maduro, who was always with him, even when the hordes of the far right questioned his electoral victory, shows how important Brazil is to the U.S. Brazil may well be for Washington what Egypt was for Rome, an endless source of food, which, combined with the circus – and in the U.S. the circus lasts 365 days a year – guarantees the appeasement of the masses.

But it is because this is all at stake that the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” no longer seems so safe. Fear, panic, the mere glimpse of the possibility of defeat and the loss of what they call world “leadership”, equivalent to “comprehensive political domination”, makes the hawks of globalist, hegemonic, super-federative capitalism ferocious, obstinate and obsessive. Used to commanding, threatening, dissuading, punishing, subverting, invading and annihilating entire nations, based on lies, and perpetrating it with impunity, it won’t be the possibility of mass death that stops them. What stops them is the guarantee of victory, a total, unquestionable, eternal and enlightening victory, like the one they sought and achieved with the genocide of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Faced with the possibility of defeat, nothing will stop them. The U.S., like the British Empire, doesn’t know how to live with compromise, impasses and appeasing logic. For them, war is the means to peace. The only means capable of guaranteeing the enlightening victory they seek. No compromise, just certain victory.

And this is why we see Zelensky ordering the bombing of the Zaporozhye NPP and threatening the Kursk nuclear plant, because his health – literally – depends on dragging Russia into a long-lasting, large-scale conflict. The aim, in my opinion, is to push Russia into a desperate action, for example, one that consists of using a nuclear weapon – tactical or strategic – and as a result, one of two things can happen: either the U.S. uses this to factually and internationally isolate Russia and demonize it to the point where the Russian people themselves turn against President Putin, or ultimately, if necessary, to drag Russia into a full-scale conflict, in which the U.S. will still think it has the upper hand. If they didn’t think they did, they wouldn’t be playing this very dangerous game. They may be wrong, but their actions are taken with their own convictions.

Another possibility is to create a provocation by bombing Kiev, causing a radioactive leak that will affect other countries and, in this way, the U.S. will have “plausible” justifications for accusing Russia of having caused it on purpose, either because they say that Russia itself did it, or because they say that the leak is not from a nuclear power plant, but from a dirty bomb used by Moscow. You’ll say: but Russia’s partners wouldn’t fall for something like that. Yes, but the U.S. objective is also played out on the national chessboards of those countries and with their peoples, namely by getting those same peoples to reject governments that don’t respect anti-nuclear rules, human rights, anti-genocide and nuclear proliferation conventions and so on.

There are many possibilities and the U.S. has already demonstrated that it can play with all of them. Let’s not be naive about why, in the 1980s, there was such a large “anti-nuclear” consensus. Neither was the U.S. desperate to free up the information field, nor did it have real nuclear parity. They needed to stop nuclear proliferation and development on the Soviet side. This also suited the USSR, as it would result in a relief for its coffers. The U.S. was therefore playing both sides: it was trying to drag the USSR into an expensive arms race, but in a way that didn’t pose a strategic threat. There are records from the time of the “democrat Yeltsin” which show that the U.S. intended to make Russia do without strategic nuclear naval forces, keeping only aviation and ground forces. Hence the logic of the “missile shield”, which fit like a glove. After all, nuclear submarines were what the U.S. saw as a major threat. And Yeltsin was doing their bidding.

In the case of Iran, the game is similar. We have a Netanyahu, Zelensky’s political twin, one a Zionist, the other a Zionist and Nazi-fascist, both Anglo-American patriots at heart, whose political health – literally – depends on a lasting, large-scale conflict. In this case too, the nuclear card is being played. All it took was for Blinken to say that Iran is “one or two weeks away” from a nuclear weapon, and it became an indisputable truth set in stone. Reference is made to “confidential reports” from the IAEA, which no one has ever seen and whose links lead to a description of the nuclear agreements with Iran itself, even going so far as to say that it was Iran that failed to comply with the terms of the JCPOA.

In both cases, it is assumed that if the U.S. says it, it is true. The U.S. says that Iran almost has nuclear weapons – despite Al-Komeini’s Fatwa banning military nuclear development – and nobody doubts it; the U.S. talks about a confidential IAEA agreement, nobody knows about it, it’s confidential, but from a “transparent” and “independent” public agency, and nobody doubts it; the U.S. says that Russia is bombing its own nuclear power plant and nobody doubts it. In fact, IAEA President Grossi goes further: he says that it is “beyond science” to prove the origin of the attacks on the Zaporozhye plant. Call in the CSI team now, and Putin will face yet another ICC trial.

The game is also being played with China. The news that the modernization of China’s nuclear forces, the “doubling” of warheads, is certain, is an objective that the U.S. “cannot turn its back on”, as the White House has said. Even if the U.S. has 10 times as many warheads as China will have when it doubles – if it doubles – the ones it already has.

For the time being, Zelesnky has guaranteed the impossibility of any peace negotiations in the foreseeable future and not even Modi’s visit – like a promise payer – will change the scenario. Like Siamese twins, Zelensky and Netanyahu demonstrate that cooperation between Nazis and Zionists is not only possible, but desirable, and that the anti-Semitism that characterized the 1930s was a casual contingency and never a deeply contradictory reality in itself. Zelensky proves that the hegemonic interest of the USA sealed the deal between Zionists and Nazi-fascists. At the time, the imperial hawks saw Jewish property as wealth to be had; today they see Jewish property as wealth in itself, which is already theirs, and they use it as a tool for territorial occupation, monetary stabilization and control of energy sources and other natural resources.

One and the other are playing a dangerous game, in which they are strategic pieces. It’s up to them to create a reality that makes coexistence impossible, to the point where “mutual assured destruction” is no longer a limitation. The glimpse of a nuclear Iran is one such case and will justify everything. Remember “weapons of mass destruction”? “Terrorists, mad men” and Muslims with access to nuclear weapons? So, after all the Islamophobia being prepared in the West and capitalized on by neo-fascist currents, who declare Muslims and Asians – poor people, only poor people – a sub-human species, an invading plague? It’s just a detail. The ground is plowed and well prepared.

Does anyone still believe in red lines?

 

The life insurance policy of “mutually assured destruction” has expired!

Zelensky is ordering the bombing of the Zaporozhye NPP and threatening the Kursk nuclear plant, because his health – literally – depends on dragging Russia into a long-lasting, large-scale conflict.

❗️Join us on TelegramTwitter , and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

As we witness geopolitical tensions worsening, especially in the places richest in natural resources, resulting in the breakdown of diplomatic channels and the increasing radicalization – at least discursively – among the opponents, we are in turn witnessing a clarification of the respective strategic positions and their direction. All the mechanisms that we once thought guaranteed international security have historically expired. The deep crisis of Anglo-American hegemony has decreed their obsolescence. No peace can survive a profound crisis of any system, much less one that lives on exclusivity and priority in the plundering and exploitation of world resources.

No matter how many fantastic reports are produced about how competitive the U.S. economy is, how stable and consistent the dollar is and how resilient the Wall Street-based economy is, the fact is that these reports are far from being matched where it matters most: in the lives of the people, the workers, their families, in other words, the immense majority who have been slow to benefit from such monstrous injections of democracy. The process that began with Bush’s War on Terror and was continued by Obama has found its epilogue in the current situation. The generic term “terrorism”, whose combat was already aimed at containing some and appropriating others, has evolved once again into a concrete “axis of evil”. Time has finally told us who the U.S. was hiding behind so much “terrorism”.

When the terrorist curtain came down, it revealed the real objectives of its uprising and its broad and multifaceted instrumental nature. Today, we know very well how the term terrorist condemns, above all, the enemies of the U.S. and its hegemonic drift. The U.S. is steadily losing its economic (and productive) influence, and with it its political power, which is still immense and based on a formal and informal army of agents – covered and uncovered – and “influencers” who move its immense formatting machine. The largest organizational machine in history is beginning to lack what is the basis for sustaining any political existence: the real productive economic base.

Basically, the economic base under U.S. domination no longer corresponds to the inversely disproportionate political power that it sustains. The pyramid is inverted and not all the world’s debt will sustain it. The growing inability of the political apparatus to prevent the corrosion of its relative position is forcing the U.S. to make a sustained effort to mitigate, contain and reverse its perishing and, ultimately, the bankruptcy of an entire economic base that is already in large deficit. This is the fundamental reason why tensions are worsening worldwide. In a deep crisis, naturally and gradually, the exploitative base is removing the civilizational obstacles that separate greed from its object.

One way of removing these obstacles lies in the U.S.’s subversive capacity. In particular, in overthrowing legitimate governments and installing clients and other “surrenderers” who ensure the betrayal of their peoples for the benefit of the Wall-Street-based empire. Bangladesh, Indonesia, Georgia, Serbia and Venezuela are just some of the places where, if the rulers don’t please the big corporations that finance political power in Washington, they find themselves besieged by the armies of NGOs, Think Thank, mainstream media and social networks in California. Pavel Durov, co-leader of Telegram, had left Russia because he considered Vladimir Putin’s demands for control to be a violation of freedom of expression. Now he has learned to his cost that, in liberal-fascist Macronist France, failure to provide such guarantees results in imprisonment! The rights that are imprisoned in order to protect free speech! And all in the name of the “independence” of justice.

The indicators of decadence are so evident and profuse that they alone would merit in-depth and even critical reflection. But let’s put it this way: even on its own terms, according to its own concepts and taking into account its own data, the reality narrated does not smile on the U.S. and its “leadership”. Not even in its own terms can the U.S. hide its progressive bankruptcy. The BRICS have overtaken the G7 in GDP and the volume of economic transactions that escape Washington’s control grows every day, even when these transactions are carried out in its own currency. A clear example of the insurmountable contradiction that plagues the U.S.-controlled monetary and financial system is the use of the dollar by Washington’s own “enemies” to stabilize their economies and guarantee the stability of transactions and their mechanisms.

Maduro’s Venezuela, once again faced with another episode of the Shakespearean film “To win or not to win elections, that is the question?”, has dollarized its economy, using Chinese reserves in dollars and the oil it has in quantity like no other country. China, which is making Hong Kong a hub for cryptocurrency transactions, uses Tether – a virtual currency indexed to the value of the dollar – as a stabilizing mechanism for the crypto market, guaranteeing the conversion of fiat money and without the constant fluctuations of Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana. Its capitalization value has already surpassed that of Bitcoin, for example. The much-vaunted “de-dollarization” may in fact be nothing more than, in part at least, a “de-Westernization” of the dollar and the consequent withdrawal of dollars from Washington-controlled banks.

It is against this backdrop that we should observe reality and not against the rose-colored backdrop that sings of enemy bankruptcies, insurmountable challenges and insurmountable obstacles, with which all the “mainstream” media paint us, unanimously and in unity, every day. This is the only way to understand the “desperate” and apparently suicidal maneuvers we see everywhere. Otherwise, given the rose-colored cloth, we end up saying that Netanyahu is crazy but a democrat, Zelensky is corrupt but brave, and that all the others are crooks, even though many are not corrupt, let alone crazy.

Once again, the solution to the crisis of crises, and the consequent extremism of positions, lies in resurrecting the Nazi-fascist monster, but this time in a more comprehensive and diverse guise. It is, however, the same monster that, with every crisis in the capitalist system, as in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and the U.S. after the First World War, emerges to solve by force what others denied it peacefully: access to natural resources, i.e. cheap energy, raw materials, food and labor. The solution to all crises is repeated once again. Some used the salvation of souls, others the salvation of peoples.

Immediately after the Russian revolution of 1917, the Western imperialist bloc was intent on getting its hands on that extraordinary reserve of all these things. Faced with resistance, an invasion organized by 14 imperial powers and a civil war, whose counter-revolutionary force was supported by the imperial West, were not enough to bring down this “diabolical” regime. The Russian and Soviet peoples wouldn’t let it. Perhaps it was a kind of Stockholm syndrome, which curiously has happened again and again to this day. Despite the fact that even today, according to their own accusations, these people are “besieged” by a “bloody dictatorship”.

A war had to be prepared and this was done by demonizing, stigmatizing, breaking down relationships and sowing fear and hatred among the most unsuspecting European populations. Nothing new, then. Dehumanization, fermented in the economic crisis, the concentration of wealth and the unwillingness of the elites to share what they had previously accumulated from work, gave Hitler (and all the hidden “Hitlers”) the justification he needed when he looked to the USSR as the cure for the ills that plagued Germany: oil and minerals in abundance, fertile land and cheap labor.

If it hadn’t been for their insistent fighting capacity, the U.S., Britain and Japan would have been rubbing their hands in glee at the deals to come. Once again, they were wrong. Once again, their chances were dashed. And once again, the Russian Federation had to play the aggressor. Victim of a Western invasion every 70 years, Russia has gone from invader to invaded. An agreement like Molotov-Ribbentrop, the last of its kind between Nazi Germany and a European country, turned the biggest victim of the Second World War into its co-author. A devastating and unexpected victory – by the West – over its newborn son, Nazi-fascism, transformed the USSR into a kind of 3rd Red Reich.

In any case, and as programmed by the reactionary elites who dominate – and have always dominated – the U.S., due to the game being played on both boards, even if at different times, the Second World War left this colossal country in an extremely enviable position, just as the first one had, resolving the damage caused by the crash of 1929 and transforming it into a superpower, the only one. That, and that alone, is why we haven’t seen a full-scale war in Europe to this day. Until that enviable position had been shattered or threatened and until the hopes of political domination by Russia, China and Eurasia had been definitively dashed. Once the triumph with the fall of the USSR has been exhausted and the European Union has benefited from the resulting continental cooperation, we are back to the beginning of the dehumanizing process, once again of Russia, but this time Iran and China are also rewarded. After all, until recently, the hope of political domination by China and Iran prevailed.

The loss of hope in the functioning of “soft power” and the urgency of the situation, aggravated by Russia’s economic recovery, China’s centrality and Iran’s regionality, caused the planetary “life insurance”, which many believed to be the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction”, inherited from the Cold War, to expire. The “mutual assured destruction” doctrine only worked because the U.S. soon realized that it would be able to supplant the USSR and that its hegemonic dominance would not yet be challenged. The USSR’s adherence to non-proliferation treaties and the establishment of an international power architecture that benefited Washington, gave hope and consolidated certainties of victory. The winner could afford to be magnanimous.

The U.S. only feared the USSR from a military point of view, but it knew that military power does not exist without political power, that political power depends on the economy, and that this relative economic capacity was insufficient to guarantee a victory for the USSR. On the other hand, even if that wasn’t the case, the economies were de facto separate, segregated, and the backdrop against which the U.S. was acting was not a black backdrop of crisis, but a rainbow backdrop of expansion. It was this backdrop, this all-encompassing rainbow backdrop, embraced by the “uniparty” that brings together Democrats and Republicans, that contained the fiercest hawks. Its economic dominance, its strategy of accumulation, were not deathly threatened. Soft power was enough. While the USSR remained strong, the world witnessed major crises such as the Cuban missile crisis. In the end, the U.S. had the luxury of establishing the Washington consensus and ushering in the neoliberal era.

Today, the reality is quite different. Knowing that China is not yet the military adversary that the USSR was, the U.S. nevertheless knows that China has the economy it needs to become one. And they know that, despite all the catastrophist propaganda, it is sustainable, stable and long-lasting. The threat to its dominance is simply formidable. What’s more, China is counting on Russia’s 75 million billion dollars of classified natural resources. The largest in the world, and by a lot. China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela have more, much more, than the USA, Canada and Australia. The EU doesn’t count in this statistic. On the other hand, without the economic potential of China, Russia is a formidable military adversary, with a growing political capital that can be fed – as can be seen in the case of the thousands of sanctions against Moscow – by the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is to Russia what its natural resources and military capacity are to China. They complement each other, to the point of symbiosis if necessary.

Dominating the world, the production system and its supply chains, once again, requires cheap energy; the end of fossil fuels, which was part of a strategy to contain China, didn’t work, because China didn’t take the bait and has never ceased to guarantee its domination of resources both inside and outside its borders. Hegemony requires cheap labor, which China also has in quantity. And it requires food, lots of food. Which Russia also has plenty of. To regain its hegemony, the U.S. needs Russia and Iran, at least. More than ever. At any cost. On pain of defeat! The pressure we are seeing today on Lula da Silva, particularly his betrayal of Nicolas Maduro, who was always with him, even when the hordes of the far right questioned his electoral victory, shows how important Brazil is to the U.S. Brazil may well be for Washington what Egypt was for Rome, an endless source of food, which, combined with the circus – and in the U.S. the circus lasts 365 days a year – guarantees the appeasement of the masses.

But it is because this is all at stake that the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” no longer seems so safe. Fear, panic, the mere glimpse of the possibility of defeat and the loss of what they call world “leadership”, equivalent to “comprehensive political domination”, makes the hawks of globalist, hegemonic, super-federative capitalism ferocious, obstinate and obsessive. Used to commanding, threatening, dissuading, punishing, subverting, invading and annihilating entire nations, based on lies, and perpetrating it with impunity, it won’t be the possibility of mass death that stops them. What stops them is the guarantee of victory, a total, unquestionable, eternal and enlightening victory, like the one they sought and achieved with the genocide of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Faced with the possibility of defeat, nothing will stop them. The U.S., like the British Empire, doesn’t know how to live with compromise, impasses and appeasing logic. For them, war is the means to peace. The only means capable of guaranteeing the enlightening victory they seek. No compromise, just certain victory.

And this is why we see Zelensky ordering the bombing of the Zaporozhye NPP and threatening the Kursk nuclear plant, because his health – literally – depends on dragging Russia into a long-lasting, large-scale conflict. The aim, in my opinion, is to push Russia into a desperate action, for example, one that consists of using a nuclear weapon – tactical or strategic – and as a result, one of two things can happen: either the U.S. uses this to factually and internationally isolate Russia and demonize it to the point where the Russian people themselves turn against President Putin, or ultimately, if necessary, to drag Russia into a full-scale conflict, in which the U.S. will still think it has the upper hand. If they didn’t think they did, they wouldn’t be playing this very dangerous game. They may be wrong, but their actions are taken with their own convictions.

Another possibility is to create a provocation by bombing Kiev, causing a radioactive leak that will affect other countries and, in this way, the U.S. will have “plausible” justifications for accusing Russia of having caused it on purpose, either because they say that Russia itself did it, or because they say that the leak is not from a nuclear power plant, but from a dirty bomb used by Moscow. You’ll say: but Russia’s partners wouldn’t fall for something like that. Yes, but the U.S. objective is also played out on the national chessboards of those countries and with their peoples, namely by getting those same peoples to reject governments that don’t respect anti-nuclear rules, human rights, anti-genocide and nuclear proliferation conventions and so on.

There are many possibilities and the U.S. has already demonstrated that it can play with all of them. Let’s not be naive about why, in the 1980s, there was such a large “anti-nuclear” consensus. Neither was the U.S. desperate to free up the information field, nor did it have real nuclear parity. They needed to stop nuclear proliferation and development on the Soviet side. This also suited the USSR, as it would result in a relief for its coffers. The U.S. was therefore playing both sides: it was trying to drag the USSR into an expensive arms race, but in a way that didn’t pose a strategic threat. There are records from the time of the “democrat Yeltsin” which show that the U.S. intended to make Russia do without strategic nuclear naval forces, keeping only aviation and ground forces. Hence the logic of the “missile shield”, which fit like a glove. After all, nuclear submarines were what the U.S. saw as a major threat. And Yeltsin was doing their bidding.

In the case of Iran, the game is similar. We have a Netanyahu, Zelensky’s political twin, one a Zionist, the other a Zionist and Nazi-fascist, both Anglo-American patriots at heart, whose political health – literally – depends on a lasting, large-scale conflict. In this case too, the nuclear card is being played. All it took was for Blinken to say that Iran is “one or two weeks away” from a nuclear weapon, and it became an indisputable truth set in stone. Reference is made to “confidential reports” from the IAEA, which no one has ever seen and whose links lead to a description of the nuclear agreements with Iran itself, even going so far as to say that it was Iran that failed to comply with the terms of the JCPOA.

In both cases, it is assumed that if the U.S. says it, it is true. The U.S. says that Iran almost has nuclear weapons – despite Al-Komeini’s Fatwa banning military nuclear development – and nobody doubts it; the U.S. talks about a confidential IAEA agreement, nobody knows about it, it’s confidential, but from a “transparent” and “independent” public agency, and nobody doubts it; the U.S. says that Russia is bombing its own nuclear power plant and nobody doubts it. In fact, IAEA President Grossi goes further: he says that it is “beyond science” to prove the origin of the attacks on the Zaporozhye plant. Call in the CSI team now, and Putin will face yet another ICC trial.

The game is also being played with China. The news that the modernization of China’s nuclear forces, the “doubling” of warheads, is certain, is an objective that the U.S. “cannot turn its back on”, as the White House has said. Even if the U.S. has 10 times as many warheads as China will have when it doubles – if it doubles – the ones it already has.

For the time being, Zelesnky has guaranteed the impossibility of any peace negotiations in the foreseeable future and not even Modi’s visit – like a promise payer – will change the scenario. Like Siamese twins, Zelensky and Netanyahu demonstrate that cooperation between Nazis and Zionists is not only possible, but desirable, and that the anti-Semitism that characterized the 1930s was a casual contingency and never a deeply contradictory reality in itself. Zelensky proves that the hegemonic interest of the USA sealed the deal between Zionists and Nazi-fascists. At the time, the imperial hawks saw Jewish property as wealth to be had; today they see Jewish property as wealth in itself, which is already theirs, and they use it as a tool for territorial occupation, monetary stabilization and control of energy sources and other natural resources.

One and the other are playing a dangerous game, in which they are strategic pieces. It’s up to them to create a reality that makes coexistence impossible, to the point where “mutual assured destruction” is no longer a limitation. The glimpse of a nuclear Iran is one such case and will justify everything. Remember “weapons of mass destruction”? “Terrorists, mad men” and Muslims with access to nuclear weapons? So, after all the Islamophobia being prepared in the West and capitalized on by neo-fascist currents, who declare Muslims and Asians – poor people, only poor people – a sub-human species, an invading plague? It’s just a detail. The ground is plowed and well prepared.

Does anyone still believe in red lines?

 

Zelensky is ordering the bombing of the Zaporozhye NPP and threatening the Kursk nuclear plant, because his health – literally – depends on dragging Russia into a long-lasting, large-scale conflict.

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As we witness geopolitical tensions worsening, especially in the places richest in natural resources, resulting in the breakdown of diplomatic channels and the increasing radicalization – at least discursively – among the opponents, we are in turn witnessing a clarification of the respective strategic positions and their direction. All the mechanisms that we once thought guaranteed international security have historically expired. The deep crisis of Anglo-American hegemony has decreed their obsolescence. No peace can survive a profound crisis of any system, much less one that lives on exclusivity and priority in the plundering and exploitation of world resources.

No matter how many fantastic reports are produced about how competitive the U.S. economy is, how stable and consistent the dollar is and how resilient the Wall Street-based economy is, the fact is that these reports are far from being matched where it matters most: in the lives of the people, the workers, their families, in other words, the immense majority who have been slow to benefit from such monstrous injections of democracy. The process that began with Bush’s War on Terror and was continued by Obama has found its epilogue in the current situation. The generic term “terrorism”, whose combat was already aimed at containing some and appropriating others, has evolved once again into a concrete “axis of evil”. Time has finally told us who the U.S. was hiding behind so much “terrorism”.

When the terrorist curtain came down, it revealed the real objectives of its uprising and its broad and multifaceted instrumental nature. Today, we know very well how the term terrorist condemns, above all, the enemies of the U.S. and its hegemonic drift. The U.S. is steadily losing its economic (and productive) influence, and with it its political power, which is still immense and based on a formal and informal army of agents – covered and uncovered – and “influencers” who move its immense formatting machine. The largest organizational machine in history is beginning to lack what is the basis for sustaining any political existence: the real productive economic base.

Basically, the economic base under U.S. domination no longer corresponds to the inversely disproportionate political power that it sustains. The pyramid is inverted and not all the world’s debt will sustain it. The growing inability of the political apparatus to prevent the corrosion of its relative position is forcing the U.S. to make a sustained effort to mitigate, contain and reverse its perishing and, ultimately, the bankruptcy of an entire economic base that is already in large deficit. This is the fundamental reason why tensions are worsening worldwide. In a deep crisis, naturally and gradually, the exploitative base is removing the civilizational obstacles that separate greed from its object.

One way of removing these obstacles lies in the U.S.’s subversive capacity. In particular, in overthrowing legitimate governments and installing clients and other “surrenderers” who ensure the betrayal of their peoples for the benefit of the Wall-Street-based empire. Bangladesh, Indonesia, Georgia, Serbia and Venezuela are just some of the places where, if the rulers don’t please the big corporations that finance political power in Washington, they find themselves besieged by the armies of NGOs, Think Thank, mainstream media and social networks in California. Pavel Durov, co-leader of Telegram, had left Russia because he considered Vladimir Putin’s demands for control to be a violation of freedom of expression. Now he has learned to his cost that, in liberal-fascist Macronist France, failure to provide such guarantees results in imprisonment! The rights that are imprisoned in order to protect free speech! And all in the name of the “independence” of justice.

The indicators of decadence are so evident and profuse that they alone would merit in-depth and even critical reflection. But let’s put it this way: even on its own terms, according to its own concepts and taking into account its own data, the reality narrated does not smile on the U.S. and its “leadership”. Not even in its own terms can the U.S. hide its progressive bankruptcy. The BRICS have overtaken the G7 in GDP and the volume of economic transactions that escape Washington’s control grows every day, even when these transactions are carried out in its own currency. A clear example of the insurmountable contradiction that plagues the U.S.-controlled monetary and financial system is the use of the dollar by Washington’s own “enemies” to stabilize their economies and guarantee the stability of transactions and their mechanisms.

Maduro’s Venezuela, once again faced with another episode of the Shakespearean film “To win or not to win elections, that is the question?”, has dollarized its economy, using Chinese reserves in dollars and the oil it has in quantity like no other country. China, which is making Hong Kong a hub for cryptocurrency transactions, uses Tether – a virtual currency indexed to the value of the dollar – as a stabilizing mechanism for the crypto market, guaranteeing the conversion of fiat money and without the constant fluctuations of Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana. Its capitalization value has already surpassed that of Bitcoin, for example. The much-vaunted “de-dollarization” may in fact be nothing more than, in part at least, a “de-Westernization” of the dollar and the consequent withdrawal of dollars from Washington-controlled banks.

It is against this backdrop that we should observe reality and not against the rose-colored backdrop that sings of enemy bankruptcies, insurmountable challenges and insurmountable obstacles, with which all the “mainstream” media paint us, unanimously and in unity, every day. This is the only way to understand the “desperate” and apparently suicidal maneuvers we see everywhere. Otherwise, given the rose-colored cloth, we end up saying that Netanyahu is crazy but a democrat, Zelensky is corrupt but brave, and that all the others are crooks, even though many are not corrupt, let alone crazy.

Once again, the solution to the crisis of crises, and the consequent extremism of positions, lies in resurrecting the Nazi-fascist monster, but this time in a more comprehensive and diverse guise. It is, however, the same monster that, with every crisis in the capitalist system, as in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and the U.S. after the First World War, emerges to solve by force what others denied it peacefully: access to natural resources, i.e. cheap energy, raw materials, food and labor. The solution to all crises is repeated once again. Some used the salvation of souls, others the salvation of peoples.

Immediately after the Russian revolution of 1917, the Western imperialist bloc was intent on getting its hands on that extraordinary reserve of all these things. Faced with resistance, an invasion organized by 14 imperial powers and a civil war, whose counter-revolutionary force was supported by the imperial West, were not enough to bring down this “diabolical” regime. The Russian and Soviet peoples wouldn’t let it. Perhaps it was a kind of Stockholm syndrome, which curiously has happened again and again to this day. Despite the fact that even today, according to their own accusations, these people are “besieged” by a “bloody dictatorship”.

A war had to be prepared and this was done by demonizing, stigmatizing, breaking down relationships and sowing fear and hatred among the most unsuspecting European populations. Nothing new, then. Dehumanization, fermented in the economic crisis, the concentration of wealth and the unwillingness of the elites to share what they had previously accumulated from work, gave Hitler (and all the hidden “Hitlers”) the justification he needed when he looked to the USSR as the cure for the ills that plagued Germany: oil and minerals in abundance, fertile land and cheap labor.

If it hadn’t been for their insistent fighting capacity, the U.S., Britain and Japan would have been rubbing their hands in glee at the deals to come. Once again, they were wrong. Once again, their chances were dashed. And once again, the Russian Federation had to play the aggressor. Victim of a Western invasion every 70 years, Russia has gone from invader to invaded. An agreement like Molotov-Ribbentrop, the last of its kind between Nazi Germany and a European country, turned the biggest victim of the Second World War into its co-author. A devastating and unexpected victory – by the West – over its newborn son, Nazi-fascism, transformed the USSR into a kind of 3rd Red Reich.

In any case, and as programmed by the reactionary elites who dominate – and have always dominated – the U.S., due to the game being played on both boards, even if at different times, the Second World War left this colossal country in an extremely enviable position, just as the first one had, resolving the damage caused by the crash of 1929 and transforming it into a superpower, the only one. That, and that alone, is why we haven’t seen a full-scale war in Europe to this day. Until that enviable position had been shattered or threatened and until the hopes of political domination by Russia, China and Eurasia had been definitively dashed. Once the triumph with the fall of the USSR has been exhausted and the European Union has benefited from the resulting continental cooperation, we are back to the beginning of the dehumanizing process, once again of Russia, but this time Iran and China are also rewarded. After all, until recently, the hope of political domination by China and Iran prevailed.

The loss of hope in the functioning of “soft power” and the urgency of the situation, aggravated by Russia’s economic recovery, China’s centrality and Iran’s regionality, caused the planetary “life insurance”, which many believed to be the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction”, inherited from the Cold War, to expire. The “mutual assured destruction” doctrine only worked because the U.S. soon realized that it would be able to supplant the USSR and that its hegemonic dominance would not yet be challenged. The USSR’s adherence to non-proliferation treaties and the establishment of an international power architecture that benefited Washington, gave hope and consolidated certainties of victory. The winner could afford to be magnanimous.

The U.S. only feared the USSR from a military point of view, but it knew that military power does not exist without political power, that political power depends on the economy, and that this relative economic capacity was insufficient to guarantee a victory for the USSR. On the other hand, even if that wasn’t the case, the economies were de facto separate, segregated, and the backdrop against which the U.S. was acting was not a black backdrop of crisis, but a rainbow backdrop of expansion. It was this backdrop, this all-encompassing rainbow backdrop, embraced by the “uniparty” that brings together Democrats and Republicans, that contained the fiercest hawks. Its economic dominance, its strategy of accumulation, were not deathly threatened. Soft power was enough. While the USSR remained strong, the world witnessed major crises such as the Cuban missile crisis. In the end, the U.S. had the luxury of establishing the Washington consensus and ushering in the neoliberal era.

Today, the reality is quite different. Knowing that China is not yet the military adversary that the USSR was, the U.S. nevertheless knows that China has the economy it needs to become one. And they know that, despite all the catastrophist propaganda, it is sustainable, stable and long-lasting. The threat to its dominance is simply formidable. What’s more, China is counting on Russia’s 75 million billion dollars of classified natural resources. The largest in the world, and by a lot. China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela have more, much more, than the USA, Canada and Australia. The EU doesn’t count in this statistic. On the other hand, without the economic potential of China, Russia is a formidable military adversary, with a growing political capital that can be fed – as can be seen in the case of the thousands of sanctions against Moscow – by the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is to Russia what its natural resources and military capacity are to China. They complement each other, to the point of symbiosis if necessary.

Dominating the world, the production system and its supply chains, once again, requires cheap energy; the end of fossil fuels, which was part of a strategy to contain China, didn’t work, because China didn’t take the bait and has never ceased to guarantee its domination of resources both inside and outside its borders. Hegemony requires cheap labor, which China also has in quantity. And it requires food, lots of food. Which Russia also has plenty of. To regain its hegemony, the U.S. needs Russia and Iran, at least. More than ever. At any cost. On pain of defeat! The pressure we are seeing today on Lula da Silva, particularly his betrayal of Nicolas Maduro, who was always with him, even when the hordes of the far right questioned his electoral victory, shows how important Brazil is to the U.S. Brazil may well be for Washington what Egypt was for Rome, an endless source of food, which, combined with the circus – and in the U.S. the circus lasts 365 days a year – guarantees the appeasement of the masses.

But it is because this is all at stake that the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” no longer seems so safe. Fear, panic, the mere glimpse of the possibility of defeat and the loss of what they call world “leadership”, equivalent to “comprehensive political domination”, makes the hawks of globalist, hegemonic, super-federative capitalism ferocious, obstinate and obsessive. Used to commanding, threatening, dissuading, punishing, subverting, invading and annihilating entire nations, based on lies, and perpetrating it with impunity, it won’t be the possibility of mass death that stops them. What stops them is the guarantee of victory, a total, unquestionable, eternal and enlightening victory, like the one they sought and achieved with the genocide of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Faced with the possibility of defeat, nothing will stop them. The U.S., like the British Empire, doesn’t know how to live with compromise, impasses and appeasing logic. For them, war is the means to peace. The only means capable of guaranteeing the enlightening victory they seek. No compromise, just certain victory.

And this is why we see Zelensky ordering the bombing of the Zaporozhye NPP and threatening the Kursk nuclear plant, because his health – literally – depends on dragging Russia into a long-lasting, large-scale conflict. The aim, in my opinion, is to push Russia into a desperate action, for example, one that consists of using a nuclear weapon – tactical or strategic – and as a result, one of two things can happen: either the U.S. uses this to factually and internationally isolate Russia and demonize it to the point where the Russian people themselves turn against President Putin, or ultimately, if necessary, to drag Russia into a full-scale conflict, in which the U.S. will still think it has the upper hand. If they didn’t think they did, they wouldn’t be playing this very dangerous game. They may be wrong, but their actions are taken with their own convictions.

Another possibility is to create a provocation by bombing Kiev, causing a radioactive leak that will affect other countries and, in this way, the U.S. will have “plausible” justifications for accusing Russia of having caused it on purpose, either because they say that Russia itself did it, or because they say that the leak is not from a nuclear power plant, but from a dirty bomb used by Moscow. You’ll say: but Russia’s partners wouldn’t fall for something like that. Yes, but the U.S. objective is also played out on the national chessboards of those countries and with their peoples, namely by getting those same peoples to reject governments that don’t respect anti-nuclear rules, human rights, anti-genocide and nuclear proliferation conventions and so on.

There are many possibilities and the U.S. has already demonstrated that it can play with all of them. Let’s not be naive about why, in the 1980s, there was such a large “anti-nuclear” consensus. Neither was the U.S. desperate to free up the information field, nor did it have real nuclear parity. They needed to stop nuclear proliferation and development on the Soviet side. This also suited the USSR, as it would result in a relief for its coffers. The U.S. was therefore playing both sides: it was trying to drag the USSR into an expensive arms race, but in a way that didn’t pose a strategic threat. There are records from the time of the “democrat Yeltsin” which show that the U.S. intended to make Russia do without strategic nuclear naval forces, keeping only aviation and ground forces. Hence the logic of the “missile shield”, which fit like a glove. After all, nuclear submarines were what the U.S. saw as a major threat. And Yeltsin was doing their bidding.

In the case of Iran, the game is similar. We have a Netanyahu, Zelensky’s political twin, one a Zionist, the other a Zionist and Nazi-fascist, both Anglo-American patriots at heart, whose political health – literally – depends on a lasting, large-scale conflict. In this case too, the nuclear card is being played. All it took was for Blinken to say that Iran is “one or two weeks away” from a nuclear weapon, and it became an indisputable truth set in stone. Reference is made to “confidential reports” from the IAEA, which no one has ever seen and whose links lead to a description of the nuclear agreements with Iran itself, even going so far as to say that it was Iran that failed to comply with the terms of the JCPOA.

In both cases, it is assumed that if the U.S. says it, it is true. The U.S. says that Iran almost has nuclear weapons – despite Al-Komeini’s Fatwa banning military nuclear development – and nobody doubts it; the U.S. talks about a confidential IAEA agreement, nobody knows about it, it’s confidential, but from a “transparent” and “independent” public agency, and nobody doubts it; the U.S. says that Russia is bombing its own nuclear power plant and nobody doubts it. In fact, IAEA President Grossi goes further: he says that it is “beyond science” to prove the origin of the attacks on the Zaporozhye plant. Call in the CSI team now, and Putin will face yet another ICC trial.

The game is also being played with China. The news that the modernization of China’s nuclear forces, the “doubling” of warheads, is certain, is an objective that the U.S. “cannot turn its back on”, as the White House has said. Even if the U.S. has 10 times as many warheads as China will have when it doubles – if it doubles – the ones it already has.

For the time being, Zelesnky has guaranteed the impossibility of any peace negotiations in the foreseeable future and not even Modi’s visit – like a promise payer – will change the scenario. Like Siamese twins, Zelensky and Netanyahu demonstrate that cooperation between Nazis and Zionists is not only possible, but desirable, and that the anti-Semitism that characterized the 1930s was a casual contingency and never a deeply contradictory reality in itself. Zelensky proves that the hegemonic interest of the USA sealed the deal between Zionists and Nazi-fascists. At the time, the imperial hawks saw Jewish property as wealth to be had; today they see Jewish property as wealth in itself, which is already theirs, and they use it as a tool for territorial occupation, monetary stabilization and control of energy sources and other natural resources.

One and the other are playing a dangerous game, in which they are strategic pieces. It’s up to them to create a reality that makes coexistence impossible, to the point where “mutual assured destruction” is no longer a limitation. The glimpse of a nuclear Iran is one such case and will justify everything. Remember “weapons of mass destruction”? “Terrorists, mad men” and Muslims with access to nuclear weapons? So, after all the Islamophobia being prepared in the West and capitalized on by neo-fascist currents, who declare Muslims and Asians – poor people, only poor people – a sub-human species, an invading plague? It’s just a detail. The ground is plowed and well prepared.

Does anyone still believe in red lines?

 

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

See also

October 2, 2024

See also

October 2, 2024
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.