An online forum has been discussing Yesterday's mailing, and it looks as if John G is the person to whom most of this is directed.
My comments in red below.
I suspect this paragraph of mine was the trigger:
I staked out my position here in the plainest possible language and my impolication was clearly that some sensible people were too chicken to admit they are sensible. I got 2 negative responses. One said that I must be careful not to support Putin in everything, because he has his faults, blah blah blah. Friends, if you have spotted me supporting Putin in some area where he has failed, let me know, ok? That respondent did not cite any examples, but if anyone can think of my support for something Putin did that is BAD, let me know so I can avoid that mistake again. DonThe anti-Russian hysteria is so thick these days that even Russophiles are laying low. They're waiting for the Trump administration to end so that they don't have to join in the chorus of anti-Russian jeers just to prove they aren't helping Putin hack their neighbor's phone.
My response to the other criticism:
I see you have been discussing Yesterday's mailing, and it looks as if John G. is the person to whom
this is directed.
I will try to respond to it. Am still wondering what the central idea is behind John's email, but here
is my response in red below:
Mr. Hank,
Help
me out here. I love to discuss this stuff (see the bottom of the email
for my email that he is criticising). I read this sort of line on Russia
from voices on the left
a lot, and, as a realist, it perplexes me.
This
is a good place to start, John. What are you defining as "The Left"? I
have found that both Left and Right are in disarray. Neither side can
define itself any more. Many
on the Left used to be anti-war. They didn't care if the Cubans were
hurling ICBMs at us, they would not fight back. Those days are over for
good. Now both sides want to use the military to do what philosophers
used to do: change people's minds. The Right
used to be, when I was a kid, for using the military ONLY for self
defense. But that idea died just before the Vietnam War. Yet, there is
infighting in the GOP and Bernie supporters are steamed at Hillary
supporters. So I don't know what you mean by the Left.
So let me tell you exactly where I am coming from, and it is neither
left nor right. I have been studying Russian since the late 50s. After a
few courses, I wanted to see what Russia was like. I knew that the
biggest issue of our time was communism vs capitalism
and had read in the western press that Russia was a really bad country.
I signed up for a Russian course at the U of Leningrad, now U of
Peterburg. On my first day, I realized why Russian communism was bad
because the Russians I met complained bitterly about
their miserable lives. I heard them in their own native tongue, person
to person.
Fast
forward to today and my Western friends who live in Russia are telling
me people are happy. Yes, happy. I don't have an ideology, Left or
Right. It all bores me. It is
all a political game.
But
when people are happy, do you think we should send in the Marines and
tell them why they should be miserable? Somehow that makes no sense to
me. http://laiglesforum.com/ the-key-to-stable-governance- happy-people/3984.htm
The key to stable governance is happy people . Yesterday, I reported on
an attack on an innocent German woman by an angry “refugee,” showing how
German women now ...
|
You
say: "I have not seen any signs of sanity in the West for a while, but
Russia is still behaving like the only adult in the room." (For what
it's worth, wasn't Bernie Sanders
an "adult voice in the room?" And he's still with us. People still
carry torches for his ideas.)
Yes,
some people seem to have read into Sanders’ statements that he was
against war. Now that the campaign is over, he is Twittering against
Putin and sounds like he can’t wait
to see WW III get started:
We'll keep this short. Russia Insider always had a soft spot for
Vermont Senator and "socialist" Bernie Sanders. Yes, he supported the
destruction of Yugoslavia; yes, he championed a wide range of
dumb ideas. But there was something magical about the way
this frumpy Vermont grandpa exposed Hillary Clinton as a walking
political joke. It's too bad Bernie turned into such a sniveling,
Clinton-cavorting jerk-off, though:
|
Your remark reads to me as
my enemy's enemy must be my friend -- that is, if my "enemy" is Hillary Clinton and all she symbolizes then Putin and Russia must be a breath of fresh air.
That might be true if I could not see anything else about Putin that I liked.
Observations among my fellow leftists aside, the Putin/Trump linkages are pretty frightening
[what linkages have been
demonstrated to exist?—Don]--
if you accept that the world is going through a profound epochal change
of the order of the shift from medieval times into the
modern nation state era. We're all in the midst of this change, which
we'll fully understand maybe 50 years from now.
If
you don’t understand what is going now and expect not to know before 50
years, why are you writing now? Just wait and then we’ll talk.
Globalization
and cyber technology are changing humanity on the granular level in
ways no one really understands. First conceived in SF novels like Neuromancer in
the
mid-1980s as a real place one could get lost in and fight struggles in,
the cyber world is now quite real and growing faster and faster in
leaps and bounds. It's overtaking the "real" world; one example of this
is the Trump Twitter phenomenon considered in
terms of chaos theory, leading to Trump's win. The "cold" war of our
age and the future is cyber warfare, something the Russians are
apparently devoting a tremendous amount of resources, research and
people to.
Incredibly, there is no
hard evidence that the Russians have devoted any time at all to
cyber warfare, unless you take the word of bureaucrats in the “intel”
agencies. To understand why I say this, let me refer you to 3 common
sense articles I wrote debunking the “Russian hacking”
myth using mostly just logic and reason, two tools that have been
atrophying in the West for years and could use a workout.
Wikileaks proves CIA has no credible evidence of Russian hacking . by
Don Hank Foreword: My friends occasionally warn me about appearing to be
too friendly toward ...
|
Analysis show US intel agencies invented “Russian” hacking story. Don
Hank. Please forward a link to this article far and wide. The DNC is
using the phony story ...
|
The new fake news story from US intel Don Hank. The latest msm reports
about the supposed Russian hacking are all focused on a side issue and
their aim is to deceive ...
|
The "hacking"
[Woa,
John. You are using quotations marks here. Does this mean you too doubt
there was hacking? Wikileaks friend Craig Murray said there was no
hacking and that a disgruntled
Bernie Sanders supporter handed over the dossier to him personally]
of
the Democrats and links with the Trump campaign are only the beginning
of it. Of course, we're up to our necks in it too; in fact, we've sown
confusion this way for many decades; consider
how the CIA effectively bamboozled the Guatemalans in 1954, long before
cyber hacking was even a SF dream.
I
guess my comment on your analysis and line on Russia is that it seems
very much focused on the past and all the truly terrible things we on
the left piss and moan about incessantly.
How is anything I said focused on the past? Can you give me an example?
Is
it possible -- if one looks toward the future -- that what Putin,
Erdogan, Brexit, Marine Le Pen, Saudi Arabia, Likud Israel and post-Arab
Spring Egypt all represent is
the rise of anti-democratic authoritarian rule in response to the
insecurities and difficulties of this on-going epochal change.
Let’s
just look at Le Pen, one of your examples of “anti-democratic
authoritarian rule. She has been
denigrated in the press and by most of the Establishment pols. Yet her
popularity is holding strong. It is a mystery how a person who appeals
to the people can be called undemocratic while the Establishment, which
has the msm and political class in its grip,
is “democratic.” You are right about Saudi Arabia and Erdogan’s Turkey
being undemocratic. That’s a no-brainer. But Brexit? I have been working
personally with the Brexiteers before the word Brexit was coined and
have many friends in the UK. The EU was forced
down the throats of the European peoples (Ted Heath lied to the Brits,
saying they would not lose any sovereignty if they joined) and not only
that, the unelected EU Commission is the only branch of the EU with the
power to propose legislation. The elected
MEPs can only vote up or down, not sideways as in a real democracy.
That is, what we're living through is the breakdown of the modern nation state world formed out
of the 1648 Treaty Of Westphalia -- and, specifically, the rise of what one writer [Who?] on post Soviet Russia calls "Violent Entrepreneurs." This term refers to the rise of public/private gangster
capitalism in Russia, with Vladimir Putin at the top of the heap. These cowboys make our capitalists look like school kids. That Donald Trump has an affinity for
this top-down, gilded, go-go, no-holds-barred capitalist life style should come as no surprise to anyone.
As I said earlier, I am not Trump fan, and my friends are horrified. I explain myself here:
http://laiglesforum.com/ another-rah-rah-moment-in- american-history/4030.htm
Trump victory: another rah rah moment. by Don Hank. I wonder if you will
recall that the GW Bush wars were started by rah rah talk, as when
Dubbya stood at ground ...
|
So
I'm perplexed by all the praise for Vladimir Putin, on Syria or
anyplace else. Just because he hates Hillary Clinton and the Democratic
machine that killed Bernie in the
election is a lousy reason to see anything positive in his rising
capitalistic power.
Well,
yeah, Russia no longer has communism, if that is what you long for. On
the other hand Russia has
free universal health care. And predatory capitalists go to jail. Ask
Khodorkovsky. But as a Russian specialist who reads the Russian press in
the language, I do not rely on Western commentaries to form my
opinions. You certainly would not respect that, right?
Again,
IF I liked Putin only because he supposedly hates Clinton (he never
expressed any anti-Clinton sentiment and insisted he would work with
whoever won the election, but
maybe you have insider info?), then I would have nothing and you would
be right to dismiss what I say. But look at the irony here: You just
seemed to have regretted the passing of the principles of the Treaty of
Westphalia, as well you should. But are you
suggesting that Putin is one of those helping to put nails in its
coffin? His is the
only government in the world that has made restoring Westphalian principles the centerpiece of his foreign policy! That is what his multipolar world is all about.
You
really have to start reading his and Lavrov’s speeches, because the
Kremlin is the only government anywhere that is tirelessly working to
restore
Westphalian respect for national sovereignties. It is on this
point that I most strongly support Putin. A few of my chicken
scratchings on Putin’s foreign policy philosophy (NOT ideology) are
here:
The disarmingly simple Putin Principle in foreign policy. by Don Hank.
One of the cardinal points raised by Sun-tzu in his “Art of War” is the
proposition of ...
|
Putinology 101. by Don Hank. In view of Western journalism’s negative
spin on all of Putin’s statements and their deliberate politically
motivated ...
|
And if you’ve been reading the scribblings of the professional Putin hating community, here is something to contemplate:
I have written about Russia and its love of tradition here, its
resistance to social Marxism here, and have shown here that in terms of
economic policies ...
|
It
will perhaps surprise you to learn that just recently, foreign minister
Sergey Lavrov lamented the way in which Westphalian principles are
disregarded by the West:
A bird's eye view of the vineyard
|
The
sovereignty of states, their equality as the main subjects of
international relations, was substantiated and approved within the
Westphalian system that took shape in Europe
in the 17th century. Currently, these traditional notions are being
questioned in a number of Western countries. They are trying to secure
for themselves, for example, the ability to interfere in other people’s
affairs under the pretext of non-compliance with
all sorts of unilaterally engineered human rights concepts like the
so-called “responsibility to protect.” We are against such a distorted
interpretation of the most important universal international legal norms
and principles.
I agree with Bill the future will be a much more multi-polar world.
And
the multipolar world is a Putin construct. He first presented it to the
world in Munich in 2007. Looks like Bill is doing his homework.
The
US will have to talk diplomatically with Putin et al in such a world.
For me, the left would improve its chances of getting anywhere if it
could accept that revolution is
a pipe dream that only assures voices on the left will be marginalized.
Not sure what revolution has to do with our conversation but it sounds as if you are lining up with Bill here.
Should
US democracy be cleaned up and reformed? Absolutely. Two of my friends
-- one in inner city Philadelphia,
one in red-state Kansas -- have run for local office, the "arena" that
Teddy Roosevelt waxed romantic about. It would be great to see more
leftist thinking in this direction and more people entering the public
arena. Maybe I'm deluded, but I've always felt
our message on the left is a good one that the times will eventually
have to open up to -- as long as it's responsible and realistic, not
Utopian. The ignominious crashing and burning of the Trump/Ryan health
care bill in a Republican-dominated Washington
suggests this. As Woody Allen said, 90% of life is simply showing up.
The critical factor is where one shows up.
Good
point there, John. Showing up where is the issue. However, I wonder why
anyone on the Left would
argue with Putin, who enjoys an over 80% popularity rating. The word
“democracy” contains the Greek component dhimos (δύμоς, often written as
demos), ie, the people. Aren’t democrats supposed to support systems
where the people decide for themselves what they
want?
Here
is something to think about: What does anyone – Left or Right – from a
nation with a $20 trillion
debt have to teach a country with almost zero debt? Can we instruct
them on economics? And if you look at the shambles that the Middle East
and Kosovo are in today thanks to US policy, does any Westerner have the
right to criticize the foreign policy of a
country that respects other countries and keeps hands off their
internal policies? That is in a nutshell what Vladimir Putin stands for.
John
From:
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2017 3:38 PM
To: John G; Don Hank
Cc:
Subject: Re: [] Fwd: Sergei Lavrov's speech: He knows US history
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2017 3:38 PM
To: John G; Don Hank
Cc:
Subject: Re: [] Fwd: Sergei Lavrov's speech: He knows US history
John,
this is psychobabble nonsense and has nothing to do with the point of
the article. The point is that the anglozionist cabal is going to have
to deal with the unbreakable
Russia-China-Iran Titanium-Steel alloy triangle. In other words, their
plan for world government ruled by the US,Israel and Britain is down the
drain. I told you this a couple of months ago but you said I didn't
know what I was talking about.
http://russia-insider.com/en/ washington-finds-brilliant- new-way-antagonize-asia-and- solidify-russia-china- alliance/ri19347
Moscow and Beijing are accelerating military and security cooperation to counter U.S. "defensive" installations in their backyards
Russia and China are tired of Washington's "defensive" military installations in their backyards — and they're already taking action.
According to the Atlantic Council and other responsible thinkers, the Untied States reserves the right to park its missile shields anywhere it wants, whether it be in Europe, East Asia, or the dark side of the Moon. This is because placing missile shields all over the place is an important cornerstone of Washington's ingenious plot to encourage Beijing and Moscow to put aside their differences and form a long-term security and military partnership.
Take for example Washington's decision to deploy Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems to South Korea.
The Americans claim that their missile defense systems will defend the free world against North Korea. But do they think Putin and Xi were born yesterday?
With yet another missile shield thousands of miles from U.S. soil,
Moscow and Beijing have doubled-down on military and security
cooperation.
On March 23, the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control, Mikhail Ulyanov, noted that Russia
"cooperates with China more and more on this issue [US missile defense system]":
Nice "Asia pivot", right?
It's hard to overstate the level of geopolitical disaster that Washington is experiencing.
The last few literate foreign policy thinkers on Capitol Hill even wrote up a report that nicely explains how badly the U.S. messed up:
v=Lewkw6-d-Wc
http://russia-insider.com/en/
Russia and China are tired of Washington's "defensive" military
installations in their backyards — and they're already taking action.
|
Moscow and Beijing are accelerating military and security cooperation to counter U.S. "defensive" installations in their backyards
Russia and China are tired of Washington's "defensive" military installations in their backyards — and they're already taking action.
According to the Atlantic Council and other responsible thinkers, the Untied States reserves the right to park its missile shields anywhere it wants, whether it be in Europe, East Asia, or the dark side of the Moon. This is because placing missile shields all over the place is an important cornerstone of Washington's ingenious plot to encourage Beijing and Moscow to put aside their differences and form a long-term security and military partnership.
Take for example Washington's decision to deploy Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems to South Korea.
The Americans claim that their missile defense systems will defend the free world against North Korea. But do they think Putin and Xi were born yesterday?
He added that China and Russia shared the same concerns but with the regional specifics.It's important to highlight the beauty of this situation: Russia is more concerned about missile defense systems in Europe, while China is focused on the THAAD systems in South Korea. But instead of pursuing separate national security policies aimed at protecting their own interests exclusively, Russia and China have come together for a common cause: Resisting U.S. military expansion.
"As for us, it mostly relates to Europe, for China, it is the Asian segment of the missile defense system, which causes the most concerns. This constitutes the ground for our cooperation," Ulyanov noted.
The last few literate foreign policy thinkers on Capitol Hill even wrote up a report that nicely explains how badly the U.S. messed up:
China and Russia are experiencing what is arguably their "highest period of bilateral [military] co-operation", according to a 20 March report published by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.Read that last sentence again. It's an extremely roundabout way of saying "our terrible foreign policy pushed Russia and China into a military alliance". As China expert Jeff J. Brown explained in an interview:
Despite areas of tension and distrust between Beijing and Moscow since normalising relations in 1989, the two countries' militaries and defence establishments "have steadily worked to minimise and overcome these differences", prioritising defence and security ties, which are now among "the most important components of the overall [bilateral] relationship", states the research report.
If the US strikes either China or Russia first, it’s probably World War III and humanity ceases to function as we know it. While there is no announced treaty alliance, we have no way of knowing what Russia and China have agreed to secretly. It is also possible that China and Russia have told NATO back channel to the effect, “You mess with one of us, you deal with us both”. I’ve always wondered if that might be the case, given America’s reluctance to push the pedal to the metal in the Ukraine and the South China Sea.https://www.youtube.com/watch?
May The Force be with you,
Bill
Bill
William H. Warrick III MD (Retired)
Veterans For Peace
Gainesville, Fl. Chapter #14
This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication or any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. Any government employee who has sworn an Oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies both foreign and domestic that retrieves, reads, copies prints, re-transmits, disseminates, or uses it against me or the recipients is in violation of their Oath. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately.
On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 2:51 PM, John Grant grantphoto@comcast.net [vfp-chaptercontacts] <vfp-chaptercontacts-noreply@
Mr. Hank,
Help
me out here. I love to discuss this stuff. I read this sort of line on
Russia from voices on the left a lot, and, as a realist, it perplexes
me. You
say: "I have not seen any signs of sanity in the West for a while, but Russia is still behaving like the only adult in the room." (For
what it's worth, wasn't Bernie Sanders an "adult voice in the room?"
And he's still with us. People still carry torches for his ideas.) Your
remark reads
to me as my enemy's enemy must be my friend
--
that is, if my "enemy" is Hillary Clinton and all she symbolizes then
Putin and Russia must be a breath of fresh air. Observations among my
fellow leftists aside,
the Putin/Trump linkages are pretty frightening -- if you accept that
the world is going through a profound epochal change of the order of the
shift from medieval times into the modern nation state era. We're all
in the midst of this change, which we'll fully
understand maybe 50 years from now. Globalization and cyber technology
are changing humanity on the granular level in ways no one really
understands. First conceived in SF novels like
Neuromancer in the mid-1980s as a real place one could get lost
in and fight struggles in, the cyber world is now quite real and growing
faster and faster in leaps and bounds. It's overtaking the "real"
world; one example of this is the Trump Twitter
phenomenon considered in terms of chaos theory, leading to Trump's win.
The "cold" war of our age and the future is
cyber warfare,
something
the Russians are apparently devoting a tremendous amount of resources,
research and people to. The "hacking" of the Democrats and links with
the Trump
campaign are only the beginning of it. Of course, we're up to our necks
in it too; in fact, we've sewn confusion this way for many decades;
consider how the CIA effectively bamboozled the Guatemalans in 1954,
long before cyber hacking was even a SF dream.
I
guess my comment on your analysis
and line on Russia is that it seems very much focused on the past and
all the truly terrible things we on the left piss and moan about
incessantly. Is it possible -- if one looks toward the future -- that
what Putin, Erdogan, Brexit, Marine Le Pen, Saudi Arabia,
Likud Israel and post-Arab Spring Egypt all represent is the rise of
anti-democratic authoritarian rule in response to the insecurities and
difficulties of this on-going epochal change. That is, what we're living
through is the breakdown of the modern nation
state world formed out of the 1648 Treaty Of Westphalia --
and, specifically, the rise of what one writer on post Soviet Russia
calls "Violent Entrepreneurs." This term refers to the rise of
public/private gangster capitalism in Russia, with Vladimir Putin at the
top of the heap. These cowboys make our capitalists
look like school kids. That Donald Trump has an affinity for this
top-down, gilded, go-go, no-holds-barred capitalist life style should
come as no surprise to anyone.
So
I'm perplexed by all the praise
for Vladimir Putin, on Syria or anyplace else. Just because he hates
Hillary Clinton and the Democratic machine that killed Bernie in the
election is a lousy reason to see anything positive in his rising
capitalistic power. I agree with Bill the future will
be a much more multi-polar world. The US will have to talk
diplomatically with Putin et al in such a world. For me, the left would
improve its chances of getting anywhere if it could accept that revolution
is a pipe dream that only assures voices on
the left will be marginalized. Should US democracy be cleaned up and
reformed? Absolutely. Two of my friends -- one in inner city
Philadelphia, one in red-state Kansas -- have run for local office, the
"arena" that Teddy Roosevelt waxed romantic about. It
would be great to see more leftist thinking in this direction and more
people entering the public arena. Maybe I'm deluded, but I've always
felt our message on the left is a good one that the times will
eventually have to open up to -- as long as it's responsible
and realistic, not Utopian. The ignominious crashing and burning of the
Trump/Ryan health care bill in a Republican-dominated Washington
suggests this. As Woody Allen said, 90% of life is simply showing up.
The critical factor is
where one shows up.
John
On Mar 26, 2017, at 5:01 PM, 'asavetmd .' [vfp-chaptercontacts] wrote:
It
is going to be a Multi-Polar World and the Exceptionalists/Masters of
The Universe in Washington and the City of London are going to have to
get used to it whether
they like it or not.
May The Force be with you,
Bill
Bill
William H. Warrick III MD (Retired)
Veterans For Peace
Gainesville, Fl. Chapter #14
This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication or any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. Any government employee who has sworn an Oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies both foreign and domestic that retrieves, reads, copies prints, re-transmits, disseminates, or uses it against me or the recipients is in violation of their Oath. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: DON HANK
Date: Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 8:18 AM
Subject: Sergei Lavrov's speech: He knows US history
To: DON HANK
The
anti-Russian hysteria is so thick these days that even Russophiles are
laying low. They're waiting for the Trump administration to end so that
they don't have to join in the chorus
of anti-Russian jeers just to prove they aren't helping Putin hack
their neighbor's phone.
I have not seen any signs of sanity in the West for a while, but Russia is still behaving like the only adult in the room. Recently foreign minister Sergei Lavrov gave a speech which, if you are looking for signs of rational thinking on planet earth, is here for you to contemplate:
http://russia-insider.com/en/i ncredible-speech-lavrov-says-n ew-centers-economic-power-will -end-us-global-domination/ri19 331
It is a bit longish so if you're short on time, here are the highlights:
Paragraph 4 dicusses how Russophobes have long attacked Russia for "expansionism." But here Lavrov discusses the addition of Siberia to the Russian empire and, without bluntly stating it, he is alluding to the way the Russians accepted the different cultures in that region, in contradistinction to the brutality of the Americans who treated their native peoples as if they were lower than animals, slaughtering them when they saw fit or forcing them onto reservations.
In about Par. 15, he mentions Kissinger and how he takes into account the cultural and historical factors in relations with other nations, while others in our State Department simply rely on fire power to persuade nations to come over to our side or else. This is certainly why Putin has maintained a cordial relationship with Kissinger all these years. Many Americans tend to dismiss Kissinger as simply another NWO stooge. We simply don't like details and nuances and are paying dearly for our lack of attention to detail.
Par. 22 or thereabouts:
Par. 24 or therabouts: A big truth here that America refuses to see:
ONLY through an international coalition including Russia can the growing terror threat be combated. We are doing just the opposite, inventing Russian "hacking" and smearing anyone who dares to state the truth, and Europe is now cowering before Islamic terror. America is next. Oh, but we're now obsessing over Iran, which has never contributed one penny to ISIS and is in fact fighting it in Syria. We've got all that fire power but where's the gray matter?
About Par. 26:
I have not seen any signs of sanity in the West for a while, but Russia is still behaving like the only adult in the room. Recently foreign minister Sergei Lavrov gave a speech which, if you are looking for signs of rational thinking on planet earth, is here for you to contemplate:
http://russia-insider.com/en/i
It is a bit longish so if you're short on time, here are the highlights:
Paragraph 4 dicusses how Russophobes have long attacked Russia for "expansionism." But here Lavrov discusses the addition of Siberia to the Russian empire and, without bluntly stating it, he is alluding to the way the Russians accepted the different cultures in that region, in contradistinction to the brutality of the Americans who treated their native peoples as if they were lower than animals, slaughtering them when they saw fit or forcing them onto reservations.
In about Par. 15, he mentions Kissinger and how he takes into account the cultural and historical factors in relations with other nations, while others in our State Department simply rely on fire power to persuade nations to come over to our side or else. This is certainly why Putin has maintained a cordial relationship with Kissinger all these years. Many Americans tend to dismiss Kissinger as simply another NWO stooge. We simply don't like details and nuances and are paying dearly for our lack of attention to detail.
Par. 22 or thereabouts:
The historical, geopolitical, moral foundations that shape the foreign policy of Russia are solid and constant. They set the tone of our day-to-day diplomatic efforts which, in keeping with the Constitution, are guided directly by the President of the Russian Federation.When was the last you heard any US pol talk about foundations such as these? They can't. A "progressive" nation is not supposed to have any such foundations. We ignore our history, deny morality, and substitute ideology for geopolitics. Our answer to any geopolitical problems: carpet bombing. If it weren't for US firepower, we would have no friends at all.
Par. 24 or therabouts: A big truth here that America refuses to see:
ONLY through an international coalition including Russia can the growing terror threat be combated. We are doing just the opposite, inventing Russian "hacking" and smearing anyone who dares to state the truth, and Europe is now cowering before Islamic terror. America is next. Oh, but we're now obsessing over Iran, which has never contributed one penny to ISIS and is in fact fighting it in Syria. We've got all that fire power but where's the gray matter?
About Par. 26:
To US Neocons, the idea that nations OTHER than the "exceptional" US (which has all but destroyed the Middle East and wiped out its Christian population) might do a better job of leading is blasphemous to the Neocons/Neoliberals who have us all in a stranglehold. The problem for them is that, while they may own the media and government, what Lavrov says here makes plenty of sense to people in other countries, who are sick and tired of being under the heel of Washington and NATO. We may have the bombs, but we have lost the propaganda war.The formation of a polycentric international order is an objective process. It is in our common interest to make it more stable and predictable. In these conditions, the role of diplomacy as a tool to coordinate balanced solutions in politics, economics, finance, the environment, and the innovation and technology sectors has increased significantly. Simultaneously, the role of the armed forces as the guarantor of peace has increased too.
Don Hank
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