Tuesday, March 28, 2017

BLOWBACK ON: Fwd: Sergei Lavrov's speech: He knows US history

Submitted by: Donald Hank

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:

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 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. Don

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:

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
 
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
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

Nice pivot, Washington
Nice pivot, Washington
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]":
He added that China and Russia shared the same concerns but with the regional specifics.
"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.
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. 
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
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.
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.
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:
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?v=Lewkw6-d-Wc


May The Force be with you,
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@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
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
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/incredible-speech-lavrov-says-new-centers-economic-power-will-end-us-global-domination/ri19331

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:
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.
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.
Don Hank

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