Tag: perpetual war

Failing Kursk Offensive May Backfire On Ukraine As Russian Troops Mass Near Sumy

The true purpose of Ukraine’s surprise offensive into the Russian agricultural region of Kursk has been hotly debated since it was launched in August.  The complete failure of the 2023 “counter-offensive” led many to believe that Ukraine’s rumored troop shortages were far worse than initially reported.  Some believed that the Kursk offensive was designed to allay fears among allies that Kyiv was no longer capable of taking ground from the Russians. 

The invasion of Kursk was successful primarily because the area was weakly defended, and it was weakly defended because it has no strategic value.  It’s a collection of farming towns with no industrial infrastructure, and the nearest vital site (a nuclear power plant) is too far away for the Ukrainians to reach.  Almost every tactician not working for Ukraine has questioned the offensive, calling it potentially one of the greatest military blunders in modern history.  

Why?  Because Kursk has siphoned up some of Ukraine’s best troops and weaponry and increased the ground they have to defend with the limited forces they have available.  In a war of attrition, the losing side must seek to shrink and strengthen their area of defense instead of spreading themselves thin.  Ukraine did the opposite. 

Vladimir Zelensky claims that Kursk was designed to lure large numbers of Russian troops away from the eastern front and stop their advance.  If this is the case, then the effort was unsuccessful.  Russian attacks increased in the period after the Kursk invasion and now Kremlin forces are in the process of taking at least three key cities which will cement their control of the Donbas.  

Another theory is that Kursk was intended to convince NATO allies that Vladimir Putin’s “red lines” are meaningless and that Ukraine should be given access to long range missiles for striking deep into the heart of Russia.  If that was the plan, then it has succeeded.  The Biden Administration and NATO have given Zelensky the green light to use ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles at will.  

Another possible advantage for Ukraine in the “red line” narrative is that it could be used to convince NATO countries to deploy troops to the region, thus triggering WWIII.  This is, at bottom, the only hope Ukraine has to push Russia back – A massive influx of western troops and hardware.  But at the same time the risk of a wider war with nuclear implications grows exponentially.  There are plenty of people in Ukraine, elites in globalist think tanks and officials in NATO that have no problem with that.

The problem with Kursk is that Ukraine needs to hold it until they can get the response they want from the west, but Russia appears to be poised to take the ground back.  And, if these reports are accurate, then maintaining a presence in Kursk may have backfired on Ukraine.

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NATO State Seeking More Cemetery Space for Potential Future War Casualties

Funeral associations in Sweden are looking to secure enough land to bury thousands of people in the event of a war, the Associated Press has reported. The Nordic country joined NATO earlier this year, amid the US-led military bloc’s growing involvement in the Ukraine conflict.

The burial association in Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, is trying to acquire additional land to ensure casket sites for some 30,000 dead, on top of what is needed for graveyards for regular use, AP wrote on Saturday.

Swedish media outlets reported earlier this month that the authorities were bracing for up to half a million potential fatalities if the country were to enter a full-scale war.

In big cities… land resources are scarce to begin with and not always sufficient to meet burial ground needs even in times of calm and peace,” AP quoted Katarina Evenseth, senior advisor at the Goteborg Burial Association, as saying.

In October, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) released updated civil preparedness guides with instructions on how to survive during an armed conflict. The brochure, dubbed “In case of crisis or war,” contains advice on evacuation, how to stop bleeding, and other recommendations.

“The national security situation has changed drastically, and we all need to strengthen our resilience to various crises and, ultimately, war,” MSB Director General Mikael Frisell said in a statement last month.

Stockholm dropped decades of military non-alliance and joined NATO in March, amid the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The US-led bloc has been supporting Kiev by providing military aid, and in November, Washington authorized strikes using its missiles deep inside Russian territory. France has also suggested that Ukraine should be allowed to fire its missiles into Russia in self-defense, and Moscow has claimed that British-supplied Storm Shadows have already been used in such strikes.

Moscow has reiterated that the move makes NATO a direct party to the conflict.

According to critics of Stockholm’s accession to NATO, Sweden has become a potential target in the event of a war.

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Biden White House to Give Another $2.5 Billion to Ukraine – After a $1.25 Billion Donation on Friday!

Joe Biden’s handlers announced another $2.5 billion will be gifted to Ukraine.

Today’s multi-billion dollar donation included an additional $1.25 billion drawdown package for the Ukrainian military and a $1.22 billion Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) package.

Biden’s handlers are hoping to escalated the Russia-Ukrainian conflict before the senile Democrat leaves office.

Who’s up for World War III?

The Biden team announced the latest donation early Monday morning on the White House website.

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Friends With (Geopolitical) Benefits: How Russia and North Korea Are Changing the Game

Recent reports suggest that North Korean (DPRK) troops may be assisting Russia in its war with Ukraine – a development that underscores their growing strategic partnership, formalized by a treaty pledging mutual military, economic, and cultural cooperation. This alliance, formalized through a recently enacted treaty, could bolster Vladimir Putin’s position ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, as Trump has pledged to end the war in the early days of his second administration. Any involvement of DPRK troops – whether logistical or kinetic – could help to expedite Russian operations. These developments, set against the backdrop of Russia and North Korea’s recently enacted comprehensive strategic partnership, highlight the deepening ties between the two nations, raising critical questions about the Ukraine war, DPRK-Russia relations, and US diplomacy in the region.

The Kremlin’s Pragmatic Gambit

The treaty, signed during Vladimir Putin’s state visit to the DPRK on June 18, 2024, ratified in November and taking full effect on December 4, 2024, marks a pivotal moment in DPRK-Russia relations. While Western media have focused on the defense-related aspects – such as alleged sales of DPRK ammunition to Russia and the rumored deployment of North Korean troops to the Russian Federation – the treaty encompasses far more than military cooperation.

Allegations of DPRK troop deployments to Russia have dominated Western headlines, though neither Moscow nor Pyongyang has confirmed them, and much of the evidence was clearly fabricated. The Pentagon claims that several thousand DPRK troops likely traveled to Russia earlier this year, ostensibly for “training exercises,” and are now stationed in rear echelons behind the front lines in the Kursk region in response to a Ukrainian invasion that was launched in August 2024. Even if DPRK troops are confined to logistical and support roles, their presence could enable Russia to redeploy its troops to critical fronts, enhancing its operational capabilities.

This aligns with speculation that Putin hopes to drive all Ukrainian forces from Russian soil before Trump’s inauguration, preferring to negotiate an end to the war from an uncompromised position of strength.

The recently enacted treaty commits both nations to mutual military assistance, stating, “In case any one of the two sides is put in a state of war by an armed invasion from an individual state or several states, the other side shall provide military and other assistance with all means in its possession without delay in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter and the laws of the DPRK and the Russian Federation.”

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US, British jets rain fire on Yemeni capital in new late night attack

US and UK warplanes launched a new round of airstrikes on the Yemeni capital late on 27 December, targeting the 21 September park in the Maeen district of Sanaa, according to Yemen’s Al-Masirah TV.

No photos or videos of the attack have been released or circulated on social media. US Central Command (CENTCOM) has not claimed responsibility for the attack.

The latest western aggression came one day after Israeli warplanes launched massive airstrikes on Sanaa and the coastal province of Hodeidah in retaliation for continued drone and hypersonic missile attacks by the Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) in support of Palestinians in Gaza.

Earlier on Friday, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis marched through the streets of Sanaa, Saada, Hodeidah, Hajjah, and Al-Mahwit, proclaiming, “We firmly stand with Gaza, the glory… without limits and without red lines.”

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Biden Is Wrong To Double Down on Syria

On December 19, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that there are roughly 2,000 troops stationed in Syria – 1,100 more than previously shared with the public. Pentagon spokesperson Major General Patrick Ryder disclosed the new number almost off-handedly, without explanation for the shock news as Syria experiences a generational moment following former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapse on December 8. The announcement personifies the ongoing and widespread disdain of American political and military leaders for transparency on military operations abroad.

Indeed, the laxness with which Ryder announced the new deployment numbers is unacceptable. These forces are not, as the spokesperson claimed, simply “temporary rotational forces” but reflect the worst excesses of mission creep that have come to define U.S. military operations in the post-9/11 era. Ryder’s follow-on statements, in the same breath as his claims of the temporary nature of the deployment, highlight this bleak reality: “Right now, there are no plans to cease the defeat-ISIS mission.”

Rather, the Biden administration feels empowered to expand that mission and lie to the American people about what exactly it is doing in Syria. Such an outcome results from unchecked executive power in the U.S. government and Congressional reluctance to question support for anything labeled as counterterrorism (CT) operations. Worse, the announcement comes as news surfaces that U.S. President Joe Biden experienced “good days and bad days” as early as 2021 concerning his mental acuity – another inconvenient fact hidden from U.S. citizens, raising questions regarding who has actually been steering policy in the White House.

The inconvenient truth for Biden’s advisors is simple: U.S. forces continue to operate in a country that has not invited them to establish a presence and without any constitutionally mandated Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) required to make such military operations legal under U.S. law. Only Congress can pass an AUMF – the president cannot unilaterally declare one. Flimsy arguments connecting the Islamic State to Al-Qaeda – arguing that the former grew out of the latter – are another ugly expansion of unchecked executive power aimed at limiting U.S. citizen input on the critical decisions of their elected officials.

Such a pass must be rejected. For two decades, U.S. officials have worked to expand global military power in a resource-draining deluge of unsustainable overextension. On the same day as Ryder’s announcement, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – the primary defense appropriations package – to the tune of $895 billion. As U.S. debt approaches $37 trillion, the government should be more transparent on such issues – not less. Yet rather than taking that approach, the Pentagon failed its seventh straight audit in 2024.

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Al Qaida Is Winning – The New Caliphate In Syria

Biden began his term in office by abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban and allowing the creation of a new terrorist super state. He is finishing his time in the Oval Office by watching helplessly as a new Caliphate is formed in the rubble of what was once Syria. Divorced from reality as always, his hapless State Department now calls the jihadi ruler of Damascus Al-Jolani a “pragmatist” and talks mindlessly about accommodation and cooperation with mass murderers and rapists.

Meanwhile, inside Syria, the new Islamic rulers are losing no time in consolidating their rule and making clear their intentions. On 26 December, Al-Jolani appointed former Al-Qaeda commander and Nusra Front co-founder Anas Hassan Khattab as the head of the country’s general intelligence agency. Khattab was designated a “terrorist” by the United Nations a decade ago. According to the UN, he was involved “in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing, or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf of, or in support of” and “otherwise supporting acts or activities of” the Nusra Front. This Al-Qaeda offshoot was rebranded as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2017.

Those are the guys who now run Syria.

As the head of intelligence Khattab’s job will not be to prepare detailed analyses of foreign developments. He will be in charge of domestic security. His job will be to crush any dissent and guarantee Al-Jolani stays in power. He has already been performing that function in the areas that HTS has controlled for years, where torture and murder are common tactics used to stifle dissent.

Last week, Asaad Hassan al-Shibani, a founding member of Al-Qaeda in Syria, was appointed foreign minister for the new terrorist state being created in Syria.

Meanwhile, more information is becoming available on the composition of the jihadist forces that drove Assad from power. Contrary to press reports that want to characterize the ousting of Assad as some sort of liberal, democratic, populist movement, the reality appears to be that substantial numbers of fighters from outside of Syria are present on the ground. Just before Christmas, a video surfaced of a Christmas tree in a town in Syria being burned by Islamists. It now appears the terrorists who carried out this action were Uzbek fighters fighting with Al-Jolani’s forces.

In fact, substantial numbers of Central Asians are in Syria and serving the new Caliphate. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI),

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Meet the new generation of tax resisters refusing to pay for war

In light of the coronavirus pandemic, the IRS has taken the unusual step of extending the tax season to July 15 — a move that gives people more time to consider using the old, but often overlooked tactic of war tax resistance from the safety of their homes.

For most people tax season is a hassle — involving organizing paperwork, gathering receipts, slogging through indecipherable forms — but it’s hardly an ethical or moral quandary. However, war tax resisters see taxes through a moral lens. For them it is a time ripe with opportunities for civil disobedience, charitable giving, and sophisticated accounting in the pursuit of peace — and now public health — by refusing to pay some or all of their income tax (and even their employment taxes in some cases).

The tactic is most associated with historic peace churches, including Quakers and Mennonites, and Vietnam-era anti-war activists. As a result, the demographic associated with the tactic tends to be older, but in an age of never-ending wars, climate change and an escalating pandemic, it is now being explored by millenials and younger people.

The War Resisters League, or WRL, a secular pacifist organization founded in 1923, estimates that in fiscal year 2021, some 47 percent of the federal budget will be allocated to military spending. The budget (nearly $3.5 trillion dollars in 2021) is funded by income taxes, hence war tax resisters primary focus on refusing to pay income taxes.

There are a variety of ways to avoid income taxes, some of which are legal and others which are not. Resisters may choose to live under the taxable level ($12,400 for an individual in 2020), which is legal, while others choose to file their taxes and refuse to pay any amount owed, which is illegal. Some even choose to send the money that they would have paid in taxes to a charity or non-profit, which could be an attractive option for those wanting to redirect their money to support those risking their lives to respond to the coronavirus. A host of options between those two poles are outlined by WRL and the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, or NWTRCC, a coalition of groups and individuals founded in 1982 to support war tax resistance.

“It encourages you to question how you’re relating to other people and society,” said Rev. Jerry Maynard, a 26-year-old Independent Catholic Priest, founding pastor of The People’s Church, and NWTRCC board member, who has been practicing war tax resistance since 2013. “It makes you aware that you aren’t just a fleeting reality in this giant, expansive world, but you’re really a cog in the machine. [At the same time] you’re conscious, so you can decide whether you want to turn this way or that way or if you don’t want to turn at all.”

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The World Order Is Dangerously In Flux

“A core reflex in these decades of postmodern insanity was constant rejection of things we thought we knew in favor of New, Improved Beliefs packaged from above.”

– Matt Taibbi, Racket News

I would guess that you’re feeling as if anything might happen now. It’s hard to rule out even the possibility that we could all be vaporized before moving onto the next mundane chore of the day. The world order is dangerously in flux. America’s Woke-Jacobin “Joe Biden” regime was defeated in the 2024 election, but they were apparently just a front for the sinister entity we call the “blob” or the Deep State, which in recent years has consistently and garishly acted against our country’s interests. So, the blob abides, and it probably weaves schemes in the deep background of daily life even as a new government awaits. But if the Woke-Jacobin Biden-istas were tied-in with the so-called “globalist” enterprise centered around the EU bureaucracy, with assistance from the World Economic Forum’s network of zillionaires and bankers. . . well, that coalition looks rather broken now. It’s doing a hurt-dance. It’s on the run, a little bit.

What is not broken for the moment — a tenuous moment — is the new Trump regime’s determination to correct the disorders of Western Civ, starting with the affairs of the USA, according to age-old reality-based norms of behavior and good-faith relations between the people and their government. Trust was broken and must be restored. The President-elect has assembled an extraordinary team of reformers, if they can get to their posts without subversion. And, of course, Mr. Trump himself has to evade further attempts to rub him out, to knock him off the game-board before he can take office, and then he must survive the months beyond his inauguration. So, you are correct to be nervous.

Paradoxically, Mr. Trump has to initially manage the US government as if it deserves a sense of reassuring continuity, which, in many respects it does not deserve. So many institutions and relationships between them have been perverted and damaged. How do we pretend that the upper layers of management in any federal agency — the strata who really run things below the top “political” appointees — can continue in-place as if all that perversion never happened? The Department of Justice and the FBI are filled with lawyers and agents who abused their power egregiously and went to war against the American people. The agency’s work will just have to stop for a while. The nation can probably endure if investigations and prosecutions are suspended for sixty days while the personnel issues get sorted out — who goes and who stays.

But what about the Defense Department and the CIA? The country must be able to defend itself. These departments are the lairs of the more dangerously entrenched blob actors. Both DOD and the CIA have come to be organized as racketeering operations. Both are involved in domestic money-laundering activities at the giant scale, and in rackets abroad — such as the many grifts around Ukraine, in which giant financial entities like BlackRock are partnered-in. (You know, for instance, don’t you, that BlackRock was poised to acquire control of Ukraine’s natural resource base, until Mr. Putin’s resolve ended that fantasy.) And the CIA is suspected of being deeply involved in the Mexican crime cartel operations, both around drugs and human trafficking. The imputations are sickening. The DOD and the CIA will fight desperately to preserve their perqs and projects, and to stay out of jail. But until now they have not really been challenged.

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Is Peace Possible Today?

As we approach Christmas, with its connotations of peace and goodwill to all people, and the New Year, when one traditionally comes up with ‘resolutions’ for the year ahead, with the intention of compensating for mistakes made during the past year, and of initiating creative projects for the future, one has to ask: is all of this just Heideggerian ‘idle talk,’ or is peace a realistic possibility? 

This seems to be an easy question to answer. Despite President-elect Donald Trump’s repeated assurance that he would bring about an end to the war in Ukraine, it is by no means certain that he would be able to do that, not only because his enemies, both in the US and abroad, are heavily invested in keeping the war going at all costs, but also in light of the improbability that President Vladimir Putin of Russia would be a pushover when it comes to conditions for a peace agreement.  

Such an arrangement would suit Ukraine and NATO very well, insofar as it would provide them with the opportunity to rearm and recruit more soldiers for the likely recommencement of hostilities in the future – something that was done before (after the 2014-2015 Minsk agreements), as Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande have admitted. Besides, that this is not a novel tactic, and a disingenuous one to boot, should be evident, as Immanuel Kant knew in the 18th century already, when he wrote his famous essay on the conditions for ‘perpetual peace,’ on which I have elaborated before. I am thinking of a specific condition stated in this essay, in the very first of the ‘preliminary articles,’ which reads: ‘No treaty of peace shall be regarded as valid, if made with the secret reservation of material for a future war.’ 

Kant’s elaboration on this article shows that he was not sufficiently shortsighted to confuse peace with ‘a mere truce, a mere suspension of hostilities’ – possibly to gain valuable time for strengthening one’s military to recover after relinquishing some of their capabilities in battle. The article is therefore clearly aimed at preventing any ‘mental reservation’ of demands to be used as casus belli to be revitalised on a more auspicious occasion in the future. This is essentially what was done before, as acknowledged by Merkel and Hollande in the RT article linked above, which reported that ‘…former German chancellor Angela Merkel [who] described the Minsk accords in December [2014/2015] as ‘an attempt to give Ukraine time’ to build up its armed forces.’ 

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