Tag: perpetual war

Columnist Says Pelosi Triggering U.S.-China war Could ‘Fight Climate Change’

South China Morning Post (SCMP) North American bureau chief Robert Delaney published a bizarre editorial on Tuesday in which he suggested a war between America and China, sparked by Beijing making good on its threat of a military response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) visit to Taiwan, could be even better than the coronavirus pandemic for reducing the world’s carbon footprint.

Delaney’s long screed, which only got around to his give-war-a-chance grand finale in the final paragraphs, included hosannas for the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as the luckiest break for the climate change movement in generations, since it significantly reduced energy consumption and emissions.

Perhaps more importantly, the pandemic gave free nations a taste of the Chinese-style authoritarianism that would be needed to make Delaney’s climate dreams come true. 

A war between America and China that could quickly spiral into a global conflict would seem likely to release a great deal of carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere – and, in the worst-case scenario, some rather massive radioactive heat blooms – but Delaney argued it would be worthwhile in the long run, because it would make the West more accustomed to totalitarian control and reduce carbon footprints by impoverishing all of mankind:

Black swans like the [Chinese coronavirus] pandemic tend to make this happen against just about everyone’s will. Russia’s war against Ukraine may work towards this goal on the margins, given that many in Europe will need to curtail power generation until they figure out how to replace the Russian energy supply. But, with talk of fossil fuels filling the gap in the near term, we could see the opposite.

Which brings us back to Pelosi, who has the world guessing whether she will make Taipei part of her Asia-Pacific itinerary. Such a move carries the risk of a military conflict in the Taiwan Strait, which would have dire economic consequences as supply chains run through China and the rest of Asia.

If a conflict ends up severing trade between Asia and the US, billions of us will suddenly need to make do to an extent far greater than when [Chinese coronavirus] disrupted supply chains.

“All things considered, a Pelosi delegation to Taiwan might be just what the Earth’s natural ecosystems need,” Delaney mused.

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Zelensky Thanks Biden For Fresh $550M In Military Aid, Claiming Ukraine “Closer To Victory”

Another Monday, and another massive military aid package for Ukraine approved by the Biden administration – this time with a price tag just over half-a-billion dollars.

“The United States is greenlighting another military assistance package to Ukraine, sending $550 million in ammunition for advanced rocket systems and other equipment to the country to fight the Russian invasion,” The Hill reports of the approved transfer. Ukraine’s President Zelensky was quick to thank the White House, curiously adding this brings the Ukrainian forces “closer to victory”.

Thank you @POTUS for your leadership, robust support of 🇺🇦 and understanding that 🇷🇺 is a threat to entire civilized world. Together we are defending values of freedom common to both 🇺🇦 & 🇺🇸. New defense assistance package is bringing us closer to victory

— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 1, 2022

The package is expected to include more ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, as well as mortar resupplies, including an estimated 75,000 rounds for 155 mm artillery.

For those keeping count, that’s north of $8 billion in total US assistance to Ukraine spread over the course of 17 packages so far since the February 24 Russian invasion.

Zelensky and his top officials have continued to press for more, and longer-range systems, even as Russia has claimed to have taken out multiple HIMARS systems and rockets in strikes on depots. Kiev has disputes this, and currently it’s believed at least a dozen to 16 HIMARS are active near the front lines based on the latest known Pentagon transfers.

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“These are animals, not people”: Zelensky frees convicted child rapists, torturers to reinforce depleted military

Once condemned by Ukrainian officials and imprisoned for sadistic torture and the rape of minors, leaders of the notorious Tornado Battalion are free under Volodymyr Zelensky’s orders.

After banning virtually his entire political opposition, publishing a blacklist of foreign journalists and academics accused of advancing “Russian propaganda,” and ramming through a law exempting 70% of Ukrainians from workplace protections, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy has freed from prison fascist militants convicted of some of the most heinous crimes the country has seen since World War II. 

According to a July 11 report in Ukrainian media, Ruslan Onishenko, commander of the now-disbanded Tornado Battalion, was freed as part of President Zelensky’s scheme to release prisoners with combat experience. Along with an unwavering commitment to fascism, Onishenko is known as a psychopathic sadist who was involved in sexually assaulting children, brutally torturing prisoners, and murder.

Onishenko’s release follows a February 27 order by Zelensky to free other convicted former Tornado members like Danil “Mujahed” Lyashuk, a fanatic from Belarus who has openly emulated ISIS and boasted of torturing captives for sheer enjoyment. According to Zelensky‘s decree, prisoners with combat experience would be allowed to “compensate for their guilt” by fighting in the “hottest spots.”

Back in 2015, when the Ukrainian state provided official support to his Tornado Battalion, Onishenko texted two fellow “patriots,” Voldomor and Svetlana Savichuk, propositioning Svetlana Savichuk to “suck my cock in front of the [toddler] children.” (See screenshots of the conversation here). He also asked Savichuk to perform lewd acts on her children for his viewing pleasure. Despite the magnitude of his crimes, which included torture, murder, rape – including that of children – kidnapping, amputation, and more, Onishenko was sentenced to a mere 11 years in prison on April 11, 2017.  

Now, after serving just five years of his sentence, the convicted predator has been freed by a president hailed by  Western patrons as a defender of democracy.

Zelensky’s move is not just a signal of desperation as his military is ground down by Russian forces in the east. It extends the virtual impunity that Ukrainian battalions infested with hardened criminals and neo-Nazis have enjoyed for over eight years as official enforcers of the post-Maidan regime’s rule.

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China Is Issuing The Same “Red Line” Warnings About Taiwan That Russia Issued About Ukraine

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has continued to pour gasoline on the foreign policy dumpster fire that is her planned visit to Taiwan next month, now reportedly encouraging other members of congress to come along for the ride.

“Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has invited a small group of lawmakers on her official trip to Taiwan, including the top Democrat and Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee,” NBC News reports.

This trip, which Beijing perceives as an egregious transgression of Washington’s longstanding one-China policy, is already so incendiary that the Pentagon is now planning to send in fighter jets and other war machinery to protect Pelosi’s plane in case of attacks by the Chinese military.

AP reports:

While U.S. officials say they have little fear that Beijing would attack the U.S. House speaker’s plane, they are aware that a mishap, misstep or misunderstanding could endanger her safety. So the Pentagon is developing plans for any contingency.

 

Officials told The Associated Press that if Pelosi goes to Taiwan — still an uncertainty — the military would increase its movement of forces and assets in the Indo-Pacific region. They declined to provide details, but said that fighter jets, ships, surveillance assets and other military systems would likely be used to provide overlapping rings of protection for her flight to Taiwan and any time on the ground there.

This risk alone would be reason enough to cancel the trip, but adding to the concern is the fact that the Chinese government has begun warning against it using the same “red line” language that Russia was using in the lead-up to its invasion of Ukraine.

“We have repeatedly made clear our our firm opposition to Speaker Pelosi’s potential visit to Taiwan. If the US side insists on making the visit and challenges China’s red line, it will be met with resolute countermeasures,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijiang said Wednesday. “The U.S. must assume full responsibility for any serious consequence arising thereof.”

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U.S. PLAYED SECRET ROLE IN NIGERIA ATTACK THAT KILLED MORE THAN 160 CIVILIANS

THE UNITED STATES played an unacknowledged role in the 2017 bombing of an internally displaced persons’ camp in Nigeria that killed more than 160 civilians, many of them children.

A surveillance plane circled above the Rann IDP camp, which housed 43,000 people and was controlled by the Nigerian military, before a jet arrived and bombed the area where people draw water from a borehole, survivors of the attack said. The jet then circled and dropped another bomb on the tents of displaced civilians sheltering there.

The Nigerian air force expressed regret for carrying out the airstrike, which also killed nine aid workers and seriously wounded more than 120 people. But the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.-Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document obtained exclusively by The Intercept.

Evidence suggests that the U.S. launched a near unprecedented internal investigation of the attack because it secretly provided intelligence or other support to the Nigerian armed forces, a contribution hinted at by Nigerian military officials at the time. The U.S. inquiry, the existence of which has not been previously reported, was ordered by the top American general overseeing troops in Africa and was specifically designed to avoid questions of wrongdoing or recommendations for disciplinary action, according to the document.

Conducted as part of a long-running counterinsurgency campaign against the terrorist group Boko Haram, the January 17, 2017, attack on the camp, located in Rann, Nigeria, near the Cameroonian and Chadian borders, also destroyed at least 35 structures, including shelters for war victims who had been forced from their homes.

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Ukrainian Government Publishes List of American Individuals Who are Allegedly “Russian Propagandists” 

The government of Ukraine recently published a list of individuals who it believes are “promoting Russian propaganda.” As Finn McRedmond of UnHerd noted, this list includes “a number of prominent Western intellectuals.” 

On July 14, 2022, the “Center for Countering Disinformation”, published a list on its website of academics, activists, and politicians who are “promoting Russian propaganda.” These included notable intellectuals and politicians such as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, geopolitical analyst Edward Luttwak, international relations scholar John Mearsheimer, and independent leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald. 

The list does not provide any specific consequences for the people who are mentioned on it.

This institution was set up in 2021 under the watch of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and was headed by former lawyer Polina Lysenko. The CCD is under the purview of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine.

The CCD’s goal is to find and combat “propaganda” and “destructive disinformation” and to stop the “manipulation of public opinion.”

McRedmond observed that the “exact criteria for inclusion are also unclear, although next to each name the report lists the ‘pro Russian’ opinions the individual promotes.” In the case of Edward Luttwak, he earned the Ukrainian state’s ire by suggesting that “referendums should be held in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions”, referring to the breakaway republics that declared their independence following the Maidan Revolution of 2014.  Mearsheimer is an outspoken critic of American involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. His remarks that “NATO has been in Ukraine since 2014” and that “NATO provoked Putin” were what prompted the Ukrainian government to label him as a “pro-Russian propagandist.” 

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The Phoniest, Most PR-Intensive War Of All Time

The president and first lady of Ukraine have posed for a romantic photoshoot with Vogue magazine, wherein President Volodymyr Zelensky waxes poetical about his love for his darling wife.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: how is Zelensky making time for a Vogue photoshoot amidst his busy schedule of PR appearances for other major western institutions?

I mean this is after all the same Volodymyr Zelensky who has been so busy making video appearances for the Grammy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the World Economic Forum and probably the Bilderberg group as well, and having meetings with celebrities like Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, and Bono and the Edge from U2. It’s as busy a PR tour as he could possibly have without having a discussion about the strategic importance of long-range artillery with Elmo on Sesame Street.

Oh yeah, and also isn’t there like a war or something happening in Ukraine? You’d think he’d probably be somewhat busy with that too.

Call me crazy, but I’m beginning to suspect that there might be a concerted effort to manipulate the way we think about the war in Ukraine. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say it’s the most aggressively perception-managed war we’ve ever experienced.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February we have not only been smashed with mass media propaganda unlike anything we’ve ever seen while Russian media are purged from the airwaves, we’re also seeing the new media element of unprecedented amounts of online censorship, algorithm-boosted propaganda, and social media trolling.

So we’ve literally never seen this much overall effort put into manipulating the way the public thinks about a war. Which makes sense, given that it’s a profoundly dangerous proxy war which stands to benefit ordinary people in no way, shape or form.

I mean, can you imagine if people were allowed to just think their own thoughts about their government’s economic warfare against Russia which is hurting them financially and pushing millions toward starvation with the full awareness and approval of the US government? Or if Americans were allowed to wonder if the billions they are pouring into this proxy conflict could be better spent at home? Or if people started objecting to a needless conflict for geostrategic domination threatening their lives and the lives of everyone they know with the risk of nuclear annihilation?

Can’t have that.

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After Thousands of Soldiers Died Fighting Them In Afghanistan, The US Now Backs The Taliban

Yes, you read that headline correctly. As we approach the one year anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan it seems as though the United States government is once again playing musical chairs with whom it considers friend or foe. At least this appears to be the case due to a recent article published by AntiWar.com, in which a yet to be named spokesman for the US State Department asserted that the US “does not support organized violent opposition to the Taliban” rule in Afghanistan.

First reported by The Foreign Desk, the statement comes as resistance fighters claim victory over Taliban forces in the Baghlan Province as conflict in the region continues.

After a two day skirmish between Taliban fighters and Afghanistan’s National Resistance Front (NRF) which resulted in heavy Taliban losses and the NRF taking control of Baghlan province’s easternmost district of Khost wa Fereng, in northern Afghanistan, the resistance fighters took to social media to celebrate their victory.

Speaking to The Foreign Desk, the State Department spokesperson said ―

“We are monitoring the recent uptick in violence closely and call on all sides to exercise restraint and to engage. This is the only way that Afghanistan can confront its many challenges,”

Continuing on, emphasis our own,

“We want to see the emergence of stable and sustainable political dispensation via peaceful means. We do not support organized violent opposition to the Taliban, and we would discourage other powers from doing so as well,”

Although this position has not yet been publicly acknowledged outside of this interview with The Foreign Desk, as the piece from Anti War notes this is an awkward position for the administration to be in. Considering the last few decades spent vilifying the Taliban as the epitome of evil and the ultimate adversary.

Although also as noted, prior to the 2001 invasion the Bush administration was actually allied with the Taliban, considering them a partner in the war on drugs.

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Warmongering Republicans Have Throbbing Hard-Ons For Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip

Octogenarian House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decided to spend her final years on this mortal coil trying to start World War Three, pushing the Biden administration to designate Russia an official “state sponsor of terrorism” and planning a freakishly incendiary trip to Taiwan just in the last few days.

Beijing has made it clear that the first visit to Taiwan by a major US official in decades would be seen as an aggressive escalation and an egregious transgression of Washington’s official one-China policy.

“The U.S. side is wrong to believe that it can continue to flagrantly disregard the feelings of the Chinese side on Taiwan without more serious consequences,” a Chinese official told the Washington Post in response to the news of Pelosi’s planned trip in August, adding that “actors like Nancy Pelosi are committed to destabilizing China under the guise of morality” and that Pelosi has “openly threatened China’s development.”

Chinese state media put it even more bluntly, stating, “Pelosi’s Taiwan visit is a blatant provocation which will surely be met with a forceful response from China, including unprecedented military pressure. She is creating a dangerous moment, placing us on the brink of war. Nobody can guarantee there will be no mishaps.”

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