Monday, May 1, 2023

Empires Of Mortals

 Mortals,


​  ​All empires are mortal, the "American Empire" too , ​by Thierry Meyssan​  Thanks Eleni.​
  The USSR collapsed in on itself, not from the war in Afghanistan (1979-89), but from the Chernobyl disaster (April 26, 1989). The Soviets suddenly realized that the state was no longer in control. The members of the Warsaw Pact, whom Leonid Brezhnev had made vassals, revolted. The churches, the Communist Youth and the gays of East Germany brought down the Berlin Wall [1]. Not only did the USSR not react, but also it abandoned its allies outside Europe, especially Cuba. The First Secretary of the party, Mikhail Gorbachev, turned from a reformer into a liquidator. The USSR broke up, creating many new independent states. Then it was a descent into hell.​..
​​..Even before the dissolution of the USSR, the United States had become the hyperpower that no one contests [2]. The Straussian Paul Wolfowitz elaborated a doctrine aimed at preventing the emergence of a new competitor, which would take the place of the Soviet Union. He unhesitatingly designated the political project of François Mitterrand and Helmut Köhl, the European Union, as the enemy to be destroyed...
..Although no one threatens the supremacy of the US, it feels that its internal balance is fragile. Their jobs have been relocated and their economy is based more on the internationalization of their currency, the dollar, than on the wealth they produce.
​  ​In 2001, the Straussians organized the September 11 attacks [3] and adopted the Rusmfeld/Cebrowski doctrine [4]. They suspended fundamental freedoms at home with the USA Patriot Act and wage an "endless war" that ravaged the "wider Middle East"...
..In a speech given on February 11, 2007 at the Munich Security Conference [5], President Vladimir Putin denounced the Bush New World Order as "unipolar". According to him, it would be more accurate to describe it as "monopolistic". He notes that far from bringing peace, it sowed misfortune...
​  ​In the 15 years since the Munich speech, Russia’s priority has been to rebuild its power.​..
​..​In the 35 years since the collapse of the USSR, the United States has wrongly convinced itself that it has defeated its rival. In reality, it was the Soviets themselves who overthrew it. They believed that the Russians would need a century to recover from their mistakes. In fact, they have become the world’s leading military power. The United States has succeeded in subjugating Western and Central Europe, but today it must confront all the states it has bullied, led by Russia and China.
​  ​During this period, the Republicans and Democrats have given way to two new currents of thought: the Jacksonians around Donald Trump and the Wokists, puritans without God...​   [I'd like to try what's behind Door # 3, please.]
​..​Moving companies report that their clients are leaving large cities for smaller ones where life is cheaper and more pleasant. However, they all note that their customers increasingly cite a new motive: they are moving to join family members. This explanation is consistent with what Colin Woodard observed a decade ago [8]: U.S. citizens are clustering by community of origin...Their clients are grouping together with people like themselves, having inherited the same culture and belonging to the same social class. They often worry about the rise of insecurity and talk about a possible civil war.

​  Russia massively attacked Ukrainian munitions, military industry, munitions train, and the preparations for the spring offensive. Massive weapons depot explosion at night is shown in video. Further loss of remaining Ukrainian antiaircraft missiles is apparent. 

​  ​Michael Hudson: Debt and the Collapse of Antiquity – Part 2

​  ​Hudson: I think the character of early Christianity is what is in the Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive them their debts as we forgive the debtors.” Christianity, especially Roman Christianity, made a travesty of this. They used the word sins. “Forgive us our sins as we forget the sins of the debtors.” What they meant was every kind of sin except economic.​..
..Colin Anthes:  Something I didn’t know that was in this book was that Brutus was a money lender charging 48% interest.​..
..Hudson: ​Yes. Let me talk about Caesar first. He was very brilliant as a political manoeuvrer as well as as a General. He borrowed a lot of money to run for office and ​re​paid the money. He was able to play the political game as a very, very intelligent manoeuvrer. What people were really frightened about with Caesar was that he was independent, and they didn’t want independent people. Just like in American democracy, the last thing you want is a president who’s independent and who’s a leader. You want a president who’s working for his campaign contributors... But here was Caesar being independent and trying to retain solvency for the economy as a whole. They didn’t want an independent head of Rome any more than you would have modern democracies wanting an independent president.
​  Caesar was accused of kingship. What did the kings do? The kings cancelled the debts and redistributed the land; that was the invective that was used against Caesar.​..
​..Well, when Jesus gave his first big sermon reported in Luke, he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah to the point where Isaiah was calling for the year of the Lord, meaning the Jubilee year. Jesus said that was what his destiny was, what he had come to proclaim. There was apparently wide support among the Jewish population advocating the restoration of the Jubilee year against the Rabbinical school that opposed it and repres​sed it. Luke said that the Pharisees loved money, and their leading Rabbis had their debtors sign documents. They would borrow money and waive their rights under the Jubilee year. That’s what Jesus wanted to change. So after Jesus gave his sermon, a lot of the population got very upset because they didn’t think it was fair to cancel the debts. The leading Jewish leaders went to the Roman pro-consul and said, “Well, we can’t put him to death, but you can because he’s seeking kingship.” They knew the magic word of invective that the Romans didn’t like– kingship. It was the Romans who agreed to put Jesus to death. The movement was way beyond Christianity. It was beyond Jesus. We know from the scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls...

​..​Finally, you had Constantine, who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
​  ​Well, there’s obviously one problem. What do you do if you’re making Christianity the official religion? The origins of Christianity were centered on the Jubilee. You cancel the debts, you liberate the debt bondage, you restore the lands to them, redistribute the land, make people independent, and you protect the poor instead of enslaving them. Well, you had to change the whole character of this..
.
​..​Under St. Augustine, it was largely sexual. All of a sudden, the focus of Augustinian Christianity became sexual egotism, not the wealth addiction of the creditors. After all, if the leaders of the Christian Church, the archbishops and the bishops, were all going to be taken from the wealthy families, you’d hardly have them criticize their own wealth. You stripped away from Roman Christianity the economic and social context that had guided early Christianity...The one thing that the Roman Christians hated was people who could read. If you could read, you’d read the Bible. If you read the Bible, you’d know that there was a clash. So I think the most famous person that Cyril killed was Hypatia, a woman who was a mathematician.​..                                                                  ..Cyril had a consul at Ephesus calling on the Roman military to kill all of his opponents. You had Christianity hijacked by Cyril. The wealthiest part of the Roman Empire by this time, the fourth and fifth centuries, was North Africa– Egypt and Hippo. The old Carthaginian area was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire; that’s where the grain was made. The Christians there opposed the creditors. They opposed the Romans. They said, “No, what the Romans are doing is not Christianity.” Rome wanted them to turn over all of their sacred books so that they could be destroyed.​..The North African Christians, many of them refused to turn over the sacred books, and they were killed.
​  ​Finally, Augustine came to power, and he sponsored the pro-Romans. There was a civil war that went on decade after decade, preventing the local Roman landowners from indebting the population, from enserfing them. Augustine called on the Romans to take away their churches and to give him their churches. So essentially, Augustine expropriated the Christian churches and made them his own deviant Christianity– I hate to even call it Christianity, it’s really Augustinianism– in a wave of violence.​..                                                                                                                                                          .​.​
What survived the Roman Empire was the Byzantine Empire and its church, which was Orthodox Christianity. Orthodox Christianity maintained many of the qualities of original Christianity, including debt cancellations when there was a crop failure through freezing or a frost that killed the crops and caused a loss of land and indebtedness. You had Constantinople as the main bishopric, with Antioch and Jerusalem.​..                                                           ..​The kings of England, the kings of Sicily and southern Italy pledged fealty to the Pope, who organized armies to have new crusades with new inquisitions under the Dominicans against Christians who didn’t agree with Roman leadership, whether it was the French Cathars or ultimately the Crusades that looted Constantinople and destroyed its ability to resist what became the Ottoman takeover at the time.​                                                       https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/04/michael-hudson-debt-and-the-collapse-of-antiquity-part-2.html

​  Over half a million protesters took to the streets of France this Mayday, protesting "pension reforms", which handed their government pensions over to BlackRock and also make them wait until age 64 to collect, instead of the long agreed age of 62.                     ​                                                                                      "Macron is trying to move forward no matter what, but people are standing still," said Antoine Bristielle, the head of the polling department at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès research institute. He said, "About 60 percent of the population say they don't want to move on from the pension reform."​                  "There will be no return to normal unless the reform is withdrawn," Sophie Binet, the head of the General Confederation of Labor, France's second-largest labor union, told local media outlet RTL.​    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/may-day-protests-france-unions-fume-over-macrons-pension-reform

​  ​Türkiye facing the American Empire​ ,  by Thierry Meyssan​    Thanks Eleni. ​                                                                                                                                     ​ With three weeks to go before the Turkish presidential election, the debate is changing. From being for or against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamism, it is becoming for or against the alliance with the United States. The outgoing president is regaining points in the polls that predicted him to lose. He has gone from being an Islamist to a nationalist. Whether this will be enough to allow him to win is not yet known, but if he does win, it is to be expected that he will withdraw Türkiye from NATO.​..​Until now, he appeared to be halfway between the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other. Now, his political party presents him as the saviour of Turkish independence in the face of Washington’s darker side. In contrast, he portrays his competitor as a Yankee henchman, which he probably is not. ​The United States is thus paying the price for the assassination attempts on the Turkish president, especially the one that led to the failed coup of July 15, 2016, after Ankara decided to build a gas pipeline with Moscow and even bought weapons from it. In addition, Washington is blamed, rightly or wrongly, no one knows, for causing the recent earthquake that cost the lives of tens of thousands of Turks.​         ​https://www.voltairenet.org/article219222.html

Moscow entitled to sever ties with Warsaw, but that would harm Russians — diplomat
However, she noted that, in this case, "very many aspects of the work will become blocked"

 M. K. BHADRAKUMAR​ ,​ Sudan: Alignment of forces, players
​  ​President Biden lent credence to the alarmist perception by confirming that on his orders, the US military conducted an operation “to extract government personnel from Khartoum.”
​  ​According to the US Department of State, about 16,000 American nationals are currently in Sudan. The US embassy in Khartoum had an excessive staff strength — on par with its Mission in Kiev — which was unwarranted by the scale and volume of US-Sudanese bilateral ties, leading to speculation that it was a key intelligence outpost.
..​
​ ..In Sudan, Saudi and Emirati efforts to shape the political transition after Omar al-Bashir’s ousting in April 2019 led to partial successes but also significant difficulties, as they came at severe reputational cost under scrutiny from both the Sudanese population and the international community.
​  ​The US and the EU saw GCC countries as useful partners in the Horn in terms of their surplus capital to invest that Western powers lacked, as well as their good personal networks. The Faustian deal between the Trump administration, Israel and the Gulf states to lure the Sudanese military leadership into the Abraham Accord in 2020 was a defining moment.
​  ​However, this dalliance proved short-lived an​d​ the Western powers’ game plan to ride on the wings of the Gulf states to counter the growing influence of Russia and China in the Red Sea met a sudden death too, as the ground beneath the feet of the US-Saudi alliance shifted dramatically under the Biden presidency and Riyadh began strengthening its ties with Moscow and Beijing.​..
​..In a nutshell, the crux of the matter is that the Western understanding of stability and sustainable development in Sudan through the prism of the neocon ideology that permeates the Biden administration lies at the core of the aggravation of the sluggish internal political crisis in Sudan that has been brewing since 2019 between the army led by the de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and armed formations led by Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo...
..The immature, unrealistic political settlements promoted by the Western liberal democracies significantly fuelled the military’s infighting.​..
​..Lest it be forgotten, Sudan is a vast country of great ethnic and regional diversity — inhabited by something like 400-500 tribes. The country’s stability depends critically on an optimal model of interaction between the elites and clans.
​  ​Basically, what drives the special forces in the current conflict is their expectation to increase their importance in the domestic political process of the country. It must be understood that the current strife is not about access to some military resource, but about control over the economy and the distribution of power.​..
​..The countries of the region can help resolve the conflict. A comprehensive settlement may not happen soon, since the internal contradictions that accumulated over time require compromises,  and so far at least, the parties are not ready for this...
​..​In addition, other external partners, especially Russia and China, will make efforts to prevent a prolonged open conflict. By the way, Sudan has an external debt under $ 60 billion, and most of it falls on China​ ​Russia, on the other hand, is well-placed to foster  rapprochement between al-Burhan and Dagalo.
​  ​Russia takes a balanced position. During his visit to Sudan in February, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with the leaders of both opposing sides. Russia is a stakeholder in Sudan’s stability.​..
​..However, the Anglo-American agenda remains dubious. Their focus is on internationalising the crisis, injecting big power rivalries into the Sudanese situation and willy-nilly create pretexts for western intervention.

​  Professor Anthony Hall, ​ Making the Shift from Fighting "Muslim Terrorists" to Fighting "Domestic Terrorists"
Tracing the Growing Corruption of Society Away from the Rule of Law Towards the Rule of Unbridled Savagery at the Top

Lawyer Testifies That Canadian Military Doctors Were Told Not to Report Vaccine Injuries 
“They were told to diagnose them as other things, such as Guillain-Barre Syndrome [GBS], when young men were collapsing in the shower after injections. … They were vaccine injured.”

​  Sasha Latypova has more on the Moderna contracts with the co-owning DoD, for the R&D and production of vaccine-products​. Profit sharing and liability protection were assured, but all routine pharmaceutical quality controls were made optional.
Part 2 Moderna Contracts​    ​https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/part-2-moderna-contracts

​Subjected to Empire (pictured in Austin garden after hailstorm the night before)​


No comments:

Post a Comment