by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Wherever you are, once you are in war, free speech doesn’t exist any longer. Truth telling is replaced by propaganda narratives enforced by censors and security services.

Between the truth and the propaganda there is that burst of 280 characters – 40 to 70 words – which was first invented in 2006 and is known as a tweet. This is published by the social networking company called Twitter Inc at the beginning, and now known as X Corp.  The company publishes hundreds of millions of tweets every day which the original inventor described as bursts of inconsequential information like the chirps of birds. That’s an insult to avian intelligence and the communicative skills of birds.

As for the Twitter and X corporation’s products, what’s been consequential for them is they have been loss-making for all but two years of their 18-year history. The company’s revenues have also been dropping for the past three years, so the losses have been growing.¹

This oughtn’t to be surprising once you learn that one tweet in every five is a fake which has been created, not by a single human being trying to communicate to another, but by a machine generating text automatically, or by groups of human beings using their machines to “peddle propaganda and disinformation to those attempting to sell products, induce website clicks, push phishing attempts or malware, manipulate stocks or cryptocurrencies, and harass or intimidate users of the platform.”²

Truth is an antidote, and there are many standards of truth telling. The two usually relied upon are the criminal court test for murder which requires the evidence to be credible beyond reasonable doubt; and the civil court test for fraud which is weighed on the balance of probabilities. In the time of the wars we are living through now, there is plenty of murder and of fraud, so both standards are recommended for judging every tweet.

However, there is a third standard –truth by retrospection. This is the clock test against which propaganda, no matter how persuasive at the start, is proved to be false by the elapse of time to the end. Was the Ukraine winning its war against Russia? – that tweeted question can finally be judged on the day after the regime in Kiev has signed the capitulation documents and accepted the loss of its armies and borders.

by Editor - Monday, August 26th, 2024
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On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot live when my fatherland is dying and everything that has been the meaning of my life is crumbling. Age and the life that I have lived give me the right to step out of this life. I struggled until the end.”

by Editor - Saturday, August 24th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The slogan on the 1960 Soviet poster by Kovalev and Godgold announces that to build your strength for work, the sun, air and water are necessary. That’s what we need in August.  

For clear head, a smile on your face, and bulging muscles by September, read the book before the new one is published.   

by Editor - Thursday, August 1st, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

This F-16 flying above Lvov yesterday is not a Ukrainian operation against Russia, it is a NATO operation against Russia. In peacetime, this is as true as the sky is blue.

But to say so in wartime is a crime – in Berlin, Ottawa, Warsaw. Wherever you are, once you  are in war, free speech doesn’t exist any longer. Truth telling is replaced by propaganda narratives enforced by censors and security services.

In this broadcast by Gorilla Radio, the last surviving investigative radio in Canada, Chris Cook and John Helmer identify the bird in the air and the two in the bush for each of the breaking stories of the day. That includes the assassination of Hamas Political Bureau leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in his bed inside a presidential guesthouse in Teheran.

by Editor - Wednesday, July 31st, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Ignore the Anglo-American propaganda now circulating from Kiev that Russia’s military  has suffered a grave  military defeat in the Sahara desert, when Tuareg (Touareg) forces destroyed a Russian Wagner unit and Malian government forces in five days of battle at Tinzaouaten, on the desert border between Algeria and Mali.

“Russia’s Wagner Group has suffered significant battleground losses in Mali,” the Financial Times, a Japanese-owned propaganda agency in London, claimed in reporting from Kiev and Lagos (Nigeria).  “Graphic videos posted on Russian Telegram channels showed a sandy landscape strewn with dozens of bodies, some wearing Russian Orthodox crosses, and multiple burnt-out vehicles…Some pro-Kremlin military commentators have blamed the failure of the Mali operation on the clean-up imposed on Wagner after Prigozhin led an uprising against the Russian defence ministry last year. He died with several other Wagner leaders in a plane crash believed to be a Kremlin-directed assassination.”

The Guardian reported the source for a similar story to be an official of the Ukrainian military intelligence service (GUR) in Kiev.  Videoclips of the battle published on the internet carry advertisements for the Ukraine regime and appeals for donations.  

This is what the US, French and British propaganda agencies and intelligence services want readers, especially African and Arab readers, to think.

What has really happened is a different story. This is already surfacing in the Moscow press because the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and intelligence services want it understood that the Wagner men lost their lives at Tinzaouaten last week following a series of military mistakes driven by a strategic miscalculation which flies in the face of years of Russian diplomatic effort in the region. In a word, don’t fight the Tuaregs on their ground – negotiate with them instead.  

“We are against any unilateral steps,” the Russian Foreign Ministry’s last official statement on armed conflicts in the Sahara had declared in 2021.  At the same time, the Ministry made the distinction between Islamic terrorism and anti-colonial national liberation movements. “We are assisting the G5 Sahel [Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger]…We are supplying these countries with the necessary armaments enabling them to strengthen their potential to eradicate the terrorist threat. We regularly train servicemen from those countries in the Russian Federation; we train peacekeepers and law enforcement officers at our Defence Ministry’s educational establishments…According to the available facts, our Western colleagues are not too enthusiastic about this.”

Tipping in favour of the Malian government like this has meant a negative Russian attitude towards the Tuaregs. Nonetheless, “the Tuaregs have lived there forever,” a Moscow reporter close to military intelligence reported this week. “Previous advances of the Wagner units in the liberation of Kidal and other areas of northern Mali do not cancel the fact that the Tuaregs are there in their thousands,  and this is their desert.”  

Marc Eichinger, a French expert on the region who has been based for seven years in neighbouring Niger, comments similarly: “You have Tuaregs from the same families on both sides and they hate the foreigners no matter who they are. They have a perfect knowledge of the landscape and it’s a big mistake to chase them in the desert. The French are happy not to be involved any more. You need much bigger means to fight them and if they feel at risk they just wait until the foreign army goes away.”  

by Editor - Tuesday, July 30th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

On Mount Olympus, the ancient Greek one, there was no god of Hypocrisy. That’s because all of the gods were, starting with Zeus himself, the king of the gods.

It is the same in Paris,  as the organiser of the state ceremony of the Olympic Games has claimed  the performance of a caricature of the Christian Last Supper was a “big pagan party linked to the gods of Olympus…a ceremony that brings people together, that reconciles, but also a ceremony that affirms our Republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity.”  

 In Moscow, the Russian government was represented by Maria Zakharova, spokesman of the Foreign Ministry, who telegrammed that what the French had done was “the LGBT mockery of the holy scene for Christians – the Last Supper — the last supper of Christ. The apostles were portrayed by transvestites. Apparently, Paris decided that since the Olympic rings are multicoloured, everything can be turned into one continuous gay parade.” It was not the end of the world, the state representative added,  but the end of French civilization — “the bottom of the river Seine.”  

by Editor - Sunday, July 28th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Combat losses of the Ukrainian armed forces along the front have accelerated to a current average of almost two thousand men a day, according to the Russian Defense Ministry’s daily  briefing and bulletin. The damage or loss of weapons is also growing fast.  

In the first week of July a year ago, the average daily number of Ukrainians killed in action (KIA) was 716. In the corresponding period of this month, the KIA level has jumped to an average of 1,948 — an increase of almost threefold. In the same week of 2023, the destruction or damage of US-made M777 artillery pieces was 8; in the first week of this month, the M77 loss number was 17. These loss rates for men and weapons have remained steady through this week.

The Ukrainians must assemble and deliver more fresh men and materiel to stave off defeat. The troops, artillery, tanks and other vehicles, plus ammunition, are delivered by train to railway stations along the front line. The Russian General Staff, headed by General Valery Gerasimov, knows the precise schedule of these trains, monitoring their departures and their speed in transit. They then prepare for their arrival at the front-line train stations where they are hit by a combination of missiles and glide bombs (FAB, Fugasnaya AviaBomba).  

This is the reality of the Russian summer offensive and Ukrainian counter-offensive without the political hype and propaganda.

by Editor - Wednesday, July 24th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

One of Germany’s most notorious prosecutions of free speech has collapsed, as the Berlin prosecutor’s office has dropped a case designed to stop Germans discussing the war against Russia in the Ukraine.

Heinrich Buecher, (lead  image, left) owner of the COOP Anti-war Café on Rochstrasse, has been prosecuted in a Berlin district court and then in the higher regional court for statements he had made in a city  park on June 22, 2022. On the anniversary of the German Army’s Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, Buecher had declared: “Never again may we as Germans get involved in a war against Russia in any form. We need to unite and join to oppose this madness together.”

In the court proceedings which followed, the judges refused to allow Buecher to speak in his own defence. Instead, he published on the website of his café  a re-statement of what he had been convicted of saying in June 2022.    “As an anti-fascist and anti-imperialist, I expressly oppose the policy of regime change, against wars of intervention and against any Interference in the internal affairs of independent states. I call on the German government to adopt a policy in the interest of International peace, in the interests of international security and peaceful coexistence of all peoples. The principles of the Charter of the United Nations must be respected and international law must be defended.”

“I call for all arms deliveries and training programs for the Ukraine stop immediately. I demand diplomacy instead of weapons. I call for all efforts of our government to negotiate and allow opponents of war without preconditions. The sacrifice of the Ukraine for the geopolitical interests of the West, namely the strategic weakening of Russia, is a monstrous war crime and must have an end.”

by Editor - Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

There have always been Russians in the Kremlin who for reasons of imperialist or Orthodox ideology considered themselves exceptionalist in politics. That’s to say, as exceptional or more exceptional than the Americans in the White House.

Since Mikhail Gorbachev ruled Russia forty years ago, there have also been Russian exceptionalists who have wanted, not to compete with the Americans for the power to rule the world, but instead to be loved by the Americans and to be loved by them in return, so that they might share rule of the world together as equals.

The Roman imperial tetrarchy was a system of that kind. So were the husband-and-wife or mother-and-son monarchies of England and Europe in the late medieval period.

After the US coup d’état of December 1991 installed Boris Yeltsin to dismantle the Soviet Union and destroy Communist ideology and its system of domestic rule, the American-loving exceptionalists have continued to hold out in the Kremlin and elsewhere in the Russian organs of government, including the media. Not loving America enough has been reason for stopping  rising Russian careerists and censoring their media.

The only holdout strong enough to survive the Gorbachev-Yeltsin putsches and purges has been the Russian military. Because of its success in defeating NATO weapons on the Ukraine battlefield and winning the war against the US, its public approval and voter trust are almost as high as President Vladimir Putin’s.  And so, in due course, it will be the Army and the generals whose personal conduct of the war has given them heroic stature, who will decide on the succession to Putin when his present term expires in 2030 (he will be 78); or when the constitutional term limit is reached in 2036 (84).

In the politics of the Kremlin succession, this Army red is the counterforce to the Trump red of the America lovers. Red on red is the fight for rule in Russia, and rule of the world for the exceptionalists on both sides.

This makes for colour blindness and other forms of partisanship in the way the official Russian media discuss American politics, especially now. To understand how this works in Moscow, read this newly published essay in the semi-official security analysis internet platform, Vzglyad.

by Editor - Monday, July 22nd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Captain Obvious is an American cartoon hero. In Poland, however, he’s now being set up for prosecution on charges of treason for saying the obvious. That, according to the new Polish government and the US Ambassador in Warsaw, Mark Brzezinski, must not be allowed to be said.

Instead, the Polish Captain O has said that Poland cannot defend itself from a combined Russian-Belarusian attack, and cannot count on the United States and other NATO allies to save it in time.  

Although the Polish General Staff knows this, and so do Poland’s presidency, prime ministry and Sejm (parliament), the Warsaw directorate aims to pay the US, NATO allies, and South Korea more than thirty billion dollars in protection money for Polish, US and NATO readiness in defence of the impossible. From time to time, one of the fantasies of Polish officials is to draw US nuclear weapons on to Polish territory for premium insurance against the Russian invasion risk. President Andrzej Duda last said as much three months ago.

That Poland won’t survive a US-fired nuclear weapon from the Redzikowo base, northwest of Warsaw, is also obvious. Not allowing this to be said is the script, not of Captain Obvious (Kapitan Oczywiste) but of Captain Oblivious (Kapitan Nieświadomy).  

by Editor - Sunday, July 21st, 2024
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