By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Hatred of the Russian race and Russophobia are more than a thousand years old in Europe – long enough for everyone nowadays to realise there’s no cure for them.  At least not by rational persuasion, not by words.  Remission by force of arms is another matter altogether.

A Swiss history of the phenomenon in Europe, starting in France in Charlemagne’s time and ending on the Donbass contact line since 2014, explains why the stakes along that line are so great now. The book is also an aid to comprehending why in this week’s telephone conversation between the chief Russian and American negotiators, Secretary of State Antony Blinken (lead image, 1^st right) demonstrated the futility of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s (3^rd right) talking with him again.*  

The Swiss history, published by Guy Mettan in 2017 as President Donald Trump was taking office in Washington, reveals a hopefulness that is impossible now. “Will Trump know how”, Mettan asks in his last paragraph, “will he still want to, or will he simply give up on trying to turn the tide and bring back civility in the relations between the West and Russia? Is a respite in what is turning out to be a new Cold War at all possible?” Mettan answered himself: “We certainly wish so. After all, if the task is almost superhuman, as no one will doubt after reading this book, it just may not be altogether impossible.”

Squeezing between that double negative there is in fact no space, no hope.

Mettan has written a primer on this brand of racism, noting that “Russophobia, contrary to French Anglophobia and Germanophobia, is a phenomenon that, though different of course, resembles anti-Semitism or Islamophobia. Like anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, it is not a transitory phenomenon linked to specific historical events; it exists first in the head of the one who looks, not in the victim’s alleged behaviour or characteristics.”

In Mettan’s history, American Russophobia “begins where the French, the English, and the Germans left off. It is a dynamic synthesis of French liberal-democratic Russophobia and English and German imperialist Russophobias.”  To Mettan the American phenomenon of today is a millennial climax of sorts. It‘s the apogee and the perigee, the final form of confidence in pursuing genocidal war against the Russians who resist and subjugation of those who remain,  which the German leadership held in June 1941.

According to Mettan, though, the adoption of Russophobia as US state policy since 1945  has reversed the outcome of the last war for the Germans. “This is how, in less than a quarter century, without striking a single blow Germany has just won the First and Second World Wars!”

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by Editor - Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

During the US Army invasion of Morocco and Algeria in 1943, enroute to the invasion of Italy, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), as the CIA was called then, came up with the donkey turd bomb for destroying the enemy. Since 2014, the CIA has come up with the modern equivalent – it’s called the Ukrainian bomb.  The first was designed to kill Germans. The second is designed to kill Russians. Both of them,   donkey turds and Ukrainians, are failing to hit their mark.

The donkey turd was the name and brainchild of a Harvard professor called Carleton Coon. In designing an American version of an improvised explosive device, Coon said that because  donkey turds were more common on the ground in Morocco than stones, bombs would be more effectively disguised to look like donkey turds.

The US didn’t fight any Germans in Morocco or Algeria. The US invasion promised the Arabs their national sovereignty and independence — — President Franklin Roosevelt was explicit on the point — but that was a calculated deception. The territories were returned to the French. After the US invasions of Italy, then France, the locals were again promised their national sovereignty and independence, but that too was an American deception. The territories were returned to those who accepted the terms of US occupation. They continue in their capitulation to this day, but the terms have been modified according to the American principle of US-directed and managed collective security. The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) is the main organisation for implementing this.

The defeated Germans, half of them to start with, retreated back into the territory from which they had come, the western half of Germany that is, between 1946 and 1990. The Soviet Army had defeated the Germans who had invaded the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and driven them back to the Berlin checkpoint. Until the Soviet terms were modified by Mikhail Gorbachev to accept Soviet withdrawal from eastern Germany, this is the way collective security operated in Europe — two opposing alliance forces confronting each other but deterring an attack from either side.

Gorbachev retreated on the US promise that NATO wouldn’t move forward. It was a promise Gorbachev was a fool to believe. He only had to ask the Moroccans or Algerians whether the Americans keep their promises, and he would have been told they don’t.  He wanted to believe otherwise. His successor Boris Yeltsin was just as ready to believe American deceptions until NATO invaded and bombed Serbia; both Gorbachev and Yeltsin believed they depended on the Americans to keep their power in Moscow.

Vladimir Putin tried to believe the promises until 2014 when the war to advance US occupation to the Russian frontier began in earnest. At that border, there is nowhere but inside Russia for the Russians to retreat to, just as they had when the Germans invaded in 1941. Putin announced there was no retreat in his speech to the Russian officer corps last month.   This marked the end of his accommodations with the advancing NATO forces and US nuclear warheads.  

In the line of this advance, the Russian Foreign Ministry proposed two treaties on the principle of indivisible security in Europe.  This principle means that one state cannot, and promises it will not,  increase its military capacities in such a way as to threaten the security of a neighbouring state in the same geopolitical space.   The treaties have also proposed there will be no more donkey turd bombs – no more Ukrainian, Romanian, Polish and other nuclear-armed missiles within close range of Russia’s capital, military command control centres, and land-based nuclear missile bases.

The principle of indivisible security, aka Russian self-defence, now confronts the principle of collective security, aka NATO forward defence, along a red line which runs from the Baltic Sea southward down the eastern Ukrainian border to the Black Sea, to Romania and the other littoral states, including Turkey. On Thursday the US rejected indivisible security, and thus the two draft treaties.  On Friday, at a 90-minute radio interview in Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explained why the conflict of the two security principles cannot result in a Russian retreat.*  

This fight is now the last stand for the American empire in Europe which began with the donkey turd bomb 79 years ago.

Lavrov’s speech reveals that from the history of that period, from the destruction of Arab sovereignty, and through the destruction of European sovereignty, and through the near- destruction of Russian sovereignty by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the Russians have learned a lesson which they cannot now unlearn and from which they cannot retreat. No retreat – that’s the lesson.

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by Editor - Sunday, January 30th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken revealed publicly in Geneva on Friday, January 21,  that he will not negotiate a no-war agreement with the Russians because he cannot. This is already understood by the Russians; by the French and Germans; and by several senior officials of the Biden Administration.

The evidence of Blinken’s incapacity is in the words he says.

It was during the last world war,  when US policymakers had next to no intelligence on how their German counterparts were thinking and what they were intending,   that a group of American sociologists were engaged by the War Department, as the Pentagon was called then,  to do what was called content analysis of German propaganda.   One of the sociologists, a Russian émigré Nathan Leites, went on to apply the same method to Soviet publications in order to uncover what Leites  called the operational code of the Politburo.  That was in 1951. It was immediately used by US negotiators during the Korean War armistice negotiations which began in July of that year and ran for two years. By then Leites had produced a sequel, A Study of Bolshevism. Both were paid for and published by RAND, the think-tank created in 1945 by the US Air Force, the Douglas Aircraft Company, and the War Department.

Since then the method has not been used on US Government officials, at least not by RAND nor publicly by any American sociologist.  

When the RAND method is used to analyze what Blinken told the  US press, following his meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, it is revealed that Blinken has no intention whatever of negotiating a non-aggression pact with the Russians on any terms. According to the scientific method devised by the best and brightest Americans for dealing with their enemies, it’s now clear from Blinken’s own words that he is unable to understand what Russians tell him. In the mind behind the words there is only one compulsive idea – attack, punish, destroy Russia.

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by Editor - Sunday, January 23rd, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Two Swiss bankers for fugitive Russian bank robber Sergei Pugachev have been convicted for the second time in Switzerland of violations of Switzerland’s money-laundering law and regulations.

Pugachev is a major source reported by Catherine Belton for the April 2020 book, Putin’s People. She and the Reuters special “enterprise unit” in New York which employs her, have not reported the evidence or the convictions in the Swiss case.

The Swiss court has attempted to keep the identities of the two bankers and their bank secret. The 38-page text of the judgement against them was dated by the court on May 31, 2021,  but   not issued until July 27. It was not published until October 1.  It has not been discovered by the press until now.  

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by Editor - Wednesday, January 19th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

James Cook (lead image, right), the Royal Navy captain celebrated in British empire history for his 18^th century voyages of discovery in the Pacific, was going mad with syphilis when he underestimated the combat skill of the Hawaiians on February 14, 1779,  and was killed in a skirmish on the beach.

He was then dismembered, cooked, partially eaten, and some of his choicest parts wrapped and delivered to his crew on board the HMS Resolution.  

Cook had navigated and mapped the coasts of Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific coasts of Siberia and North America, and the Hawaiian islands, preparing them for military operations,  colonial occupation, annexation, partition, plantation, etc.   

In today’s NATO war against Russia, the British Navy has been practising cut-and-run on the Black Sea off the Crimean coast. British special forces have been spotted on operations in Ukraine, Moldova, and the Baltic states.  So far, they haven’t been caught or come to Cook’s sticky end.  

The most famous Russian singer of his time, Vladimir Vysotsky (left), composed a song in 1976 entitled “Why Did the Aborigines eat Cook?” In the song, Vysotsky mistook the Hawaiian islanders  for the indigenous Australians. But the moral of the song isn’t anthropological – it is a  joke, and a warning.  Introducing the song, Vysotsky said Cook’s tale is what happens to people who “grab at other people’s waists”.  

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by Editor - Tuesday, January 18th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When the US-led putsch in Kiev started the Ukrainian civil war in 2014, most Russians have believed the risk of war with the US and NATO was small. In the past two years, however, there has been a significant change in Russian thinking.  

Asked to say if an armed conflict with the US and NATO is “possible” this year, one in four (25%) Russians across the country, interviewed in their homes by the Levada Centre between December 16 and 22, said yes. This is a jump from 14% in 2020, and from 10% in 2017, the low point in this series of polls Levada has been conducting since 2015.  

The new poll was released on Monday and has not yet been published in English. Three days earlier, however, Levada released the responses of its nationwide sample to the question asked in the same interview — what are the major fears Russians have for the future.   World war was ranked second after fear for the illness of family members; it came well ahead of Russians’ fear of abuse of power and political repression, poverty, robbery, loss of savings, unemployment or growing old. Fear of illness in the family is now acknowledged by 82%; fear of world war by 56%. The Russian apprehension of war has almost doubled since 2003.

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by Editor - Tuesday, January 18th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The current generation of Russian leaders was educated to believe that imperialist and capitalist systems like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the United States make  rational and predictable calculations of their self-interest; and that they can count the costs and casualties of warmaking; especially when nuclear weapons are launched with mutually assured destruction of the adversaries.

But Russian leaders find it difficult to accept that the current US leadership, especially Secretary of State Antony Blinken (lead image) and his Under Secretary, Victoria Nuland, are Russia-hating racists committed to a policy of genocide against the Russian state and against Russians wherever they are located in the territories of the old Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, especially in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.

“The culture of diplomacy and compromise is all but lost”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov conceded last week.   “The US line in the international arena is dictated by the awareness of its own exceptionalism. This is not even denied.” “Foaming at the mouth” is as close as Lavrov came to characterising Blinken in person. The new sanctions threat, he added, is “a nervous breakdown of sorts. In the endless assertion of their own greatness, these people have reached a psychological state that is difficult to comprehend.”

American exceptionalism is the diplomatic Russian term for American racism’s plan for  liquidating the Russian ethnic group, language, culture, and resources in the Ukraine.  

Since Russia’s defeat of the German attempt to do this between 1941 and 1945, and then the defeat of the US-NATO plan to mobilize the surviving Ukrainian allies of the Wehrmacht, the genocide plan keeps reappearing in Kiev and Washington (in London too, though not in Berlin). That it would do so, reanimated and rearmed after the independence of Ukraine was declared in 1991, was certain. The US-led putsch in Kiev in February 2014 then revived the genocidal plan in most of its older German particulars.

This genocide is not the crime of genocide as the US criminal code defines and prosecutes it when Americans commit the crime.  That is because in 1987 the US Congress changed the universal definition of genocide, adopted by all members of the United Nations (UN) in 1948, opening for Americans two very large loopholes. The senator who drafted these and put them into law was Joseph Biden.

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by Editor - Monday, January 17th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Banging the table isn’t what a superpower does unless it’s super no more.  But for a superpower which doesn’t realise its own weakness, a banging war with Russia is no piece of cake.

Right now, just days from the Russian deadline announced last week for the US and NATO to deliver their written proposals for stopping short of war in Europe,  the media blitz,  propaganda and cyber warfare are obscuring the fundamental reality on the ground along the Ukraine front. Simply put, if the war will be what US State Department officials Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland and Canadian officials Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau say they will fight for in the Donbass, then the Ukraine regime of Vladimir Zelensky will be defeated, and his Ukraine will cease to be a state. This is a recipe the cook won’t survive to taste.

The Americans and Canadians may think the leftover from this defeat will be tasty enough. That would be the Galician region, between Lvov in western Ukraine and Cracow in southern Poland, which the German Army ruled between 1941 and 1943, before running away from the Red Army.

They may also be calculating that the new US sanctions they are threatening against Russia will be so crippling that the outcome of the war will be preferable to the situation now – that outcome would be an independent Catholic, Ukrainian-speaking Galicia in its Nazi borders; the disappearance of Orthodox Christian, Russian-speaking Donbass into the Russian federation; Russia quarantined financially from the western world for the foreseeable future.

Is this the we-can’t-lose calculation of Blinken, Nuland and Freeland – the three Ukrainians* who have captured the warmaking policy of both states of North America?

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by Editor - Monday, January 17th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

What will be written on the US Government’s piece of paper since the Russian Government already knows – its intelligence services know, the Solar Winds hackers know  – what was not written on the papers which Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was reading at the Geneva talks with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Monday?

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, announced on Thursday evening the US should now produce on paper its proposals for reducing the risk of war. Or else, Lavrov also told Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, the US will have war with Russia. Enough “arrogance of the highest degree”, and “foaming at the mouth”, Lavrov told Blinken. That “the Secretary of State of a serious state  [солидного государства] declares such things” is –  Lavrov left the expletive unsaid.

“We hope that the promises made now in Geneva and Brussels will be fulfilled. They concerned the fact that the United States and NATO would put their proposals ‘on paper’. We have clearly and repeatedly explained to them that we need to have an article-by-article reaction to our documents. If some position is not suitable, let them explain why and write ‘on paper’. If it is suitable with amendments, then they should also be done in writing. If they want to exclude or add something – a similar request. We gave our thoughts in writing a month ago. There was plenty of time in Washington and Brussels. Both of them promised that they would put their reaction ‘on paper’.”

Lavrov was waving the American piece of paper to remind that the piece of paper which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain displayed on September 30, 1938 (lead image), on his return from talks with German Chancellor Adolph Hitler, contained the line expressing “the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again”. That turned out to be false – Hitler didn’t mean it; Chamberlain wasn’t sure but wanted his electorate to believe it, plus time to prepare.

Lavrov is announcing that Russia today knows the US intention is to go to war; and that Russia is prepared and is already on war footing on all fronts.

That Sherman told Ryabkov on Monday “the United States and Russia agree that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought” is just as false, Lavrov has now declared —  unless what follows is Sherman’s paper. On that paper there must be “legal guarantees of non-expansion of NATO to the East, legal guarantees of non-deployment of shock [nuclear] weapons in our neighbouring territories that pose a threat to Russia’s security, and in principle, the return of the configuration of the European security architecture to 1997,  when the Russia-NATO Founding Act was signed. On its basis, the Russia-NATO Council was subsequently created. These are three key requirements. The rest of the proposals depend on how the conversation goes on these three initiatives.”

Lavrov’s declaration also dismissed as empty the attempts to intervene in the Russia-US negotiations  by Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general now approaching the end of his term; and  Josep Borrell, the Europe Union foreign minister from Spain. Stoltenberg, Lavrov said, was “shaking the air”. Borell had been “emotional and not very polite”.

Lavrov’s spokesman, Maria Zakharova, followed at her briefing on Thursday by remarking: “It seems that there are two J. Borrells: one is the one who speaks, and the second is the one who writes. Or one J.Borrell, who speaks, but other people write for him. Both in style, and in language, and in the expressions used, these texts do not belong to one person. It’s obvious.”

The only interlocutor left in Europe Lavrov identified as serious is France. Germany went unmentioned; the British were not to be believed, Lavrov commented; the US Senate is  suffering from a “nervous breakdown… a psychological point that’s difficult to explain.”

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by Editor - Thursday, January 13th, 2022
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When it comes to understanding the Geneva round of talks between the Russian and US foreign ministries on Monday, it is helpful to read; and if that is unavailing, to ask official sources in a position to know  if and when they are talkative. Actions talk louder than words, especially in war. It is intelligent to be patient and wait.

Going off half-cocked, however, is what Alexander Mercouris,  Bernhard Horstmann,  Scott Ritter,  and many others are doing. Half-cocked at the brothel door is  adolescent.  

Sergei Ryabkov (61 years old) and Wendy Sherman (72), the lead negotiators, are what newspapers call seasoned professionals. Seasoning in their cases refers to the pepper and salt in their hair – and also in their methods of speaking in private and public. Ryabkov was born in Soviet Leningrad; Sherman in a Jewish neighbourhood of Baltimore which her father, an ex-Marine then real estate broker, helped to integrate racially, a story Sherman tells in her autobiography.   Sherman’s book is not a ticket of leave for doing what Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland tell her to say, and no more.* Sherman’s instructions are less Russia hating, more catholic (as she describes her father).

Taking Sherman at her word, therefore —  from what she said in her press briefing after the talks with Ryabkov concluded —  it is possible to conclude that she repeated to Ryabkov all the Blinken-Nuland vetoes and provocations which they have advertised in advance; which the White House, the British and Polish prime ministers, and the Secretary-General of NATO (lead images, left to right) keep repeating as if their lives depend on them.  And their political lives do depend on them.

That also makes them impotent in the war they are threatening against Russia on all fronts – the Donbass, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Syria, Libya, etc.  

However, Sherman made eight points indicating that the “core security interests” which the Russian side has placed at the top of the agenda are now in negotiation with the US. Before you knock on the door, here they are. Read carefully, and watch what comes next.

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by Editor - Tuesday, January 11th, 2022
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