By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
In the very long history of men and women who snatch defeat from the jaws of victory; miss the forest for the trees; and turn a molehill of profit into a mountain of loss, the US, British and German attempt to stop the tankers which carry Russian oil and gas to market is an exceptional failure.
It’s exceptional in the same way, and for the same reason of strategic miscalculation that Napoleon’s “Continental System” failed to destroy British trade with Europe – but destroyed the French economy instead. That was 217 years ago – France has never recovered from the damage the over-confident, miscalculating Napoleon did to the French position in Europe’s seaborne trade.
Napoleon multiplied the catastrophic cost of his misjudgement by deciding that, in order to stop the smuggling and bypass trade, and enforce his blockade, he should invade Spain, Portugal and Russia, and close their ports. Russia then buried Napoleon twice — once in Moscow in 1812, then in Paris in 1814, before he and the French army were finished off by others at Waterloo.
This time round, the NATO blockade of the Russian maritime trade is Napoleonic in the obviousness of the miscalculation; it is also Napoleonic in the refusal to acknowledge defeat.
So stubborn is this American blindness that even the Greek shipowners, stalwart defenders of the US occupation of Greece since 1945, cannot resist cashing in on the profits to be made from carrying Russian oil and gas across the sea. This is despite every attempt the arch US coup plotter, Geoffrey Pyatt – now State Department inspector of “energy resources”, formerly US ambassador to Athens and before that US ambassador to Kiev — is making to persuade, deter, threaten, and hurt them.
The defeat of the war against Russia on the land has yet to reach its Waterloo. The US, British and German idea of escalating the war on the Dnieper River battlefields westwards to Kiev and Lvov will become as obvious as Waterloo in a few months’ time.
Listen to Chris Cook asking the questions and the discussion which follows on today’s Gorilla Radio broadcast. Click to open the link, starting at Minute 1:
Source: https://gorilla-radio.com/
For a brief history of Napoleon’s Continental System, read this. Eli Hecksher’s 1918 history remains the standard historical work, and is now readable in digital format.
Never has the Russian state shipping company Sovcomflot been able to operate as profitably as it is currently doing under every sanction the US Treasury and the British government have announced, but cannot enforce. Read the first book to published in English on Sovcomflot – and then look at the list of the Greek shipping companies which lead in running the gauntlet of sanctions – at the same time as the newspapers and television channels owned by the same Greek shipowners are broadcasting exactly what the US Embassy in Athens insists on.
Left: The book is at Amazon. Right: to read an enlargement of the table, and see who is behind the tanker company names, click on the source.
Since October 2022, Gorilla Radio has been banned from broadcasting by Radio CFUV 101.9 FM in Victoria, British Columbia. The Gorilla Radio transcripts are published on the blog. For Chris Cook’s broadcast archive, click to open.
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