Re-Imagining Armageddon

Today, Saturday October 5, we can look with some trepidation to consideration of what kinds of spectacular murder the criminal regime of Tel Aviv can conjure for Monday, October 7.

But this is not to say that Israel has not already exacted its revenge for Iran’s attack last Tuesday on Iran. Having killed hundreds of civilians in Beiruit in its endeavor to kill Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, it yesterday murdered hundreds of more civilians in an endeavor to kill Nasrallah’s most likely replacement, Hashem Safieddine.

Nor has Israel ceased its murderous rampage in Gaza and in southern Lebanon, where, in addition to its killings of 2,000 Lebanese citizens in the past few days, Israel is now demanding Lebanon evacuate villages as far north of the original UN imposed buffer zone, that stops at the Litani river, as Sidon.

For their part, the US and UK are helping along the process of Israeli genocide by attacking the only Arab actors who have shown the means and courage to withstand it, namely the Houthis of Yemen, whose energy facilities and ports (Hodeidah, particularly) are now under Western and Israeli attack. These are counter productive mesasures for the West, as is almost everything else the West does, given that an attack on Hodeidah strengthens Yemeni resolve to disrupt Red Sea shipping and in itself conveys the message to the shipping community that the Red Sea is far from safe.

Increasingly, regional experts seem to agree that the Iranian attack on Israel earlier this week inflicted substantial damage on military targets. Most importantly, the missiles, of which Lebanon claims 90% got through, exposed Israel’s much touted “Iron Dome” as something closer to a paper cup.

There were no civilian targets. Iran gave Israel and the US advance warning, enough time for civilians to head for their bunkers. Iran has demonstrated, so far, that it can defend itself without descending into the hideous barbarity that the word “Israel” now projects across the entire globe (except in Washington and its preening poodle states of Europe).

But Iran has warned, through the mouth of its Supreme Leader (one must wonder whether Western-prone President Pezeshkian can last any longer than Western tool Zelenskiy in Ukraine), that should Israel stage a counter-attack on Iran, then Iran will respond with mighty force.

Will this be as civilized and gentlemanly as the last? Not if its purpose is to sink this menace to humanity once and for all. So we can ponder whether it is Iran or Israel that has the more convincing opportunity to “escalate in order to de-escalate.” Israel cannot afford either to escalate or de-escalate without destroying itself in the process.

Like Western attacks on Yemen, mooted Israeli responses to Iran all sound horribly counterproductive, threatening as they do a cessation of trade through the Straits of Hormuz and a severe blow against global energy supplies that will send oil prices through the roof, boost Russian oil reserves, kill off any chance of a Democratic win in the US in November and help put an end to the current regime in Ukraine amongst other things.

Edging further towards the precipice of World War Three is Russia, whose interests are now being directly impacted by the threats of (completely illegal, of course) Israeli strikes against Syria close to Russian air and naval facilities in Latakia and Tartous.

Russia has been relatively gentle on Israel to this point in time, mindful of the fact that a large number of Israelis, over two million, are of Russian origin, who emigrated to Israel during the final years of the Soviet Union. Some of these Israeli Russians are plutocrats of dubious reputation who have fled justice in their homeland. But many others are potential Russian assets who, in the event of direct conflict between Israel and Russia may cast their ballots in favor of Russia.

Be that as it may, the period of relative Russian “neutrality” vis-a-vis Israel is at an end. Russia and Iran have agreed a comprehensive mutual security agreement and Russia (whose head of its national security council, Shoigu, has been present in Tehran for some weeks, doubtless advising on the delivery to and strategic firing of kinzhal and similar hypersonic weapons) and Russia most assuredly will protect Iran every bit as or more effectively, even, than it protected its neighboring ally, Syria during the Western-instigated “civil war” in collaboration with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunni jihadist fanatics.

The alliance between Russia and Iran is for all practical purposes now an alliance between Russia, Iran and China. The three countries have been organizing collective military exercises for five years. Russia’s foreign minister has promised Washinton that in response to its policy of “double containment,” Russia and China together offer a response of “double counteraction.”

Although Russia would much prefer to wait until after the BRICS summit in a fortnight’s time before engaging in Armageddon, just as Washington would much prefer to wait until after the presidential election in a month’s time before doing the same, its hand may be twisted by the maniacal and Satanic power of Netanyahu who, to be sure, is the head of a US proxy in a war to suppress potential rivals to Washington (whom we can loosely describe as the pluri-centrist Global South), but who also has penetrated and corrupted Washington foreign policy elites way beyond the boundaries of civility and rationality or even US self-interest.

The future of global security is in the hands of a maniac. The only end to this threat is an end to the maniac and his henchmen. The only means by which this can be accomplished, under great pressure of time - before 4 million or more Palestinians are exterminated in Gaza and the West Bank, and before a nudge from Israel on both the US and to Russia to engage in nuclear confrontation - is immediate, decisive action, and there is no way imaginable that the Western powers are intellectually or morally or militarily capable of such.

Russia, China and Iran are. Iran has shown that the Iron Dome gives Israel no refuge, bo peace. Russia has inflicted a major defeat on Ukraine, even now threatening to push Ukrainian forces out of Kursk and invading as far south as Sumy, where the hapless Zelenskiy is now visiting in a sure-fire sign that the city must soon fall. Iran seems at last to have rediscovered its identity and its power. China must do what China must do to ensure the security of its most important source of fossil fuel.

Assassinations Central

Mir Aziz in Countercurrents today (Aziz) recalls a history of Israeli assassinations.

“In his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, Israeli author Ronen Bergman affirms that Israel has assassinated more than 2,700 people throughout its history. He describes it as Israel seeking to stop history without engaging in diplomacy and statesmanship”.  

Israel has since its inception, recalls Aziz, invaded almost all its neighbors and still occupies their lands. In 1981, it destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor and is the only nuclear (weapons) power in the Middle East. It is not a signatory of the non-proliferation treats and there declines inspection of its nuclear stockpile which likely includes more than 400 nuclear warheads.

Israel’s record of assassinations has achieved nothing and is almost always counterproductive. After Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin and his successor Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi were assassinated in 2004, for example, the group developed close ties with Iran and forced Israel to end its two decade occupation of Southern Lebanon. Following Israel’s recent assassination of Haniyeh in Beirut, Hamas’s political bureau was taken over by its military wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades.

In face of such aggression, the US, seeking to use Israel as its proxy in a struggle to retain hegemony in the Middle East has acted like a patsy. Edward Snowden’s leaked documents, says Aziz, show that Israel has direct and complete access to the highly classified information shared by America’s spy agencies.

A History of Israeli War Crime

From former Dutch ambassador Nikolaos Van Dam a 75 history of Israeli war crime, published today in Fanack.com. (Van Dam). Israel could have made peace with the Palestinians a long time ago. Instead, it imagined it could keep the Palestinian Occupied Territories indefinitely, with in the end as few Palestinians as possible. The illusion was sustained because its innumerable war crimes and violations of international law were condoned by most of the Western world. The problem started in the mid-nineteenth century when Zionism first took the shape of an evangelical Christian eschatological vision and as a so-called attempt to rescue Europe’s Jews from anti-Semitism.

“Towards the end of that century, Zionism had been transformed into a settler-colonial operation in Palestine, targeting its Indigenous population as alien, considering them as a major obstacle to building a modern so-called “democratic” Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world.

The Israeli concept of “democracy” was applied by the Zionists to Jews only, not to the Palestinians, the original inhabitants of Palestine. These were ignored, or at most considered as an inconvenient stumbling block on the road to full Zionist Jewish domination of the whole of Palestine.

The foreign Zionists, coming from Europe, the United States and elsewhere, behaved like cuckoo birds laying their eggs in a stranger’s nest, being that of the Palestinians, monopolising it, and subsequently pushing the original inhabitants out”.

By the 1920s and 1930s, the Palestinians started to resist the Zionists, opposing the arrival of the Zionists. But their right to self-determination was simply ignored by the Zionists and the British.

The Deir Yasin massacre of 9 April 1948 represented the start of the so-called Israeli “Plan Dalet”, which was intended to implement the large-scale ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.

“Those in the West who have supported Zionism, share one element in common: they wanted the Jews to migrate elsewhere, but not to their own countries….The presence of some 750,000 illegal Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem is the clearest indicator of Israel’s intention to stay there forever. The settlements were occasionally criticized by Western countries as not being “conducive to peace”, but that was about all. Apart from some critical political statements, there were no sanctions, and Israel kept being romanticised by many Westerners as being the “only democracy in the Middle East”, with “the most moral army in the world”, “making the desert bloom”, and other unrealistic propagandistic Zionist clichés”.

Assessing Iranian Capability

On Substack, Kit Klarenberg recently examined a recent report from the Jewish Institute for National Security for America by a former CENTCOM commander, titled U.S. Bases in the Middle East: Overcoming the Tyranny of Geography. The report concludes:

“The Iranians have no army that can be deployed as an invading force. They have a small and ineffective navy, and in practical terms, no air force. Their missile and drone force, though, is capable of gaining overmatch against many of its neighbors…they can deploy more attacking missiles and drones than can be defended against.”

In this view, therefore, a war in the Gulf would be of strike aircraft, tankers, and air and missile defense. But these aircraft are largely based at locations along the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf. Yes, they are close to Iran, but so close to Iran that it takes only five minutes or less for missiles launched from Iran to reach the bases. Iran’s thousands of short-range missiles pose a threat to F-35 and other fighter jets when these are sitting on the ground. Refuelling and rearming facilities on US bases in West Asia are also vulnerable, and they cannot be moved. The bases are defended by Patriot and other defensive systems which can easily be overwhelmed by decoys and other projectiles fired in mass.

The report suggests that Iran cannot threaten “carrier-based aviation” capabilities, but that there aren’t enough carriers. It considers basing in Israel, where US military presence has been slowly growing, but amidst controversy.

Intelligence Agencies Manipulating Elections?

Well of course they do. Look no further than the Russiagate Hoax and the deep involvement of US and British and Australian intelligence agencies in trying to prevent the victory of Donald Trump. Now this:

TNT Radio host Basil Valentine speaks with co-founder of Gods Five Stones and author Dr Jerome Corsi, to explore the clever tactics used to bypass election regulations and the effects of fictitious voters on electoral results, including hidden algorithms in U.S. electoral systems. Investigate how fraudulent ballots are created, the potential involvement of intelligence agencies, and the implications for democratic integrity (Corsi)

Digging Russian Economy

The Bell has a number of characteristic blind-spots when it comes to critiquing the Russian economy, while managing not to talk about the staggering $33+trillion US debt and the characteristically staggering debt loads of all Western powers, and not to confess to the incubus-like hold of the National Security State apparatus over US governance, expenditure and culture.

Today this august source of neoliberal cliches professes indignation that the Kremlin has the nerve - as though it intended to win its wars against the supercilious neoliberal powers (!!) - to raise military expenditure by 25% to $140 billion a year (a small fraction of the US military budget).

At the same time, The Bell moans, the government intends to run a budget deficit of no more than 1% of GDP and is not counting on any windfall income from oil revenue. (Yes, Oh West! - weep in the face of such economic frugality).

The Bell is enraged that Russia wants to pay for its determination to win the West’s existential war against it by raising taxes, but gives insufficient credit to the fact that these taxes are being raised in the context of a growing economy and rising incomes. It gleefully notes the high contribution to Russian revenues of taxes on the oil and gas industry, ignoring, of course, the huge dependence of US industry on US oil and gas.

The Bell concedes that Moscow still plans to run a budget deficit over the coming years, albeit not a large one: 0.5% of GDP in 2025, or 1.17 trillion rubles, then 0.9% and 1.1% of GDP in the following two years. It claims that Russia will still have to “cover” that, as though this might represent some herculean effort unknown to the human species, ignoring the perfect ease with which Russia has been able to raise money in recent years to comfortably cover such low deficits.

It gleefully observes that under Wetern-imposed sanctions, the Russian state can only borrow within the country, including from state-run banks, while failing to note that Russia’s overcoming of the West’s sanctions weapon has been the main reason for the current strength of its economy and its increasing economic sovereignty.

The Fiction of Ukraine-as-Proxy

Ukraine is beyond doubt a tool for the West in its war against Russia, first, and the Global South, in general. Arguments about whether NATO’s involvement is “direct” or “indirect” have always seemed to me to be speciously semantic. The argument about whether Washington should give the greenlight for NATO to fire its weapons on Russian targets from Ukraine (bearing in mind that NATO can strike Russia from many other countries, including Poland and Romania, and with nuclear warheads) seems to me to have more to do with a nervous dance of calibration than with intellectually sound concepts and rules.

Of interest then is a piece by Drago Bosnic in Global Research (Bosnic) that implicates a former US ambassador to Moscow for participation in “Ukraine’s” fated invasion of Kursk. Boanic cites former Security Council Secretsry Nikolai Patrushev as saying that the US lied when it claimed it had no advance knowledge of the Kursk invasion, and insisted that the invasion would not have taken place without NATO participation and direct support, and alluded to evidence that NATO intelligence services were providing direct support to Ukrainian forces. Drago claims that leaked documents show that several high-ranking American officials and at least one think tank took part in planning the invasion and that former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul had been invited to take part in a relevant war game organized by the Atlantic Council as early as last February. The goal was internal destabilization.

BRICS Currency and Membership Innovations

For 21 Century Wire Blake Lovewell (Lovewell) holds out some hope for a BRICS currency. He describes an app developed by Russia that allows the vendor to access funds in their own national currency from their national bank. That national bank then makes a demand from their central bank. That central bank builds up a balance of trade (for example 100 Indian transactions in Russia). The central bank of Russia then settles with the central bank of India using a token (NSRB : New Silk Road BRICS token), India will have debited the BRICS pay account of the buyer at the point of sale, via an Indian bank, and the transaction is paid for and settled in seconds using a web of high speed computer networks.

“This is better than the current system where Russia could end up with an excess of Rupees, as happened in a 2023 oil trade”.

The NSRB token will be run on a blockchain that is centrally managed by nation states and used to keep a ledger of every transaction, including a mass of data on the users, location, time and amount etc. The system uses Central Bank Digital Currencies here used at the settlement layer that is to be the interlocutor between national currencies, Rubles, Rupees and Yuan, and the NSRB token.

Each nation will have control over its CBDC and monetary policy. For the user, there will not be a great difference between a bank account of today and a BRICS pay account.

The BRICS coin - the New Unit of Currency (NUC), or New Unit of Account (NUA) or New Silk Road BRICS token, will be backed by gold.

Lavrov has already indicated and repeatedly explained the “suspension” of membership into BRICS+. Instead of membership, Lavrov mentioned that potential countries can only be accepted as a “partner group” with simple consideration to support and interact with the BRICS association.

For IPS this week Kester Klomegah (Klomegah) discusses the brakes on an otherwise surging membership of BRICS. More than 30 countries have expressed their readiness to join BRICS. In practical terms, however, Russia has suspended BRICS+ expansion. The official documents, as stipulated by the guidelines, set no concrete criteria or rules for admission except using the flexible term “consensus” – a general agreement at the summit which was utilized in the selection process.

“Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian President Vladimir Putin have described (designated) this circle of BRICS+ friends into … what is now referred popularly to as “partner members” which starkly reflected in official documents…In mid-June 2024, Lavrov hosted the BRICS Foreign Ministers Council in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod where The BRICS Foreign Ministers decided to suspend admission of new members and this step reflected in the final documents”.

Existing members decided to ‘take a pause’ with new members while working on categories of partner countries as stages ahead of a full-fledged membership.

I would think that the pause will give existing members more time to develop the BRICS or its successor entity as a carefully structured and regulated institution.