Soros Open Society + "Anti-fascists" = Globalist propaganda

[KUAN]

^

t's not bad people who came up with this hundreds of years ago who are responsible, rather it is a system that advances bad people and rewards bad behavior. "Globalist" is about giving dumbfucks and haters and victims of adolescent U.S.-style "libertarian" brainwashing a fantasy enemy, so that they need not confront the fairy tales of the capitalism that has already burned the planet and murdered their grandchildren.

o for a wise dictator. Nah, she'd be murdered

[seemslikeadream]

JULY 31, 2015
Russia Challenges America’s Orwellian NED
by STEPHEN LENDMAN


The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) duplicitous mission statement indicates a “dedicat(ion) to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world.”

Its practices are polar opposite – a State Department-funded agency created to undermine democracy wherever it exists.

It’s a global mischief-maker – a rogue agency financing anti-democratic groups and initiatives in scores of countries worldwide. Its objective is regime change – notably in independent nations like Russia. It subversively interferes in its electoral practices among other ways of targeting its sovereignty.

Moscow’s mid-year 2015 enacted Law on Undesirable Organizations justifiably targets foreign organizations posing a “threat to the constitutional order and defense capability or the security of the Russian state” – subversive groups no governments should tolerate.

On July 28, Russian Deputy Chief Prosecutor Vladimir Malinovsky “signed a decree recognizing the activities of the National Endowment for Democracy, a foreign non-commercial organization, as undesirable in the territory of Russia in compliance with a law on measures of impacting people linked to the violation of basic human rights and freedoms and the rights and freedoms of the citizens of Russia.”

The document was sent to Russia’s Justice Ministry – including NED in its register of undesirable foreign organizations.

Action against the organization was long overdue along with targeting other US subversive ones. More on them below. Washington works aggressively against Russian interests – a longstanding campaign to marginalize, contain, weaken and isolate Moscow, with internal subversion one of many methods used.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov called the undesirable organizations law “without any question a step in the right direction.” Many so-called NGOs (like NED) are agents of foreign governments.

In late May, Putin signed the new measure into law. It lets the Prosecutor General’s Office and Foreign Ministry declare activities of “undesirable foreign organizations” illegal – ones posing a “threat to the constitutional order and defense capability, or to the security of the Russian state.”

Non-compliance is punishable by administrative penalties. Repeated violations mandate imprisonment for up to six years. Russian citizens and organizations working with banned groups face fines only.

Russia’s 2012 Foreign Agents Law requires NGOs engaged in political activities to register as foreign agents or face stiff fines. They’re prohibited from supporting political parties. They’re free to engage in other activities.

NED is a longstanding political meddler. It’s named in a Russian upper house Federation Council “patriotic stop-list” – groups considered potentially threatening national security.

Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said the list was created out of concern about foreign organizations operating subversively in Russia.

A Federation Council statement said “(t)oday Russia faces its strongest attack in the past 25 years, targeting its national interests, values and institutes.”

“Its main goal is to influence the internal political situation in the country, undermine the patriotic unity of our people, undermine the integration processes within the CIS space and force our country into geopolitical isolation.”

Groups included in the Federation Council’s stop-list are “known for their anti-Russian bias.” They include:

NED, George Soros’ Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation), International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, MacArthur Foundation, Freedom House; Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Polish-based Education for Democracy Foundation, East European Democratic Center, Ukrainian World Congress, Ukrainian World Coordinating Council, and Crimean Field Mission on Human Rights.

Nations must protect themselves against foreign subversion without violating international rule of law principles. In enacting the Law on Undesirable Organizations and Foreign Agents Law, Russia acted responsibly.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

[Sounder]

The prior article from 21WIRE was long but quite detailed with many links that are dead, at least from my computer. Now that I have Jacks endorsement, perhaps more folk will choose to read it.

The author is;
Author Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her blog The Wall Will Fall.

People that endorse the destruction of nation states are sick people lacking in empathy, and probably white exceptionalists, for the most part.

[Joe Hillshoist]

The Daily Mail reported back in November 2015 that Soros was busy telling the EU to take “at least a million” refugees every year.

One million, on a population of 740 million! Obviously aiming to dilute and adulterate the essence of whiteness, ha.

What's interesting in these discussions is to see posters who love to portray their governments as somehow the embodiment of modern fascism, in order to romanticise the heroism of their subversive posts on the internet, then turn around and loudly object to the structural aspect that is essentially the function of these governments, as far as salary and wage earners are concerned: the maintenance of the wage differential between first worlders and third worlders. What is the issue with migration? That spoiled rich-country citizens will have to compete on the labour market with ambitious wogs? Whose countries have been devastated by capital movements that have been to the material advantage of those now moaning about the threat that these guys could be coming in and destroying their cultures (i.e. fucking their girlfriends)?

You'll excuse my lack of sympathy, I hope.

Nailed it.

[Joe Hillshoist]

I'd like to point out that I actually support equalising wages between the first and third worlds. There's enough money in the system to enable everyone to get first world wages.

[Iamwhomiam]

I would too, Joe, but we must be careful what we wish for. The quickest way to achieve pay parity would be to lower first world workers pay to the level of third world workers pay.

edit to remove "that equaling "

[Joe Hillshoist]

Russia is one country and it can be surrounded.

You do know that would be impossible, don't you, to surround Russia?
Countries bordering Russia; Length of Border
Country-------------Length (km)
Kazakhstan---------6846
China (SE)----------3605
Mongolia-------------3441
Ukraine---------------1576
Finland---------------1313
Belarus-----------------959
Georgia---------------723
Latvia------------------292
Estonia----------------290
Azerbaijan------------284
Lithuania--------------227
Poland-----------------210
Norway----------------196
China (S)---------------40
North Korea-----------17.5
Japan------------------water
US----------------------water

It is damned ridiculous to believe ISIS could possibly be a greater threat to Europe than ISIS could be. Russia's nuclear arsenal is on par with ours. ISIS has no such advantage over Russia.


edited to repair lost formatting

yeah what he said (apart from "ISIS being a greater threat than ISIS" )

[American Dream]

There's money lubricating the wheels of Team Putin, and many players from the far right are creaming in their jeans over the prospect of getting paid some Russian coin for joining up with the team:

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/the ... eople#full

A Syrian man comforts a boy following a reported air strike on the rebel-held neighbourhood of Al Kalasa in Aleppo on February 4.


The long read: What does the future hold for Syria’s people?

The revolution, counter-revolutions and wars in Syria are terribly misunderstood, particularly in the English-speaking West, by politicians and publics alike. There are many shining exceptions, but in general, poor media coverage, ideological blinkers and Orientalist assumptions have produced a discourse which focuses on symptoms rather than causes, and which is usually unencumbered by grassroots Syrian voices or any information at all on Syrian political and cultural achievements under fire.

The consequent incomprehension is disastrous for two reasons – one negative, one positive.

First, the exponentially escalating crisis in Syria is a danger to everybody – Syrians and their neighbours first, but Europe immediately after. Russia’s bombing is creating hundreds of thousands of new refugees.

Meanwhile there’s good reason to believe Russian president Vladimir Putin is funding far-right, anti-immigrant parties across Europe. It is very possible that this year’s flood of refugees will re-establish Europe’s internal borders, destroying the “Schengen” free movement area, seen by some as Europe’s key political achievement since the Second World War.

With 11 million homeless, traumatised people on the eastern Mediterranean, terrorism is sure to increase. And the long-term geopolitical consequences of allowing, even facilitating, Russia, Iran and Syrian president Bashar Al Assad to crush the last hopes of democracy and self-determination in Syria will create a still more dangerous world for our children. Yet European heads are being buried in the sand. Some still imagine a peace process is underfoot.

And the positive reason. Amidst the depravities of war, Syrians are organising themselves in brave and creative ways. The country now boasts more than 400 local councils, most democratically-elected, as well as many free newspapers, radio stations, women’s centres, and an explosion in artistic production.

We shouldn’t just be feeling sorry for Syrians, but learning from them too. Their democratic experiments are currently under full-scale international military assault. They may be stamped out before most non-Syrians have even heard of them.

These factors spurred me, a British-Syrian novelist, and Leila Al Shami, a British-Syrian activist, to write our book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.

In place of inaccurate grand narratives we have amplified the voices of Syrian revolutionaries. Instead of sensationalism we have tried to provide context (for without context all we are left with is ideology and assumptions). This means that we also seek to explain the perspectives of those we disagree with – the different varieties of extremists, for instance, or pro-regime Alawites, who are often reluctantly driven to loyalty by fear and a lack of alternative leadership.

The following extract is taken from our chapter entitled ‘Scorched Earth: The Rise of the Islamisms’:

“We used to laugh at the regime propaganda about Salafist gangs and Islamic emirates. Then the regime created the conditions to make it happen.” – Monzer Al Sallal

Tormented, bereaved and dispossessed, the Syrian people turned more intensely to religion. This doesn’t mean they became advocates of public beheadings and compulsory veiling; almost all were horrified by the appearance of these phenomena and most still expressed the desire for a civil rather than an Islamic state. A minority, disgusted by the uses to which religion had been put, questioned it more intensely than before. But in general religious emotions were enflamed, religious references were reinforced.

The first cause was the same one which powered militarisation – the brute fact of extreme violence. In most cultures the proximity of death will focus minds on the transcendent – there are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes – and more so in an already religious society like Syria’s. Faith is intensified by death and the threat of death, and by the pain and humiliation of torture. And when the nation is splintering, sub-national identities are reinforced. In death’s presence, people want to feel like we, not like I, because I is small and easily erased.

The sung slogan ‘Ya Allah Malna Ghairak Ya Allah’ (O God We Have Nothing But You) became ubiquitous amongst protestors facing bullets. An intense relationship with God became a survival framework for the detained. Religious slogans became cosmic rallying calls for the fighters. In the Syrian context, radicalisation is better named traumatisation.

Islamism – in both moderate and extreme forms – flourished. The trend was more pronounced amongst the fighting formations than among the people in their committees, liberated towns and villages, and refugee camps – and there were concrete reasons for this, to do with arms supply, funding and discipline. The most serious consequence for the course of the revolution was the hardening of divisions between the Sunni Arab majority and the rest, and foremost amongst them the Alawites. By 2014, battlefield events (and certainly media reports) were often dominated by the acts of the most extreme Sunni Islamist militias – either the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat Al Nusra or the even more extreme Daesh. But at first these organisations were by no means the most important Islamist actors.

The persistence of sectarian resentment in secular, even unbelieving countries such as Ireland or Scotland reinforces an obvious point – these conflicts aren’t about theology but concern group fears and resentments, and their exploitation by power. Communal tensions, in other words, are the result not of ancient enmities but of contemporary political machinations. Communities engaged at one moment in seemingly unforgettable strife are, at another, busily engaging in intermarriage or political alliance. In Lebanon, for instance, the main civil war cleavage was Christian-Muslim, but now tends to divide Sunni-Shia, with Christian groups allied to both sides. And in Iraq, before the 2003 invasion, a third of marriages were cross-sect Sunni-Shia.

There was nothing fated about the sectarian breakdown in Syria. It was deliberately provoked and manipulated, by a host of secondary actors, but primarily by the regime.

Why would the regime provoke first armed resistance and then a fierce sectarian backlash? Because Assadist policy under father and son, at home and abroad, is to present itself as the essential solution to problems it has itself manufactured – a case of the arsonist dressing up as a fireman. The double aim of the counter-revolutionary strategy was to frighten secularists and religious minorities into loyalty, and the West into tolerance of the dictatorship’s violence. The first goal has been partially achieved, the second – at the time of writing – more so.

How did the regime undertake its project? To start with, it targeted Sunni areas for collective punishment and sectarian provocation, as Marcell Shehwaro saw: “The sensation of Sunni identity is based on something real – I can’t pretend that the regime isn’t sectarian, that there haven’t been sectarian massacres. Look, there were stages on the way. When they started killing Sunni civilians randomly as opposed to just those protesting – this increased it. People asked ‘Why are they killing my children when none were carrying arms, and while they’re sending provisions to the nearby Shia village?’ When they played Shia songs at the checkpoints in all-Sunni neighbourhoods. Then my atheist friends began asserting their Sunnism, which is now more of a social than a religious identity.”

Add to this a symbolic assault against Sunni sacred sites. Regime forces fired anti-aircraft guns at minarets until they crumbled. The Umayyad mosque in Aleppo burnt, its thousand-year-old minaret fallen, and the minaret of Deraa’s Omari mosque, erected in the seventh century by Caliph Omar bin Al Khattab. The Khalid bin Al Waleed mosque in Homs, built around the mausoleum of the famous Muslim general and companion of the Prophet, was shelled and burnt. In the regime’s cells, meanwhile, in a parody of the Muslim profession of faith, detainees were forced to swear that there was no god but Bashar.

Writer Samar Yazbek describes the provocation: “When the uprising began, they attacked or destroyed symbols of the Sunni religion. In Kafranbel in August 2013, every day for 20 days, when people broke their fast during Ramadan, the Assad forces used to shell them at that moment, when they were about to eat, when they were saying their prayers. They used to hear the people in the planes on the telephones saying to each other, ‘We want to make them eat death. We want to make them break their fast with death.’ And they did. This is where extremism comes from – from violence and brutality. I am sorry, but anybody who has had ten of their children die is going to become an extremist.”

Then the drowning tyranny threw its arms around the neck of the Alawite community, advertising its complicity in its crimes and making it a potential target for revenge. The Zahra neighbourhood of Homs, for instance, was a visible affront to the besieged and shelled areas surrounding it. An Alawite community overbrimming now with soldiers, with rocket launchers set up in the square, the whole area was lit up while the rest of the city was dark. There were goods in Zahra’s shops, and very cheap furniture, clothes and electronics on sale in the ‘Sunni market’ – all looted from opposition homes. Alawite women too were encouraged to join in the repression of their neighbours – eliciting a predictable response. “They come into people’s houses and take money if they find more than a little,” complained one Sunni woman. “They steal mobile phones. They kick and punch. And what have we done to deserve this? Is it because we’re Muslims? Because we say there is no god but God? Is that why we lost our youth and our homes?”

Collective punishment for Sunnis; the collective tarring of Alawites. The most crucial of all mass-implications, and another bloody turning point in the conflict, was the series of state-directed sectarian massacres on the central plain between Homs and Hama through summer 2012. On May 25, 108 people were murdered at Houla, a Sunni population surrounded by Alawite and Shia villages. The victims – almost half of them children – had their throats cut, their skulls split open and were riddled with bullets. On June 6, between 78 and 100 were similarly murdered at Al Qubeir, again a Sunni farming area surrounded by Alawi villages. On July 10, between 68 and 150 – both civilians and rebel fighters – were killed at Tremseh.

In these and many smaller incidents, it was the shabiha militias accompanying the army who did most of the killing. In Aleppo and Damascus the shabiha militias are manned by thugs of all backgrounds, but in the Homs, Hama and Latakia regions they are exclusively Alawite and Shia. Using locally-recruited gangs as death squads transforms neighbouring communities into bitter enemies. The strategy is coldly intelligent; it incites the victim community with a generalised thirst for revenge, while exploiting the spectre of this revenge to frighten even dissenting members of the ‘perpetrator community’ into redoubled allegiance.

Next, the entry of Lebanon’s Hizbollah and other Iranian-backed militias gave the conflict a Sunni-Shia flavour and fitted it into a regional struggle which had flared since the American occupation of Iraq. The Shia were by no means a natural target for Syrian Sunni enmity – they constituted only one per cent of the population, and before the revolution were not particularly associated with the regime. When Hizbollah was perceived as an anti-Zionist resistance force, it was wildly popular amongst Syrians, Sunnis as much as everyone else, and in 2006, when hundreds of thousands of southern Lebanese – most of them Shia – fled Israeli bombs for Syria, they were housed in private homes. Several thousand were welcomed in the border town of Qusayr.

In any case, orthodox Shia like orthodox Sunnis tend to consider the Alawites heretics. The alliance between Assadist Syria and Shia-theocratic Iran is political, not religious – but that’s not the way it felt on the ground. By word and action, Iran and its clients seemed to confirm the discourse of the wildest anti-Shia propagandists. Hizbollah’s role in Assad’s recapture of Qusayr was followed by the regime burning the Homs land registry, and then reports that Alawi families were being invited to take over Sunni homes. Sunnis feared an agenda linking Alawite tyranny and ethnic cleansing to Shia regional expansionism. The results soon began to emerge. Hizbollah secured Qusayr on June 5, 2013; and on June 11 there was a savagely sectarian response at Hatla in Deir Ezzour, where 60 Shia – some shabiha but at least 30 civilians – were murdered.

*****

With ISIL building a totalitarian ‘Sunni’ state in the east, and tens of thousands of transnational Shia troops on Assad’s frontlines, Syria’s sectarian dynamic has never been stronger than today. Russian bombing is leading towards a sectarian partition of the country that would immeasurably strengthen both forms of jihadism. Yet very many Syrians still refuse this fratricidal logic and remain aware of how sectarian hatreds have been fanned and exploited by tyranny. If these people are listened to, empowered, and involved in any real settlement, it may not be too late to avoid the very worst. Our solidarity is required. And before solidarity must come real knowledge.

Robin Yassin-Kassab also wrote the novel The Road from Damascus.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Has anyone (else) read the Soros' article in the Guardian? Its worth reading them both together. But only if you can think for yourself.

[JackRiddler]

In Soros' homeland the majority of young people are for better or for worse part of the anti-globalist right you attribute to the old and dying.

If their country accepts Boer refugees we can see anti-refugee polemics from the left!

I for one hope they don't get turned into Ukraine 2.0

What's Soros' homeland? The place he had to flee when he was 15?

Thats a sorry bunch of irrelevancies that speak to your own obsessions, and have nothing to do with the world as it is.

Hungary is run by an extreme right-wing neoliberal party (big majority in recent election) which is pro-NATO, pro-Eurozone/Schäuble, extreme anti-Russian, and very extreme anti-refugee, which I suppose you find particularly inspiring. The third party in Hungary is openly fascist, and probably these are the "anti-globalists" to whom you refer as the good guys. Luckily, even in present-day Eastern Europe, Hungary is still one of the most extreme and reactionary examples, although there is no telling how bad things are yet to get. Probably much worse than they already are.

Of course, neither the EU nor the U.S. has any problem with this obedient client state. Your suggestion that it would be given a "Ukraine" treatment has no basis in any non-fantasy, non-fascistoid reading of the world. It shows total ignorance about the geostrategic position of the Ukraine as opposed to that of Hungary. There is no reason in the world to associate anything to do with Hungary with the pre-2014 U.S. covert operations in the Ukraine, unless you are advancing intentional confusion. In Ukraine, of course, "new world order" fascists of the ilk you admire in Hungary are the ones who joined the government after the U.S.-sponsored coup d'etat.

Your gratuitous racist trash talk about non-existent Boer refugees, and how your feverish-fantasy left might respond to them in a parallel universe in which they did exist (unlike this one), also has no relation to anything in the real world, although I understand why you feel a need to invent a world to fit your fucked up politics, since otherwise you'd have to shift your fucked-up politics to reflect the actual world, and that must be so very hard for you.

You're not particularly good at disguising what a piece of disgusting racist filth you are, which still isn't going to make a difference on current RI. More likely I'll get me a ban for saying it, even though you make it obvious. But I assure you, I'm not as politically noble as I put on. You can be certain I'd ban you for being stupid even faster than I would ban you for being racist. Either way, this is the last response you merit, racist trash. Either the moderation will take care of you or they won't.

.

[seemslikeadream]

[seemslikeadream]

Yeah, conniption has a nasty habit of posting Russian State propaganda here and the Russian State is all about coopting neo-fascists and other such racialist/nationalist types.

It never seems to occur to the supporters of the Anti-Imperialism of Fools that they could instead be critical of all competing power blocs and can align themselves with better principles.

[seemslikeadream]

NATO’s Provocative Anti-Russian Moves
February 13, 2016

Exclusive: Official Washington’s demonization of Vladimir Putin and the neocon “group think” about “Russian aggression” have fueled a reckless drive to move NATO forces up to Russia’s border, thus heightening risks of nuclear war and not serving real U.S. national interests, writes Jonathan Marshall.

By Jonathan Marshall

Twenty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO is back flexing its muscles as if nothing had changed since the days of the Soviet Union. Defense ministers from the enlarged, 28-member organization agreed recently to strengthen the alliance’s “forward presence” in Eastern Europe. If their new policy is endorsed at a summit in Poland this summer, NATO will begin deploying thousands of troops in Poland and the Baltic states, right up against Russia’s borders.

In other words, the Western alliance will redouble its military commitment to a Polish government whose right-wing, anti-Russian, and autocratic policies are so egregious that even the stanchly neo-conservative editorial page of the Washington Post saw fit to condemn the new leaders’ encroachments on democracy and the rule of law.

Worse yet, NATO’s provocative commitment will include a potential threat to start World War III on behalf of that government. Most Americans are unaware that NATO’s policies — reaffirmed by the Obama administration — view nuclear weapons as a “core component” of the alliance’s capacity to repel even a conventional attack on one of its member states.

An accidental clash of forces, perhaps triggered by military exercises gone awry, could potentially lead NATO to use its nuclear weapons against Russian troops on Poland’s borders. Or, just as catastrophically, it could prompt Russian forces to attack NATO’s nuclear stockpiles preemptively.

Either scenario could trigger a much wider nuclear war. The British television channel BBC Two explored such a scenario, involving Latvia, in a chilling “war game” film that aired earlier this month.

Rather than let small, distant countries put U.S. national security at risk, the United States should, as an interim step short of disbanding NATO, demand the elimination of theater, or nonstrategic, nuclear weapons from NATO stockpiles. (Theater weapons are smaller and shorter in range than the large warheads carried by intercontinental ballistic missiles and long-range bombers.)

England and France would retain their independent, sovereign nuclear deterrents. But the United States would prevail on NATO to withdraw the 200 nuclear bombs it now stations at air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and even Turkey. It would also forgo costly and destabilizing plans to deploy a new generation of highly accurate B61 bombs in Germany.

Eliminating NATO’s theater nuclear weapons would dramatically reduce security concerns about terrorist attacks — a threat highlighted by an Air Force security review in 2008. It would also eliminate them as tempting targets of a Russian preemptive attack in case a conflict begins to spin out of control.

A unilateral elimination of theater nuclear weapons would leave Western nations with thousands of nuclear warheads, enough to wipe out much of human civilization along with Russia. It would also leave the United States alone with an 8-to-1 advantage over Russia in military spending.

Political leaders from Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Norway called for the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from European soil in 2010, saying they had “lost all military importance” and had become a liability.

U.S. military leaders were inclined to agree. In 2008, the U.S. European Command, once a champion of theater nuclear weapons, acknowledged they were no longer important as a deterrent. When asked in 2010 if tactical nuclear weapons in Europe bought NATO any additional security, General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared simply, “No.”

In today’s political climate, however, demonizers of Russia insist that self-interested steps to eliminate our unneeded weapons would somehow reward Vladimir Putin.

Last year, two leading congressional Republicans, Alabama’s Mike Rogers, chair of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, and Ohio’s Mike Turner, chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, demanded that the United States deploy more nuclear weapons to Europe to counter Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

In 2014, Bush-era right-wingers John Bolton and John Yoo advocated reintroducing theater nuclear missiles into Europe. Either move would simply result in tit-for-tat responses by Russia, leaving both sides mired in a counterproductive arms race.

Other strategic analysts concede that “tactical nuclear arms in Europe are literally outdated” — obsolete both technically and in terms of strategy — but say that withdrawing them “would look like capitulation to Russia and thus encourage Putin to continue pressing his luck.” In other words, the United States should allow its security to be held hostage not only to the whims of Poland and Latvia, but also to Russia’s alleged perceptions.

In an ideal world, NATO would negotiate away its theater nuclear weapons as part of a bilateral treaty to reduce Russia’s own arsenal of smaller weapons, which may number 1,000 or more. But insistence on a negotiated deal has long been an excuse for inaction. And giving any single NATO member a veto will ensure that the alliance’s nuclear policies never change.

Russia’s numerical superiority, moreover, buys it no military advantage. If it launched nuclear weapons in Europe, odds are that the conflict would escalate quickly to engage the strategic nuclear forces of the United States, the UK, and France — leaving Russia a radioactive slag heap. That’s why Russian military doctrine firmly envisions using nuclear weapons only as a last resort, either to respond to a nuclear attack or to resist foreign aggression that “would put in danger the very existence of the state.”

Russia today hangs onto its theater nuclear weapons because its conventional forces have been radically weakened by the collapse of the USSR, the loss of control over Eastern Europe, and a succession of economic crises, including of late the collapse of oil prices.

In a recent commentary, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, dismissed claims of Russia’s growing threat to U.S. security as “belligerent nonsense.”

“It remains the case that NATO countries hugely outspend Moscow when it comes to military procurement,” he observed. “There is no evidence whatsoever that Russia, as when it was the Soviet Union, is embarked on a wanton course of global expansion. This is a country that unilaterally pulled its occupying troops out of Eastern Europe, a door closing on the Cold War.”

Rohrbacher added, “Obviously, some highly influential people can’t accept that and leave the Cold War behind, their mindsets and careers linked to a lingering enmity between the Kremlin and the White House. In particular, they can be found as think tank strategists and arms merchants.”

[backtoiam]

IAMWHOMIAM WROTE:
You do know that would be impossible, don't you, to surround Russia?

Well ya know...I dunno....I think those things are called "fighter jets" and NATO happens to have a bunch of those...they even brag about it...

https://youtu.be/akYcDhmeU9s

[Wombaticus Rex]

IAMWHOMIAM WROTE:
You do know that would be impossible, don't you, to surround Russia?

Well ya know...I dunno....I think those things are called "fighter jets" and NATO happens to have a bunch of those...they even brag about it...

https://youtu.be/akYcDhmeU9s

You are both right about this -- it is logistically impossible to surround Russia, and it is strategically un-necessary to actually surround Russia in order to contain it.