Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly

Putin to Russia’s enemies: Incoming!

Dmitry Orlov
C l u b O r l o v | ideas to blow your mind
February 21, 2023 at 15:20 | Has readers’ comments | For subscribers only | Here

A good way to determine whether you are still alive is by asking whether you can still feel wonder and amazement at watching the changes sweeping the world. Most such changes are gradual and hard to detect as part of your day-to-day experience, and so it is useful when someone important stands in front of you for an hour, as Putin did today before Russia’s Federal Assembly, and explains exactly what has happened and exactly what is gong to happen. It is also quite entertaining: Putin is someone who is naturally irrepressible and refuses to hold back. His Russian also has a tremendous dynamic range: one moment he sounds like a streetwise kid from the tough streets of Leningrad, and another moment he sounds like a lawyer and a consummate technocrat, literary scholar or even a theology student. Well, he is all of these things. Like him or hate him (few people manage to feel neutral about him) but he is difficult to ignore. Especially since, as is usual, his annual address to the Federal Assembly was not lacking in what linguists call performantives — statements that do not express opinion or impart information but actually transform reality in specific ways. And these it is important to know about, especially if you reside in one of the countries whose leaders have (very stupidly) decided to be Russia’s enemies, since, ultimately, it is your ass that’s on the line. You may stand in awe of the awesome leader whose name is Vladimir Putin (there is nothing to stop you) but, more to the point, I feel it is my humanitarian duty to warn you what’s likely to happen before someone shouts “Incoming!” That way, you might formulate a better plan than just covering yourself with a white sheet and slowly crawling toward the cemetery (so as to not cause a stampede in which someone might get trampled). And so…

…let’s start from the most momentous: Putin announced that Russia is suspending its participation in the START-3 treaty. That’s “Treaty between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, No. 3.” This treaty dates back to the Soviet era, but on February 3, 2021 the US and Russia agreed to extend it until February 5, 2026. Putin stipulated the terms under which Russia would consider returning to the treaty: it must take into account strategic offensive capabilities of all of NATO countries, not just the US. Britain and France also have nuclear weapons, although none of them are too fresh, and Washington has a tendency to send its nukes to any place it likes, including other NATO countries, such as Germany and Turkey, and this is a problem. Putin ridiculed NATO’s calls for Russia to allow its experts to inspect Russian military sites; after recent drone aircraft carried out a strike on Russian airports that host its strategic aviation, damaging a few planes (using the Ukrainians as mindless proxies) such a request is beyond ridiculous. Perhaps Russia should be allowed, as a courtesy, to blow up a bunch of US strategic bombers, just to even the score before commencing negotiations? No? Oh, well… Putin also pointed out that US strategic weapons are well beyond their sell-by date (he was a bit more polite and circumspect, but that was the gist, and those who are in the know also know that he wa being factual). Figuratively speaking, when it comes to nukes, Washington’s armory is in sad shape; the cans are bulging and the ones that have burst smell really bad and are leaking vile substances.

More specifically, there are some technical details that can be grasped without having to become a nuclear weapons nerd. The US has zero (that's right, zero!) factories that can build nuclear weapons. There is some artisanal activity… (continuation here)

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Ordem mundial é o objetivo da guerra informacional na Ucrânia

Guerra, desinformação e democracia

Carlos Branco, Major-general e Investigador do IPRI-NOVA • O Jornal Económico • 17 Fevereiro 2023, 00:14

Para além da verdade, também a democracia está a ser vítima desta guerra. A divergência de pensamento transformou-se em delito de opinião.

Tornou-se banal admitir que a verdade é a primeira vítima da guerra. Na maioria dos casos, é um reconhecimento pouco útil porque não ajuda a aumentar as defesas contra a mentira. Não nos coloca de sobreaviso. Não eleva os níveis de alerta. Isso aplica-se ao processo comunicacional relacionado com o conflito na Ucrânia, que nos envolveu nos últimos meses.

Passado quase um ano de hostilidades, é tempo de confrontarmos os factos com os discursos. Este exercício deve ser feito independentemente de convicções pessoais, ou do apoio que se dê a uma ou à outra facção. O facto de a esmagadora maioria da comunicação social estar do lado da causa ucraniana, por muito justa que seja, não legitima nem justifica a promoção sistemática de propaganda.

Qualquer declaração do Governo ucraniano, assim como de algumas outras fontes, como sejam os serviços secretos ingleses, transformados neste conflito em agência noticiosa, é automaticamente considerada uma verdade absoluta inquestionável, por mais ilógica e inverosímil que seja. Fica isenta de contraditório, averiguação e certificação.

Desvaneceu-se assim a fronteira entre notícia e informação. Tornou-se fútil e dispensável verificar a verosimilhança da notícia, um quesito fundamental para se tornar informação. Escancarou-se a porta à manipulação. Ao aceitarmos e promovermos realidades complexas com representações maniqueístas de santos de um lado, e pecadores do outro, tornamo-nos colaboracionistas e, nalguns casos, agentes da manipulação.

A manipulação informativa turva a cognição e impede que se percepcione a realidade com clareza. Inibe a clarividência e impossibilita-nos irremediavelmente de compreender o outro. O raciocínio reduz-se a um corrupio de preconceitos.

No caso em apreço, o lado russo tem sido o alvo. As forças russas não tinham munições (davam apenas para uma semana), não tinham preparação, estavam mal equipados, aprendiam a manusear o armamento pela wikipedia, não tinham botas, os soldados desertavam, o ministro da Defesa foi demitido, o chefe das forças armadas morto, Putin foi atingido por várias doenças terminais, os civis eram o alvo dos bombardeamentos, sem esquecer a atribuição da destruição do Nord Stream à Rússia, etc.

Não faltaram “especialistas” para credibilizar estas “notícias”, na maioria dos casos insultos à nossa sanidade mental, com a finalidade exclusiva de moldar atitudes e comportamentos. Ajudaram a criar nas opiniões públicas ocidentais o dogma da vitória ucraniana, como se tratasse de uma imposição divina.

Afinal, quem não tem munições é Kiev, quem não tem base industrial e tecnológica de defesa capaz de apoiar a guerra é a Europa e a Ucrânia, que sobrevive apenas com recurso à ajuda externa, que fez uma remodelação governamental profunda, lançou brutais campanhas de mobilização, etc.

Para além da verdade, também a democracia está a ser vítima desta guerra. Com a conivência promíscua de largos setores da elite pensante do país, aplaude-se o pensamento único, insulta-se e demoniza-se quem questiona as narrativas do mainstream. A divergência de pensamento transformou-se em delito de opinião.

Independentemente do curso da guerra e do lado para que penda o nosso coração, quando informação e manipulação se misturam num pântano de insalubridade é clara a conclusão: a democracia está moribunda. Não só aqui, mas noutras latitudes também.

Original aqui.

FIM

Arkhangelsk–Astrakhan line

The Great Patriotic War (Russian: Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́, romanized: Velikaya Otechestvennaya voyna) is a term used in Russia and some other former republics of the Soviet Union to describe the conflict fought during the period from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945 along the many fronts of the Eastern Front of World War II, primarily between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. For some legal purposes, this period may be extended to 11 May 1945 to include the end of the Prague offensive.
From Wikipedia entry “Great Patriotic War (term)” retrieved 20 February 2023, at 22:18 (UTC).

Day of June 22 changed the world forever. At 4 o’clock in the morning German troops invaded the territory of USSR. Largest conflict in the human history began. The war lasted almost 4 years and ended with surrender of Germany, Hitler’s suicide and the fall of Third Reich.

Confrontation between Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is the part of World War II.

The conflict is known as the Great Patriotic War in Russia, while in Germany and Western World it is called the Eastern Front or the German-Soviet War.

This videos will show the whole chronology of hostilities on the map from 22 June 1941 to May 9 1945.

This is a special 1984 remaster of the original 1945 Soviet Victory Parade over Nazi Germany. The film featured enhanced quality picture, and re-recorded music tracks of the original songs used. This parade took place on a rainy summer day on 24 June 1945. Taking the salute is Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgi Zhukov. Commanding the parade is Marshal of the Soviet Union Konstantin Rokossovsky.

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The Currency Wars Are Back

The unexpected truth

about the billions ‘stolen’ from Russia

Alexander Dugin • Geopolitika.ru • February 01, 2023 | Original via Geopolitika.ru in English

One of the most popular and debated arguments is the West’s theft of Russia’s foreign reserves and, consequently, the blaming of the liberal bloc government for placing them. I am far from a supporter of liberalism, in fact I am an irreconcilable opponent of it, but it is still worth getting to the bottom of the myths and propaganda.

I do not have a very deep knowledge of economics, although I have studied the classics of liberalism and Marxism and, with particular zeal, the heterodox economic theories: John Maynard Keynes, Silvio Gesell, Giovanni Arrighi, Friedrich List, Joseph Schumpeter, Leon Walras and, of course, my favourite, Ezra Pound. I have a book called The End of Economics and several articles on the subject. Yet the field is little known to me, and if it is interesting it is from a philosophical and sociological point of view. So I could be wrong and I ask the more knowledgeable experts to correct me.

The image of foreign exchange reserves in the West is portrayed as a transport of gold bars in exchange for interest or some other mechanism to obtain additional financial means from their storage. Of course, all people versed in economics know that nothing of the sort happened. Nobody transported ingots to the West.

But already at the first stage there were objections to placing gold reserves in the West: why withdraw funds from Russia? Let the funds be injected into our economy. This was argued in detail by our economists Sergey Glazyev, Valentin Katasonov, Mikhail Delyagin, Mikhail Khazin and others.

Elvira Nabiullina replied: if we let money into the Russian economy, this will lead to inflation and, consequently, to unevenly rising prices and income. In other words, everything will be worse. As for the currency board, i.e. the rigid pegging of the rouble to the global reserve currency (in fact, to the dollar), everything is so and Nabiullina is right. But there is a way out: the two-ring model of the financial system proposed by Sergey Glazyev and later adopted by Alexander Galushka – which existed, as Galushka shows in his book Crystal of Growth, under Stalin, Roosevelt and Yalmar Schacht.

Whenever this model was applied completely independently of the dominant economic dogma, the economies of these countries – with very different ideologies – skyrocketed. Let us remember this two-ring argument, the most serious one that can be made. The rest is Soviet inertia or populist ‘give the people their money’ demagoguery.

Nabiullina’s logic prevailed and the foreign exchange reserves were placed in the West – to generate profits and not create inflation. The patriotic economists were not listened to.

Now the popular image is that the Russian gold has disappeared, and after the start of the SMO it has been seized by the enemies and is in danger of being handed over to the Nazi regime in Kiev to continue killing our citizens, slaughtering not only the fighters but also the civilian population – women, the elderly and children. It turns out that Nabiullina is either unfit or a traitor. But was there gold?

Let us read the classic definition: “Gold and foreign exchange reserves are highly liquid assets that are under the control of the monetary authorities.” What does this mean? It means that foreign exchange reserves are not necessarily gold or not gold at all. They are financial liabilities, securities. It is even more complicated: it is the purchase of Western bonds and complex financial transactions.

The obligations associated with these securities are considered ironclad, but that is under normal circumstances. After the SMO there was a state of emergency. This is not the case. Under normal conditions no one would blow up a pipeline. This meant that all obligations – primarily economic ones – faltered and collapsed.

So, we did not put something concrete and tangible in the West, but merely signed up to complicated financial schemes. It is much less concrete and tangible than Nord Stream.

Yes, we vouched for them, but the West also vouched for many things they did not care about. Considering this, there are no Russian trillions in the West, and even if there were something, if we wanted to guarantee it, it would be worth nothing.

All our wealth stays with us and above all: we, no matter what, can issue in full sovereignty all the money we want to print. All wealth is ours and we have an infinite amount of money.

Nabiullina is justified, unless, of course, she is in favour of victory and has so far said nothing against victory. Correct me if I am wrong.

Nabiullina, however, has a different problem: she is a staunch supporter of monetarism and currency board policy. For her, therefore, the obligations of the Russian Central Bank to the West, and thus to the Fed, are sacrosanct, and monetary issuance should only be single-cycle and tied to the reserve currency. In this case – and only in this case – Russia owes the West what it has taken from it. That is, someone took a receipt from you, then burnt down your house, killed your family and is demanding repayment as if nothing had happened. This is where the monetarist (Nabiullina) has a dilemma:

• whether to continue to behave monetaristically with the rapist and murderer, honouring agreements no matter what;
• or consider the commitments broken after what the West has done to the pipeline, to our reserves and in general?

If one considers that we remain loyal to monetarism and the global rules that the West itself, which established them before, has just grossly violated, then Russia is engaging not only in legal theft, but also in funding a direct enemy to kill the Russian people. That is, it is either homeland or monetarism.

A second very similar choice. Suppose the Central Bank sends the West packing and says that the gold and foreign exchange reserves deposited there simply do not exist and that Russia has no obligation to do so. This means that the budget will be replenished with the stolen money and Ukraine will be armed with funds printed in the US. And they will have to deal with this on their own.

Here again, however, there is a conflict with the currency board doctrine: throwing the returned funds into the Russian economy, which can be returned with a snap of the fingers (because we haven’t actually given anything real away), is like triggering inflation, and this is where the two-ring system of the patriot economists comes in handy. Putting funds in the strategic loop and spending them only on defence, strategic projects and long-term infrastructure, and preventing these extra funds from entering the general financial system, will have no effect on inflation.

Again, monetarism or homeland.

There is an important point to be made here: everyone knows that the placement of foreign reserves has nothing to do with taking real wealth out of the country, neither with gold nor with anything else in particular, but in any case Russia is a sovereign power and can, given the second circuit, issue as much currency as it wants. With the same gold and foreign currency reserves that we consider our own, or just let them go out and put in the second circuit and for stealing and manipulating this circuit, a special punishment. Especially since we are outside the ECHR. Stealing from the front of a country at war: what is the penalty?

What’s my point? If I am right, then Nabiullina, being a monetarist, has not yet made a fatal mistake and committed a crime. Only now the Central Bank and the government’s financial bloc are faced with a real dilemma. I have already formulated it: monetarism or life. Just accept the two-circuit model and you will immediately discover that Russia has not lost any foreign currency reserves. This will immediately become glorious. This means that the government did not make any irreparable mistakes on the eve of the SMO. Everything was taken into account. Nabiullina, the Central Bank and the entire government economic bloc are justified. Go and sin no more (monetarism).

However, this is the decisive moment when Nabiullina must abandon the monetarist dogma, the currency board. No, she has not lost any foreign exchange reserves yet, but she could lose them. Now. If Nabiullina sticks to monetarist dogma, she will indeed (to the future!) betray the motherland. Then everything the patriotic economists say about her will be true. But let’s be honest: for now, her monetarism is not yet a crime. Tomorrow it will become a crime – or perhaps it will. Or maybe it won’t.

Let us spare Nabiullina. It is not necessary for her to renounce liberalism, market freedom or the general vectors of financial policy (in my opinion, she could very well renounce them, so much goodness is not spared, but that is up to her discretion). It is simply necessary to put the interests of the state, i.e. sovereignty, above the conditional world community, from which the West is stubbornly trying to throw Russia out. You cannot force someone to do something nice. You don’t want Russia in your system? Then we leave proudly, slam the door and say: we owe you nothing more.

We have to win, then in the market we will see, maybe we will listen to Nabiullina but only after victory, now is the time to break. We did not want this, but the West has cut us off from itself. In this situation it is silly to insist that no matter what, ‘we are part of the West’. Not any more. In fact, we never were, but there is no need to pretend now. Everything is very clear.

This is what is required of Nabiullina in economics: just a return to mercantilism (the state monopoly on foreign economic activity) and the Keynesian principle of ‘economic insularity’ (which saved the American economy under the New Deal and in World War II). Mercantilism is technically synonymous with economic sovereignty.

And, of course, the two-loop issuance model: for purely pragmatic purposes, for the sake of Victory.

And in the rest there is monetarism (I do not like it, but if Nabiullina likes it and it is not fatal for the country, then so be it), but on a limited scale. Not total dogmatic liberalism, not a currency board, but a market in the name of power and the people. A market for Victory. I would go further, as far as Pound and Gesell, and abandon interest capital altogether in favour of orthodox socialism. But this is just a dissenting opinion.

Here is Nabiullina’s salvation. However, the choice is now hers: loyalty or betrayal, the head of the Central Bank is called upon to solve the problem herself. Only now, yesterday does not count. The past is in the past and is easily excused, but what about today?

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini

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The Vineyar of the Saker • February 15, 2023 | has comments • original

by Gerardo Papalia (PhD) for the Saker blog

What and who is “woke”?

“Woke” has become the latest scourge-term used by many right-leaning commentators with which to verbally flagellate progressives. In the Webster Dictionary, the term is defined as: “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)”. In practice, these “important societal facts and issues” generally refer to concepts such as gender and racial identities, environmentalism, and anti-colonial histories, as in the case of slave narratives. As a counter to “woke”, right-leaning commentators espouse traditional values, gender roles, environmental policies and histories. We thus witness the creation of a binary where one can either be “woke” or anti-woke”.

I argue here that this dichotomy ends up concealing those underlying economic processes and realities that are actually purposing devising and fostering those very same issues the term “woke” refers to. These processes are deeply rooted in the neo-liberal world order which is the expression of contemporary financial capitalism. A good example of this is the” global network of influence” created by the billionaire stock-market speculator George Soros, who is currently funding an entire panoply of media and activist organisations, such as the Open Society Foundations. One could argue that the causes that Soros is funding align exactly with many “woke” agendas. But is Soros supporting “wokeness” which is awareness of societal problems, or is he instead engendering “wokeism”, which is the policing of differing viewpoints? And why would a finance capitalist do this? The answer lies in the nature of advanced financial capitalism itself.

Caveat Emptor

In order to sell goods, the capitalist mode of production must define the buyer. In the earlier years of capitalism, identifying the buyer was easy: it was obvious to the producer what the needs of buyers were. The requirement to have shoes, bread, chairs, for example,after all, is self evident. The style of shoe, the type of bread and the quality of the chair were secondary considerations. As time progressed, and the productive system became more efficient and competitive, it became important to differentiate the style of shoe, the type of bread and the quality of the furniture, to attract buyers. But to attract buyers meant being able to differentiate among them and to target them with advertising. For example, what type of buyer would be interested in this style of shoe and how can I advertise this product? This meant examining and dividing the buyers into market segments. Hence, the birth of targeted advertising and the consumer.

Initially, this segmentation involved determining the broad social classes of consumers: whether they were white or blue collar workers, whether they lived in cities or on farms, whether they were educated or not. As time went on, and the system of production became more sophisticated, consumers were increasingly differentiated into ever smaller and more specific groups. Advertising began to penetrate ever more precisely defined subjectivities: demographic groups whether single, coupled or extended; age groups whether teenager, middle aged or elderly; gender identities whether male, female, fluid; interest groups whether in sport, politics, the arts or other areas; cultural identities whether autochthonous, native or diasporic, and so forth.

Instead of reflecting already existing groups, the advertising industry then began to actually fashion or create purpose built subjectivities in order to be able to sell pre-conceived products to them. The media industry became the chief vehicle in this process with distinctions between advertising and artistic output largely disappearing. This process is reflected in the dictum: capitalism will eventually create artificial needs so that it can satisfy them.

With the coming of the digital age, algorithms have made it possible to reduce societal groups almost to the category of the single individual. As a result society has been split into ever more specific niches, corresponding to an entire panoply of identities and orientations in an ever strengthening centrifugal dynamic. As consumers, human beings are continually being into ever more fragmented subjectivities, on the assumption that the nature of their existence is ultimately entirely ‘monadic’ and isolated, a condition where they would be vulnerable to each and every external force or influence, unable almost to conceive of positive social change.

Ecce homo

The ideal human from the capitalist standpoint is a being who is entirely dependent on the products and services that its system can deliver, and whose only contribution consists in their atomised labour. The weak and the vulnerable are always the best consumers. This includes sexual and gender identities, assumed to operate as essentialised quanta within an economy of equally discrete and hollow bodies, separable from broader concerns or desires except insofar as they can be captured and filled by the same system of production.

Accordingly, under capitalism, human relationships have been moving away from historically consensual or collaborative paradigms to transactional ones. Collective activities that once enabled societies to function, such as political activism, trade union participation, social interest groups, are now increasingly being peopled with individuals asking what direct material benefit they can expect in exchange for their contribution. Even in charitable endeavours, the giving of money has largely replaced actual physical or intellectual commitment. This is the only type of exchange of interest to capitalism: all other relationships are but illusory ‘maya’ in comparison to the productive power of the system itself. A productive capacity has now become sufficiently articulated and flexible to be able to satisfy even single desires.

For the oligarchs of this world, the human exists only as a fetish, or a zombie; an entirely knowable, predictable and manipulable creature, much like the way slaves were viewed by their masters, and subjugated people the world over are by the neo-colonial powers that be.

Advertisers continue to hope that they can direct human exchange into ways that make money, and yet people always seek to escape from this conditioning. Advertisers call this process ‘Cool Hunting’.

Beati pauperes spiritu

This is where capitalism comes undone. For humans are not static creatures that can be precisely defined into discrete entities. People exist in a diachronic dimension: they change in unforeseen ways and are much more complex than capitalism will allow. It is always possible that they will evolve and develop in ways that the advertising industry cannot capture or even envisage.

Humans know the difference between true generosity and self-interested benevolence. They will act in ways that are not transactional and make no economic sense, such as being generous and kind and, horror of horrors, actually love others for what they are. They will act in solidarity and not just by giving money. They will show kindness, be generous without want of return, contribute each and severally to the common good. They will also continue to work with and care for others in non transactional ways. In other words, people will practice selflessness, which contravenes every classical economic principle.

All of these behaviours constitute an enormous blind spot in classical economic theory: its inability to accommodate so called “unpaid” labour. It is not surprising that work in the domestic sphere is largely excluded from economic output calculations, particularly the contribution of women. Marx, who was very attentive to the contribution of labour to the economy, expressed this vital effort as the faculty of proletarian “reproduction.” Unpaid labour has been the minimum common denominator, and I daresay the prerequisite, of any economic system from the beginning of time.

Humans create meaning for themselves by living for each other, which is perhaps what Margaret Thatcher actually meant when she stated: “There is no such thing as society.” Hence they will commit to work to the best of their abilities, not principally for material gain, but for the sake of their own dignity as individuals and for the benefit of the greater whole. For the same reasons they will also embrace difference, not simply tolerate it, in recognition of the dignity that is the abiding quality and the due of each and very human being. Such an approach can be termed “wokeness”. We need only look around us to see this in families, among friends, and even in nation states.

Today the social battleground is not only, as Marx envisaged, a struggle for the control over the means of production, it has become a social, even a spiritual struggle between capitalism and humanity. Any form of division, of separation of people into distinct groups premised on essentialised identities, an expression of “wokeism”, as opposed to “wokeness”, will promote capitalism and ultimately destroy human solidarity.

We should be mindful of the origin of the word ‘devil’: it derives from the Ancient Greek ‘daimōn’, which means ‘he who divides’. By focusing on what separates us from our fellow human beings, we are ultimately doing the work of the devil.

Beautiful Demon Devil Girl

“Mammon and His Slave”
Wood engraving, published by Johann Jacob Weber, Leipzig, circa 1896.

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