The Total War to Cancel Russia

thesaker.is/the-total-war-to-cancel-russia

By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted

''Vast swathes of NATOstan have been corralled into behaving like a Russophobic lynch mob. No dissent is tolerated.''

By now it’s abundantly clear that the neo-Orwellian “Two Minute Hate” Russophobic campaign launched by the Empire of Lies after the start of Operation Z is actually “24/7 Hate”.

Vast swathes of NATOstan have been corralled into behaving like a Russophobic lynch mob. No dissent is tolerated. The full psyops has de facto upgraded the Empire of Lies to the status of Empire of Hate in a Total War – hybrid and otherwise – to cancel Russia.

Hate, after all, packs way more punch than mere lies, which are now veering into abject ridiculousness, as in U.S. “intelligence” resorting to – what else – lies to fight the info war against Russia.

If the propaganda overdrive has been lethally effective amidst the zombified Western masses – call it a “win” in the P.R. war – in the front where it really matters, inside Russia, it’s a major fail.

Public opinion support for both Operation Z and President Putin is unprecedented. After videos of torture of Russian POWs that caused widespread revulsion, Russian civil society is even bracing for a “Long War” lasting months, not weeks, as long as the targets of the Russian High Command – actually a military secret – are met.

The stated aims are “demilitarization” and “denazification” of a future neutral Ukraine – but geopolitically reach way beyond: the aim is to turn the post-1945 European collective security arrangement upside down, forcing NATO to understand and come to terms with the concept of “indivisible security”. This is an extremely complex process that will reach the next decade.

The NATOstan sphere simply cannot admit in public a series of facts that a military analyst of the caliber of Andrei Martyanov has been explaining for years. And that adds to their collective pain.

Russia can take on NATO and smash it to bits in 48 hours. It may employ advanced strategic deterrence systems unmatched across the West. Its southern axis – from the Caucasus and West Asia to Central Asia – is fully stabilized. And if the going gets really tough, Mr. Zircon can deliver his hypersonic nuclear business card with the other side not even knowing what hit it.

“Europe has chosen its fate”

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>>16042660

''-“Europe has chosen its fate”-''

It may be enlightening to see how these complex processes are interpreted by Russians – whose points of view are now completely blocked across NATOstan.

Let’s take two examples. The first is Lieutenant General L.P. Reshetnikov, in an analytical note examining facts of the ground war.

Some key takeaways:

– “Over Romania and Poland there are airborne early warning aircraft of NATO with experienced crews, there are U.S. intelligence satellites in the sky all the time. I remind you that just in terms of budgets for our Roscosmos we allocated $2.5 billion a year, the civil budget of NASA is $25 billion, the civil budget of SpaceX alone is equal to Roscosmos – and that is not counting the tens of billions of dollars annually for the entire U.S. feverishly unfolding the control system of the entire planet.”

– The war is unfolding according to “NATO’s eyes and brains. The Ukronazis are nothing but free controlled zombies. And the Ukrainian army is a remotely controlled zombie organism.”

– “The tactics and strategy of this war will be the subject of textbooks for military academies around the world. Once again: the Russian army is smashing a Nazi zombie organism, fully integrated with the eyes and brain of NATO.”

Now let’s switch to Oleg Makarenko, who focuses on the Big Picture.

– “The West considers itself ‘the whole world’ only because it has not yet received a sufficiently sensitive punch on the nose. It just so happened that Russia is now giving him this click: with the rear support of Asia, Africa and Latin America. And the West can do absolutely nothing with us, since it also lags behind us in terms of the number of nuclear warheads.”

– “Europe has chosen its fate. And chose fate for Russia. What you are seeing now is the death of Europe. Even if it does not come to nuclear strikes on industrial centers, Europe is doomed. In a situation where European industry is left without cheap Russian energy sources and raw materials – and China will begin to receive these same energy carriers and raw materials at a discount, there can be no talk of any real competition with China from Europe. As a result, literally everything will collapse there – after industry, agriculture will collapse, welfare and social security will collapse, hunger, banditry and chaos will begin.”

It’s fair to consider Reshetnikov and Makarenko as faithfully representing the overall Russian sentiment, which interprets the crude Bucha false flag as a cover to obscure the Ukrainian army torture of Russian POWs.

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And, deeper still, Bucha allowed the disappearance of Pentagon bioweapon labs from the Western mediasphere, complete with its ramifications: evidence of a concerted American drive to ultimately deploy real weapons of mass destruction against Russia.

The multi-level Bucha hoax had to include the Brit presidency of the UN Security Council actually blocking a serious discussion, a day before the Russian Ministry of Defense struggled to present to the UN – predictably minus the U.S. and the UK – all the bioweapon facts they have unearthed in Ukraine. The Chinese were horrified by the findings.

The Russian Investigative Committee at least persists in its work, with 100 researchers unearthing evidence of war crimes across Donbass to be presented at a tribunal in the near future, most probably set up in Donetsk.

And that brings us back to the facts on the ground. There’s a lot of analytical discussion on the possible endgame of Operation Z. A fair assessment would include the liberation of all of Novorossiya and total control of the Black Sea coastline that currently is part of Ukraine.

“Ukraine” in fact was never a state; it was always an annex to another state or empire such as Poland, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and crucially Russia.

The landmark Russian state was Kievan Rus. “Ukraine”, in old Russian, means “border region”. In the past, it referred to the westernmost regions of the Russian Empire. When the Empire started expanding south, the new regions annexed mostly from Turkish rule were called Novorossiya (“New Russia”) and the northeastern regions, Malorossiya (“Little Russia”).

It was up to the USSR in the early 1920s to jumble it all together and name it “Ukraine” – adding Galicia in the west, which was historically non-Russian.

Yet the key development is when the USSR broke up in 1991. As the Empire of Lies de facto controlled post-Soviet Russia, they could never have possibly allowed the real Russian regions of the USSR – that is, Novorossiya and Malorossiya – to be again incorporated to the Russian Federation.

Russia is now re-incorporating them – in an “I Did It, My Way” manner.

Vamos a bailar in European Puerto Rico

By now it’s also quite clear to any serious geopolitical analysis that Operation Z opened a Pandora’s box. And the supreme historical victim of all the toxicity finally let loose is bound to be Europe.

The indispensable Michael Hudson, in a new essay on the U.S. dollar devouring the euro, argues half in jest that Europe might as well surrender its currency, and go on like “a somewhat larger version of Puerto Rico.”

After all, Europe “has pretty much ceased to be a politically independent state, it is beginning to look more like Panama and Liberia – ‘flag of convenience’ offshore banking centers that are not real ‘states’ because they don’t issue their own currency, but use the U.S. dollar.”

In synch with quite a few Russian, Chinese and Iranian analysts, Hudson advances that the war in Ukraine – actually in its “full-blown version as the New Cold War” – is likely to last “at least a decade, perhaps two as the U.S. extends the fight between neoliberalism and socialism [meaning the Chinese system] to encompass a worldwide conflict.”

What may be seriously in dispute is whether the U.S., after “the economic conquest of Europe”, will be able to “lock in African, South American and Asian countries”. The Eurasia integration process, rolling in earnest for 10 years now, conducted by the Russia-China strategic partnership and expanding to most of the Global South, will go no holds barred to prevent it.

There’s no question, as Hudson states, that “the world economy is being enflamed” – with the U.S. weaponizing trade. Yet on the Right Side of History we have the Rublegas, the petroyuan, the new monetary/financial system being designed in a partnership between the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China.

And that’s something no puny Cancel Culture War can erase.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglehart%E2%80%93Welzel_cultural_map_of_the_world

The Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world is a scatter plot created by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel based on the World Values Survey and European Values Survey.[2] It depicts closely linked cultural values that vary between societies in two predominant dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values on the vertical y-axis and survival versus self-expression values on the horizontal x-axis. Moving upward on this map reflects the shift from traditional values to secular-rational ones and moving rightward reflects the shift from survival values to self-expression values.

According to the authors: "These two dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten indicators—and each of these dimensions is strongly correlated with scores of other important orientations."[3][4]

The authors stress that socio-economic status is not the sole factor determining a country's location, as their religious and cultural historical heritage is also an important factor.[5]

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Values

Analysis of the World Values Survey data by Inglehart and Welzel asserts that there are two major dimensions of cross-cultural variation in the world:

x-axis: Survival values versus self-expression values

y-axis: Traditional values versus secular-rational values.[3]

The map is a chart in which countries are positioned based on their scores for the two values mapped on the x-axis (survival values versus self-expression values) and the y-axis (traditional values versus secular-rational values).[3] The map shows where societies are located in these two dimensions. Clusters of countries reflect their shared values and not geographical closeness.[3]

Traditional values emphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority, absolute standards and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. Societies that embrace these values have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.[3]

Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. Societies that embrace these values place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable.[3]

The shift from traditional to secular-rational values has been described by Engelbrekt and Nygren as "essentially the replacement of religion and superstition with science and bureaucracy as the basis of behaviour and authority relations in a society".[5]

Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security.[3] They are linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.

Self-expression values give high priority to subjective well-being, self-expression and quality of life.[3] Some values more common in societies that embrace these values include environmental protection, growing tolerance of foreigners, gays and lesbians and gender equality, rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life (autonomy and freedom from central authority), interpersonal trust, political moderation, and a shift in child-rearing values from emphasis on hard work toward imagination and tolerance.[3]

The shift from survival to self-expression also represents the transition from industrial society to post-industrial society, as well as embracing democratic values.[3][6]

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Clusters

A 2017 version of the map had countries divided into nine clusters: the English-speaking, Latin America, Catholic Europe, Protestant Europe, African-Islamic, Baltic, South Asian, Orthodox and Confucian clusters.[1] In previous studies, the African-Islamic cluster was split into two (the African cluster and the Islamic cluster) and the Baltic states did not have their own cluster.[7]

Another proposed way to cluster the societies is by material wealth, with the poorer societies at the bottom of both axes, and richer at the top.[8]

Country-specific analysis

Out of Western world countries, the United States is among the most conservative (as one of the most downwards-located countries), together with highly conservative Catholic countries such as Ireland and Poland.[9] Simoni concludes that "On the traditional/secular dimension, the United States ranks far below other rich societies, with levels of religiosity and national pride comparable with those found in some developing societies."[6]

Asian societies are distributed in the traditional/secular dimension in two clusters, with more secular Confucian societies at the top, and more traditional South Asian ones at the center of the map.[10]

Russia is among the most survival-value oriented countries, and at the other end, Sweden ranks highest on the self-expression chart.[5]

It has also been found that basic cultural values overwhelmingly apply on national lines, with cross-border intermixtures being relatively rare. This is true even between countries with shared cultural histories. Additionally, even cultural clusters of countries do not intermix much across borders. This suggests nations are culturally meaningful units.[11]

History

The map is updated and modified regularly along with the new waves of data from the World Values Survey. The different versions are available at the website of the World Values Survey.[12]

An early version of the map was published by Ronald Inglehart in 1997 with the dimensions named "Traditional vs. Secular-Rational Authority" and "Survival vs. Well-being".[13]

Inglehart and Welzel revised this map in 2005 and named the dimensions "Traditional vs. Secular-Rational Values" and "Survival vs. Self-expression Values".[8] This map and its various updates are generally referred to as the Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map.

Welzel published a quite different map in 2013 with two closely related dimensions named "Emancipative Values" and "Secular Values", where Emancipative Values provide the main variable behind his theory of human empowerment.[14]

Other cultural maps have been published by Shalom Schwartz,[15] Michael Minkov,[16] and by Stankov, Lee and Vijver.[17]

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https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp?CMSID=Findings

WVS Database

worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp

Findings and Insights

Home › Findings & Insights

The WVS has over the years demonstrated that people’s beliefs play a key role in economic development, the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions, the rise of gender equality, and the extent to which societies have effective government. Some of the key findings of the work are described below.

Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map

The map presents empirical evidence of massive cultural change and the persistence of distinctive cultural traditions. Main thesis holds that socioeconomic development is linked with a broad syndrome of distinctive value orientations. Analysis of WVS data made by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel asserts that there are two major dimensions of cross cultural variation in the world:

1) Traditional values versus Secular-rational values and

2) Survival values versus Self-expression values.

Traditional values emphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.

Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. These societies place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable. (Suicide is not necessarily more common.)

Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. It is linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.

Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, growing tolerance of foreigners, gays and lesbians and gender equality, and rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life.

The two dimensions have been created by running factor analysis over a set of ten indicators. The ten indicators used (five to tap each dimension) were chosen for technical reasons: in order to be able to compare findings across time, we used indicators that had been included in all four waves of the Values Surveys. These ten indicators reflect only a handful of the many beliefs and values that these two dimensions tap, and they are not necessarily the most sensitive indicators of these dimensions. They do a good job of tapping two extremely important dimensions of cross-cultural variation, but we should bear in mind that these specific items are only indicators of much broader underlying dimensions of cross-cultural variation [Source: Chapter 2 from Inglehart, R & C. Welzel. 2005. Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence. New York: Cambridge University Press].

The global cultural map (below) shows how scores of societies are located on these two dimensions.

Moving upward on this map reflects the shift from Traditional values to Secular-rational and moving rightward reflects the shift from Survival values to Self-expression values. A somewhat simplified analysis is that following an increase in standards of living, and a transit from development country via industrialization to post-industrial knowledge society, a country tends to move diagonally in the direction from lower-left corner (poor) to upper-right corner (rich), indicating a transit in both dimensions.

However, the attitudes among the population are also highly correlated with the philosophical, political and religious ideas that have been dominating in the country. Secular-rational values and materialism were formulated by philosophers and the left-wing politics side in the French revolution, and can consequenlty be observed especially in countries with a long history of social democratic or socialistic policy, and in countries where a large portion of the population have studied philisophy and science at universities. Survival values are characteristic for eastern-world countries and self-expression values for western-world countries. In a liberal post-industrial economy, an increasing share of the population has grown up taking survival and freedom of thought for granted, resulting in that self-expression is highly valued.

Two Acquitted in Whitmer Case, FBI Misconduct Central

amgreatness.com/2022/04/08/two-acquitted-in-whitmer-case-fbi-misconduct-central

''In a huge defeat for the U.S. Department of Justice, a jury today acquitted two men accused of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the fall of 2020.''

By Julie Kelly April 8, 2022

In a huge defeat for the U.S. Department of Justice, a jury today acquitted two men accused of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the fall of 2020 and deadlocked on a verdict for two other defendants. The verdicts were announced at the Gerald R. Ford Federal Building in Grand Rapids after more than four days of deliberations; jurors heard 13 days of testimony in a case the government considered one of its biggest domestic terrorism investigations ever.

Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta of Michigan were found not guilty of conspiring “to unlawfully seize, confine, kidnap, abduct and carry away, and hold for ransom and reward, or otherwise, the Governor of the State of Michigan.” Jurors could not reach a unanimous decision for Adam Fox, the alleged ringleader, and Barry Croft, Jr., resulting in a mistrial.

Harris was also found not guilty on charges of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction for allegedly attempting to build an explosive device to use in the abduction scheme and other firearms charges.

Jurors this morning notified Chief U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jonker that they had reached a verdict on several charges but were deadlocked on others. Jonker urged the jury of six men and six women to continue deliberating under a soft “Allen charge,” which instructs jurors to keep pushing for a unanimous verdict but they later notified Jonker the outcome was the same.

Defense attorneys had argued—successfully, it would appear—that their clients were entrapped by the FBI; at least a dozen FBI confidential human sources and undercover agents working out of numerous FBI field offices were deeply embedded in the plot.

Jonker ruled before the trial began on March 8 that defense counsel could not raise the entrapment issue until the government rested its case, but that plan was quickly scuttled when it became obvious the four defense attorneys were unable effectively to represent their clients without demonstrating the FBI’s extensive involvement. To prove entrapment, the defense had to convince the jury that the government induced the criminal behavior and the defendants lacked predisposition to carry out the kidnapping conspiracy on their own.

Against the objections of prosecutors, Jonker notified the jury last Friday they could consider entrapment. Jonker advised jurors to ask themselves whether “the agent or informant persuade[d] the defendant who is not already willing to commit a crime to do something illegal?”

A roster of FBI agents and experts took the stand during the three-week trial, which was temporarily delayed due to one participant’s COVID diagnosis; Dan Chappel, the lead informant and government’s star witness known as “Big Dan,” explained how he brought the makeshift group of alleged “militia” members together after he was hired by the FBI in March 2020. Chappel created encrypted chat groups and organized excursions for field training and surveillance of Whitmer’s cottage. (He, along with other FBI informants, posed as leaders of two “militia” groups, at least one of which was created by the FBI.)

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For his work over a six-month period, Chappel, a truck driver for a U.S. Postal Service subcontractor, was compensated at least $60,000 by the FBI in cash and gifts such as a new laptop, tires, and a smart watch.

Prosecutors mostly relied on conversations secretly recorded by FBI assets as evidence of wrongdoing; two men charged in the same indictment had pleaded guilty and testified for the government in exchange for lighter prison sentences.

Jurors heard defendants make inflammatory, and on some occasions, violent comments about the Democratic governor, who is up for re-election this year. Foxl lived at the time in the dilapidated cellar of a Grand Rapids vacuum repair shop with no running water or toilet; Chappel texted Fox at least 1,000 times between June and early October, cultivating a close relationship with the otherwise friendless and sparsely-employed outcast. On at least five occasions, Chappel offered Fox a $5,000 credit card, which Fox repeatedly refused.

In his closing remarks last Friday, assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler dismissed defense arguments that the evidence merely amounted to “crazy talk” by disgruntled misfits high on marijuana. “In America, there’s a lot of things you can do. You can criticize the government publicly, absolutely,” Kessler told jurors. “If you don’t like elected leaders, you can vote them out at the ballot box. What you can’t do is kidnap them, kill them, or blow them up. It wasn’t just talk.”

But defense attorneys angrily condemned the FBI’s sting operation. “When I look at what happened in this case, I am ashamed of the behavior of the leading law enforcement agency in the United States,” Joshua Blanchard, Croft’s public defender, said during his closing argument. Christopher Gibbons, Fox’s public defender, called the government’s conduct “unacceptable in America. That’s not how it works. They don’t make terrorists so we can arrest them.”

The case produced damaging headlines for Donald Trump in October 2020 just as millions of Americans were already voting for president, including in the crucial swing state of Michigan. During a dramatic speech on October 8, 2020, Whitmer blamed Trump for “stoking distrust, fomenting anger, and giving comfort to those who spread fear and hatred” and for refusing to condemn “hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups.” Joe Biden accused Trump of sending “dog whistles” to white supremacist militias, later telling reporters it was “despicable” and “beneath the office of the presidency” that Trump allegedly encouraged the would-be kidnappers.

Biden also thanked the FBI for a job well done—but the agency has been mired in scandal related to the case ever since. Richard Trask, the special agent in charge at the Detroit FBI field office, was fired last summer after he was arrested for assaulting his wife in a drunken rage following a swingers party. Reporters also found anti-Trump sentiment on Trask’s Facebook page.

Two other FBI agents who handled Chappel were removed from the government’s witness list amid accusations of unethical conduct. Stephen Robeson, a longtime FBI informant and convicted felon, also was fired for committing at least two other crimes while working on the Whitmer investigation. Known to the defendants as “Steve,” Robeson coordinated numerous events including a militia conference in Dublin, Ohio in June 2020 and training exercises in his home state of Wisconsin. After the government accused him of acting as a “double agent” and Robeson threatened to plead the Fifth, Judge Jonker denied defense counsel’s motion to compel his testimony.

Harris and Caserta, who have been incarcerated since their arrests in October 2020, were released from custody. Fox and Croft will remain in prison as the government decides its next move.

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>>16042792

>can you provide a bun, anon?

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>>16042773

https://twitter.com/monicag0321/status/1512844204539490307

Which one of you men showing off prompted this warning?

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