"In fact, knowing these cowards and criminals, the war in Ukraine might have been instigated to facilitate the money laundering and/or to cover up evidence of past corruption."
If only that were the case. Until I read Aleksandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics in March of 2022, I would have thought that that was true - money laundering and hush money from US oligarchs to Ukrainian oligarchs. But Dugin, in 1997, laid out a long term plan which culminated in the extinction of the Atlanticists and the Anaconda - NATO and the US. Russian is a hard language to slog through, I had to learn at least the rudiments of it in the course of my studies for a PhD in synthetic heterocyclic chemistry, because so much of the research in that field was done in Russia - and published in Russian. It seems that very few Americans in any position of power - even in the "intelligence community" had bothered themselves with learning that language or at least gaining a reading knowledge of it - and of course the media are entirely ignorant of it and Dugin. I've been harping on this on my Substack since April 2022. Of course, no decent translation of this work exists in English - the machine-translated works are garbage. It's frustrating to deal with this, because what was laid out in it was a long term plan which Putin has followed since 2007, starting in Chechnya. To save typing, I'm going to cite some excerpts from a Brookings paper , and then give a reference to a 18 page review done in 2004 at Stanford. It's a lot of reading, but at least it's in English. Both of these sources will explain a lot - and why the American political and media establishments - and the "intelligence community" - haven't figured this out is a mystery.
First, the Brookings paper: "A single book, written in 1997, signalled every significant foreign policy move of the Russian Federation over the following two decades. The United States, Europe, and every nation intertwined with Russia failed to see the signs. From the annexation of Crimea to Britain’s exit from the European Union, the grand strategy laid out in Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundation of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia has unfolded beautifully in a disastrous manner for the western rules-based international order. Perhaps, his words also telegraph the belligerent Putin’s future intentions. ...Having been in power for over two decades raises the question of what his strategy is. There are two dominant views regarding this question. The first is that Putin plans with the long-game in mind, seeking to weaken America’s ties to Europe, dissolve the European Union, and break apart the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The other is that Putin acts mostly as a reactionary, solving problems in isolation and attempting to preserve Russia’s position on the world stage.
One man has alluded heavily to the former. Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin is a Russian political theorist with controversial views and ideas. He is a contributing author to the Katehon think tank, which the New York Times accuses of pushing Russian propaganda through fake news-media sites. His website operates in 38 languages and displays far-right ideas recognizable in Russian domestic politics. Dugin has planned courses for the Russian military General Staff Academy, stood as a Department Head at Moscow State University, and been featured prominently on both Russian state-run media and conservative media with close ties to the Russian government. Journalists, albeit western ones, have called him “Putin’s Brain” and “Putin’s Favorite Philosopher.” The accolades go on.
Dugin presents the world order as one of the Tellurocracies (Land Powers) versus the Thalassocracies (Sea Powers)—of Eurasia versus the Atlanticists. The Atlanticists, Dugin claims, are the United States, Britain, and Europe, and they seek to dominate the world through NATO and other international institutions. In the socio-political spectrum, Dugin is a traditionalist, a fascist, and an anti-Semite. In the geopolitical realm, he is an aggressive Russian nationalist. Most telling, however, is how many of his earlier strategies and destructive stratagems have come to fruition."
"Far Right" in Russia is what we know as Stalinist Communism. Dugin's website is Strategic Culture.org, which has been censored from the US internet ("This site can’t be reached strategic-culture.org’s DNS address could not be found. Diagnosing the problem. DNS_PROBE_POSSIBLE")
Ignorance is very definitely not bliss, it leads to bad information and bad decisions and bad policy.
More from Brookings: "Suffice it to say that two of Russia’s most controversial moves this century have been the 2008 invasion of Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Dugin addressed the problems of both Georgia and Ukraine in back-to-back subchapters. According to him, Russia needed the Black Sea coast-line for both trade and as a naval base of operations so that the “northern coast of the Black Sea [could] be exclusively Eurasian and centrally subordinate to Moscow.”[1]
Dugin’s stratagems rely on exploiting ethnic rifts all over the world. He specifically mentions in his Caucasus chapter the Abkhazians, the Ossetian Problem, and the need to control the Caucasus from Volgograd to Armenia. He claimed Armenia, with its ethnic ties to Tehran, was an essential ally in the prevention of Turkish expansion. Let us recall the outcome of the Russo-Georgian war. No other nation recognized Abkhazia at the time as sovereign. With Russia’s help, Abkhazia finally enforced its secession from Georgia and took half of its Black Sea coastline with it. Today, South Ossetia remains heavily occupied by Russian forces, despite not being recognized as sovereign on the international stage. Putin did, however, learn lessons of subtlety in the Georgian conflict. Maskirovka, the Russian military philosophy of deception, became a vital element of the ongoing Ukrainian conflict to avoid timely international backlash. Dugin’s ideas of scapegoating and exploiting ethno-political rifts neatly align with this purely military philosophy.
Dugin grew in relative fame after the Ukraine conflict began, as this was his most efficacious recommendation. As he explained, “Ukraine, as an independent state with some territorial ambitions, poses a huge danger to the whole of Eurasia, and without solving the Ukrainian problem, it makes no sense to talk about continental geopolitics.”[2] The Crimean Peninsula has been home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet and a major military hub since 1997. Ukraine is also a significant economic hub on land, as a majority of Russia’s natural gas exports travel through it. This is an important factor in Dugin’s idea of stripping Europe’s energy dependence away from third-world energy reserves controlled by the Atlanticists.[3] ... Russia’s political and economic hold on Ukraine had dwindled over time from the fall of the Soviet Union to the late 2000s. In response, Putin supported Viktor Yanukovych for election. The first time Yanukovych ran for President in 2004, there were several re-votes, his pro-western opponent suffered dioxin poisoning, and citizens took to the streets in the so-called Orange Revolution. Yanukovych finally took power in 2010 before he reversed two decades of pro-western policy. In 2013, Yanukovych backed out of an EU-Ukraine summit and immediately met pivotal protests. He fled to Russia, and Mr. Putin seized the opportunity to exploit unrest. Professional soldiers of Russia in unmarked uniforms, known in the West as “Little Green Men,” stormed naval bases and facilities in Crimea. Shortly thereafter, a proxy war began in the Donbas region, which would have given Russia a land bridge to the peninsula. It was not until December of 2019 that Russia opened a rail bridge crossing the Kerch Strait." https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/5/28/putins-playbook-reviewing-dugins-foundations-of-geopolitics
Its not just here in the US where a loose thread has been pulled that will result in a total unraveling of a society and belief system we all once thought to be inviolate. The entire globe is a boiling cauldron. Nothing is occurring by happenstance. Powerful men in governments around the world believe it is them making the decisions. But they are just the tools being used by unseen hands. Events have been moving towards a crescendo, and foretold to any willing to listen, for millennia. The di was cast long ago and nothing is going to change the outcome... no votes, no revolutions, no nothing. In fact, it all works toward the end goal even if we think we act independently. Anyway, thats my belief. It is in no way a surrender. I'll fight and claw until my last breath. I just see the road for what it is and seek devine help and protection in traveling it.
Its now Monday evening. The killing between Israel and Hamas has been on-going now for two days. Its disappointing but not surprising that people the world over quickly aligned with one side or the other without pausing just a little bit to consider why this is happening and why now. Its like viewing the world through one of those cardboard tubes in the middle of a roll of TP. There is much more to see if you remove the tube! There was no intelligence failure. Please! Mossad knew. The Egyptians even warned them. My point is, don't become myopic on just one segment of interest to you and ignore the big picture. Its all related, and it will come home to us soon enough.
"In fact, knowing these cowards and criminals, the war in Ukraine might have been instigated to facilitate the money laundering and/or to cover up evidence of past corruption."
If only that were the case. Until I read Aleksandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics in March of 2022, I would have thought that that was true - money laundering and hush money from US oligarchs to Ukrainian oligarchs. But Dugin, in 1997, laid out a long term plan which culminated in the extinction of the Atlanticists and the Anaconda - NATO and the US. Russian is a hard language to slog through, I had to learn at least the rudiments of it in the course of my studies for a PhD in synthetic heterocyclic chemistry, because so much of the research in that field was done in Russia - and published in Russian. It seems that very few Americans in any position of power - even in the "intelligence community" had bothered themselves with learning that language or at least gaining a reading knowledge of it - and of course the media are entirely ignorant of it and Dugin. I've been harping on this on my Substack since April 2022. Of course, no decent translation of this work exists in English - the machine-translated works are garbage. It's frustrating to deal with this, because what was laid out in it was a long term plan which Putin has followed since 2007, starting in Chechnya. To save typing, I'm going to cite some excerpts from a Brookings paper , and then give a reference to a 18 page review done in 2004 at Stanford. It's a lot of reading, but at least it's in English. Both of these sources will explain a lot - and why the American political and media establishments - and the "intelligence community" - haven't figured this out is a mystery.
First, the Brookings paper: "A single book, written in 1997, signalled every significant foreign policy move of the Russian Federation over the following two decades. The United States, Europe, and every nation intertwined with Russia failed to see the signs. From the annexation of Crimea to Britain’s exit from the European Union, the grand strategy laid out in Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundation of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia has unfolded beautifully in a disastrous manner for the western rules-based international order. Perhaps, his words also telegraph the belligerent Putin’s future intentions. ...Having been in power for over two decades raises the question of what his strategy is. There are two dominant views regarding this question. The first is that Putin plans with the long-game in mind, seeking to weaken America’s ties to Europe, dissolve the European Union, and break apart the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The other is that Putin acts mostly as a reactionary, solving problems in isolation and attempting to preserve Russia’s position on the world stage.
One man has alluded heavily to the former. Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin is a Russian political theorist with controversial views and ideas. He is a contributing author to the Katehon think tank, which the New York Times accuses of pushing Russian propaganda through fake news-media sites. His website operates in 38 languages and displays far-right ideas recognizable in Russian domestic politics. Dugin has planned courses for the Russian military General Staff Academy, stood as a Department Head at Moscow State University, and been featured prominently on both Russian state-run media and conservative media with close ties to the Russian government. Journalists, albeit western ones, have called him “Putin’s Brain” and “Putin’s Favorite Philosopher.” The accolades go on.
Dugin presents the world order as one of the Tellurocracies (Land Powers) versus the Thalassocracies (Sea Powers)—of Eurasia versus the Atlanticists. The Atlanticists, Dugin claims, are the United States, Britain, and Europe, and they seek to dominate the world through NATO and other international institutions. In the socio-political spectrum, Dugin is a traditionalist, a fascist, and an anti-Semite. In the geopolitical realm, he is an aggressive Russian nationalist. Most telling, however, is how many of his earlier strategies and destructive stratagems have come to fruition."
"Far Right" in Russia is what we know as Stalinist Communism. Dugin's website is Strategic Culture.org, which has been censored from the US internet ("This site can’t be reached strategic-culture.org’s DNS address could not be found. Diagnosing the problem. DNS_PROBE_POSSIBLE")
Ignorance is very definitely not bliss, it leads to bad information and bad decisions and bad policy.
More from Brookings: "Suffice it to say that two of Russia’s most controversial moves this century have been the 2008 invasion of Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Dugin addressed the problems of both Georgia and Ukraine in back-to-back subchapters. According to him, Russia needed the Black Sea coast-line for both trade and as a naval base of operations so that the “northern coast of the Black Sea [could] be exclusively Eurasian and centrally subordinate to Moscow.”[1]
Dugin’s stratagems rely on exploiting ethnic rifts all over the world. He specifically mentions in his Caucasus chapter the Abkhazians, the Ossetian Problem, and the need to control the Caucasus from Volgograd to Armenia. He claimed Armenia, with its ethnic ties to Tehran, was an essential ally in the prevention of Turkish expansion. Let us recall the outcome of the Russo-Georgian war. No other nation recognized Abkhazia at the time as sovereign. With Russia’s help, Abkhazia finally enforced its secession from Georgia and took half of its Black Sea coastline with it. Today, South Ossetia remains heavily occupied by Russian forces, despite not being recognized as sovereign on the international stage. Putin did, however, learn lessons of subtlety in the Georgian conflict. Maskirovka, the Russian military philosophy of deception, became a vital element of the ongoing Ukrainian conflict to avoid timely international backlash. Dugin’s ideas of scapegoating and exploiting ethno-political rifts neatly align with this purely military philosophy.
Dugin grew in relative fame after the Ukraine conflict began, as this was his most efficacious recommendation. As he explained, “Ukraine, as an independent state with some territorial ambitions, poses a huge danger to the whole of Eurasia, and without solving the Ukrainian problem, it makes no sense to talk about continental geopolitics.”[2] The Crimean Peninsula has been home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet and a major military hub since 1997. Ukraine is also a significant economic hub on land, as a majority of Russia’s natural gas exports travel through it. This is an important factor in Dugin’s idea of stripping Europe’s energy dependence away from third-world energy reserves controlled by the Atlanticists.[3] ... Russia’s political and economic hold on Ukraine had dwindled over time from the fall of the Soviet Union to the late 2000s. In response, Putin supported Viktor Yanukovych for election. The first time Yanukovych ran for President in 2004, there were several re-votes, his pro-western opponent suffered dioxin poisoning, and citizens took to the streets in the so-called Orange Revolution. Yanukovych finally took power in 2010 before he reversed two decades of pro-western policy. In 2013, Yanukovych backed out of an EU-Ukraine summit and immediately met pivotal protests. He fled to Russia, and Mr. Putin seized the opportunity to exploit unrest. Professional soldiers of Russia in unmarked uniforms, known in the West as “Little Green Men,” stormed naval bases and facilities in Crimea. Shortly thereafter, a proxy war began in the Donbas region, which would have given Russia a land bridge to the peninsula. It was not until December of 2019 that Russia opened a rail bridge crossing the Kerch Strait." https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/5/28/putins-playbook-reviewing-dugins-foundations-of-geopolitics
And the article goes on, although not as much as the Stanford 2004 article by John Dunlop - here: https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics - which is well worth reading, for nearly 20 years ago, it is prescient about current events.
When the ball drops I fear many of our own countrymen will betray us to our enemies.
20 years ago Vince Flynn wrote a novel titled Term Limits.
Not pretty, but his scenario will have to happen before the ruling class gets the message.
T L has a good grasp of these times and the history that led us here
Its not just here in the US where a loose thread has been pulled that will result in a total unraveling of a society and belief system we all once thought to be inviolate. The entire globe is a boiling cauldron. Nothing is occurring by happenstance. Powerful men in governments around the world believe it is them making the decisions. But they are just the tools being used by unseen hands. Events have been moving towards a crescendo, and foretold to any willing to listen, for millennia. The di was cast long ago and nothing is going to change the outcome... no votes, no revolutions, no nothing. In fact, it all works toward the end goal even if we think we act independently. Anyway, thats my belief. It is in no way a surrender. I'll fight and claw until my last breath. I just see the road for what it is and seek devine help and protection in traveling it.
Its now Monday evening. The killing between Israel and Hamas has been on-going now for two days. Its disappointing but not surprising that people the world over quickly aligned with one side or the other without pausing just a little bit to consider why this is happening and why now. Its like viewing the world through one of those cardboard tubes in the middle of a roll of TP. There is much more to see if you remove the tube! There was no intelligence failure. Please! Mossad knew. The Egyptians even warned them. My point is, don't become myopic on just one segment of interest to you and ignore the big picture. Its all related, and it will come home to us soon enough.