As I have rather miserable hay fever, this will be a short post, but I wanted to comment at least indirectly about the Wagner PMC mutiny in Russia and its sudden resolution. My own best tentative interpretation you can find here. It’s not worth very much, as there are better sources you can go to for the war, but I wanted to speak briefly to the idea that what happened was some kind of psyop – a deliberately staged putsch to further the purposes of Russian politics or strategy. In this conception, the aim was to create a pretence for repositioning Wagner forces near Kiev, or to smoke out hidden traitors, or perhaps something else.
You’re actually hitting on the main problem with all conspiracy theories, namely that people are rarely that smart or prescient, and when two or more get together, their incompetence blossoms far faster than their deviousness. All the more so these days, when political performance all over the world has become as authentic as a Disney cartoon.
I'll tell you what's the most dangerous situation is when people are participating in small actions that brush with evil, but don't breach it, and think they are doing "good"., i.e., the way children were treated during covid...in particular with the masks...or with the depravity being normalized at school.
This can be applied to myriad situations, because this type of evil has a long arc and is not easily detected by normal people...until sometimes too late to recognizes its evil in the aggregate.
IMO, there is no reason evil and incompetence can't coexist.
In fact evil can and has emerged as a byproduct of systems/organizations self-arranged by unthinking utter incompetence.
The depravity in schools definitely crosses the line of evil, but, yes, the well-meaning busybodies who need to fuss with other people's lives create a great deal of harm.
It may not be evil, but it does cross the threshold of where people have the right to make their own decisions. The fact that this do-goodiness was to assuage their own fears makes it much worse.
I agree about evil and incompetence. In fact, evil is often incompetent. One fallout of these two going together is that from the outside it can look like all the chaos we've been seeing was planned. I think ordered people look for order even in chaos (like these last three years). And so we came up with a lot of theories that it must have all been a concerted effort because there was no other justification for all the damage being done. It may have been mostly a lot of evil incompetence.
Conspiracies get treated like they are rare occurrences. They aren’t all that exotic. They are hatched all the time for different objectives. Everything you say is true, but sometimes there is a plan. It may be messy, and there are always ways in which a plan goes sideways, but when things like COVID happen with tremendous coordination and all kinds of clearly evident forethought, it’s not just a bunch of hippies in a drum circle spreading peace and love.
You have to look at who is involved. The people like Fauci and Birx and other top level federal administrators, including btw theFDA, CDC, CIA, DoD and State Department are a different breed of cat. These people are scheming every day as part of their jobs. They are powerful people in powerful agencies and they know how to manipulate, slit the metaphorical throats, and hide the metaphorical bodies. They are doing power plays all the time.
These aren’t 3 buddies from Home Depot planning a barbecue.
A behemoth organization that is inefficient and corrupt on the average by no means rules out the existence of one, perhaps several, elite groups that are highly effective, self-contained, ruthless, and not accountable to anyone.
In fact, it all but guarantees the existence of such groups, doesn't it? These are massive, inefficient, corrupt and incompetent blobs of opaque and unaccountable bureaucracy, corporatism, and exhibitionist political whores that collectively wield enormous power. Very easy for small, well-organized groups to navigate and manipulate.
I only question how reliable their effectiveness is. I think there are several such entities, but how far and wide they reach may have been overestimated by people who tend to live ordered lives.
Means, motive, and opportunity. They had all 3 in spades, and then there's the Warren Report, which tries to rationalize a lot of inconvenient facts that point directly to Christians In Action.
In his near 50 years in Congress, Biden was generally thought of as a somewhat low intelligence doofus and not taken all that seriously. A blowhard with no talent, and a liar. If he actually were smart and scheming, I doubt he could have played the idiot role so successfully for 50 years. He's a not-so-smart incompetent boob who loves the limelight and playing the role in his aviator glasses, but all that made him a useful idiot to be manipulated at a particular point in time. He was useful to those really in charge as a means to oust Trump, but increasingly he less useful now. They'll figure out a means to get him out of the way for the next election.
This heuristic creates moral hazard. Let's say I am a business owner who is known to believe your rule of thumb. An employee might be emboldened to steal precisely because they're confident that I'll never suspect criminality and would readily believe it's "an accounting error" if caught.
Obviously, rogue government agencies, or small factions within them, can benefit from the same calculus. I believe the Pentagon just "lost" another $6.3B in Ukraine. Well shucks!
Agreed generally, but quite a bit of truly sinister flourishes only because there is so much stupidity and incompetence available to provide cover for it.
Why humiliated? He came out of it pretty well and his position much strengthened. He was no more humiliated than De Gaule was by the army mutiny in 1962.
I'm sure the people who died from those rather elaborate poisoning techniques did not think it was cartoonish. Probably more likely he might actually die from friendly fire.
Occam's Razor, applied to putsches, would suggest that it is what it looks like --- and Yevgeny misperceived the existential reality and decided discretion was the better part of valor. However ... that still does not obviate the likelihood that within a year Vlad may be replaced as MFWIC of Russia, likely to be supplanted by a more reactionary oligarch who would be more inclined to stick a nuke up NATO's ass rather than take any more crap from the West. There are some real hard-liners back behind the red curtain, real wild-cards who won't put up with all the Neocon crap. There's only so much poking that the Bear will put up with before he bites someone's arm off. There's some really bad mojo coming by 2025...
Well either way, if this Ukraine thing had not happened then by 2025 everyone would have received the death jabs or be interred in refusenik camps. Remember.. that was the plan of the phoney pandemic creators and I know that not one organization, government, churches, groups, civil rights, or human rights organizations would have intervened. But the events in the Ukraine stopped that in its tracks. All of a sudden not an official word on that matter, no more talk of saving grandma yada, yada, yada.
I have to thank Putin for that.
I think there will be many many more revelations and more deaths and injuries revealed caused by these vile injections, including sterility and shortened life spans. So the longer we have to let this come out on the surface the better. I don't believe that the current couple of generations will ever get the message, even if they find themselves processed for termination papers in hand. Their brains are wired for acceptance of everything they are told, its just another trip.
But are you aware that an eternal state of exception for anything from potential pandemic to too extreme weather lockdowns is scheduled to start at end of November, for all countries that by then have not used the 18 month deadline to opt out of that amendment to the WHO International Health Regulations? Which eliminates the full respect of individual human rights and bodily integrity? That, unfortunately, has not been stopped by events in Ukraine. That is just lying low, waiting to go live in November. Turnkey totalitarianism.
And if the Wuhan 'flu had not appeared at just the right time the HK protests would have been 10 thousand Tiananmen Squares and gone would be China's entreaties to Silk Road goodwill and prosperity, hands-across-the-water, trade and "investment" Nirvana...
Just to bolster my opinion that the current couple of generations will never get the message, even if they find themselves processed for termination with papers in hand.
Canadian Woman Dies Minutes After Getting "Booster" People Who Watched Her Die Remain In Line To Get Their Shot.
I believe this happened around Sept: 15th of last year... but also could have been in 2021. It really doesn't matter does it, it is pathetic and beyond comprehension. In speaking to our own children about Covid they immediately blank out as if they are no longer there, and if pressed further they start to exhibit high anxiety and actually begin to shake. Now that our youngest granddaughter is being taught all the wonders of LBTQ life and sexual perversion as well as holocaust brain washing by being sent home with videos from the teachers about WW2, I am shaking too, with rage.
According to my daughter in law it's not a big deal and she doesn't want to create problems for the child at school.
I am resigned to the fact that our children were snatched away from us somehow. They should know better but they really don't. All except one are university educated and have professional well paying careers. The one with just a high school diploma refused his employers request that he get jabbed, they threatened to fire him but he held his ground and told the employer that he wanted the reason for his dismissal in writing. At the time the company was looking for qualified help at their plant as they were busier than they had ever been. Our son has been a valued asset to the company for 20 years. He started out as someone who you would call a box filler when the company was very small, but has worked his way up to middle management in this outfit that now has about 800 employees in the province.
The Company backed off. It boggles the mind that some jerk bureaucrat was given the power to force this mandate on anybody, business or otherwise.
Since our oldest son as the others completed basic schooling I doubt that the school was to blame. Besides this was in a rural setting hundreds of miles from the nearest city, without the kind of immersion that kids find themselves in today at school. The oldest graduated in 1981 the next 83, then 87 and finally 95. All we experienced was the joy of having wonderful kids full of life, funny happy and ready to begin a life away from the nest.
Something changed several of them whom we greatly loved while raising them, and of course we still do.
In the immortal words of the great Inspector Sledgehammer: What did it.
Spot on. It makes me laugh when you hear the neocons talking about regime change, as if Putin will be replaced by some effete Westernised liberal like Gary Kasparov. They don't realise that Vlad is the calm, rational and restrained one.
I sure hope you are wrong. About somebody worse replacing Putin because you're 100% right the bear To the best of my knowledge that never ends well particularly for the Idiot screwing with the bear
A few weeks ago I saw a video clip of Prigozhin saying something and although I don't recall what the topic was I do recall thinking he sounded even more delusional than the political lunatics in DC, which is saying something these days. I'm not going to claim to know exactly what it is we just saw in Russia but it could simply be Prigozhin completely lost his mind and it took a minute for some among the Wagner force to realize as much.
In Russia, false flags, psyops and trickery are the norm. (as we learned in the last few years, they are the norm here as well).
The interesting thing about Prigozhin's mutiny is that it demanded to wage a harder war, and people seemed to cheer him.
Also, Prigozhin is a crazy maniac who loves videotaping himself amongst corpses.
He is an extremely intense person who does accomplish whatever he sets out to do, consequences be damned.
He felt it was so important to depose Russian minister of Defense Shoigu and the General Staff commander Gerasimov, that he literally lost everything with the march to Moscow demanding that.
I am personally not sure of the deeper psyops behind all that, but I am sure there was more than met the eye.
can’t remember where i’ve read or heard it but belarus put itself behind putin during the theater. then the guy gets exiled to belarus. does that make sense whatsoever?
It’s hard to know what think about this one - especially when relying on corrupt media and governments everywhere who like to play make believe. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it plays out and what comes of it.
Watch The Imitation Game and you can see the brutal realities of psyops during war. Knowledge of a ship targeted for torpedoes did not compel the intelligence group to warn the ship. Putin said in his speech that the West's governments, intelligence apparatus and media were all working together using misinformation and propaganda to try to split Russian from the inside. What better way to fight such tactics than using the same tactics on the West? Wagner is moving to Belarus now. That's all we need to know. The rest is just legerdemain..
Excellent movie. And quite historical on important points: Alan Turing, to a large degree, helped the Allies win WW II. For his service, some years after the war he was charged with homosexuality (a crime then) and forced onto hormone therapy which probably led to his death. This has nothing to do with psyops, but if this is how a government treats a man who have been a national hero (if what he did wasn't highly classified -- and still is) it's a pretty safe bet they aren't going to treat the average citizen very well.
It's a pysop, but I suspect an American funded and inspired one. They are now touting the exile in our press as "an emergent strong nationalist leader, an alternative to Putin". As Zelensky is a US plant, as so many " revolutions" have been historically and continue to be CIA funded US plots, I see this scenario as having the stamp of my own disgusting government upon it.
Sadly you are probably right. I am assuming you are an American and I can assure you as a Canadian I feel the same way about our government having a vested interest in all of this. Same goes for Europe and Great Britain.
I remember in the seventies that a generation protested the Viet Nam war. Now it seems that the only protests are based on gender wars. A complete and utter distraction from the true tragedy that is unfolding in both Russia and Ukraine. Fodder for the military industrial meat grinder.
Whatever it was, it was in every way postmodern. Soldiers getting out of their tank to fetch coffee, helicopter gunships maybe shooting at the convoy and getting return fire, then again the convoy just merrily trundling along, fakes and decontextualized older videos making the rounds, various information spheres mobilizing their resources to push or quell certain narratives. Fascinating to watch and sort of funny, except at some point a few people got shot. The whole thing was simultaneously a farce and very very serious.
Come to think of it orchestrating something like this would fit Putins earlier political style when he allegedly funded all kinds of political groups just so he could present himself as the bulwark against the chaos.
Exactly. That's the easiest retirement decision ever. Stay fighting and risk being killed for money, or alleviate the need for money ever again.........
That fence is getting crowded. We live in an era of the universal lie. Everything we hear, and much of what we see, is a lie. Is Herr Goebbels not famously said to have remarked, "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself".
I agree with you on this one. Sitting on the fence right now is prudent and very wise. Unfortunately the bought media and our corrupt Western Governments aren't. We won't get the truth from them.
A good article, however I think there are situations that overrule your example of "The figurehead politicians can at any time just tell their minders to get lost, and these will have no recourse because the appearance of being in power hardly differs from the reality of it."
I clearly see 2 alternatives with effective deterrence to the "get lost" directive:
1- The JFK solution
2- The Nixon Solution
3- The hopefully soon to be Biden solution where the corruption is allowed to be exhibited
4- Any technology based frame up from child pornography to extortion.
wouldn't the assassination or removal of leaders prove the principle? the problem is that they have power and must be removed (by others who also have power to some degree).
They are working to make child pornography 1. not a crime 2. de-stigmatized. I thought this was esoteric in the past, but it seems to have currency as either one of the last taboos remaining to destroy Western culture or to really allow the "Lizard people" (I speak metaphorically and ironically here) to walk in the light of day.
I think it was a distraction to cover for the fact that the Wagner Group had completed its mission in the Dombas and was needed to repeat their success in banishing the residual Nazis in Kiev.
I think it was also to show a fluid situation to NATO for the duration of their Air Defender exercise. Because so many things can mishappen during exercises what with all the higher alerts. They might have had an idea to pull off. But with such a dynamic situation, they might have said, no, let's wait and see if we can work with the authentic developments going on between Wagner and Putin. That way, they didn't do their potential original plan hoping for a better entry point for their potential toppling scenario to look more organic. They waited and saw, then Defender ended, and lo and behold, the dynamic situation on the ground in Russia is aborted as well. - Outside an exercise I think it is less easy to plausibly-deniably make provocative but oh so lamentable errors involving more dangerous types of weapons. This way, that dangerous period was tided over.
eugyppius, under the scenario that you describe, "There are ordinary elections, politicians and ministers, but they are all mere puppets for this hidden cabal. This might seem a plausible scenario, but if you think about it, it’s a highly volatile and unstable situation. The figurehead politicians can at any time just tell their minders to get lost, and these will have no recourse because the appearance of being in power hardly differs from the reality of it."
As I read those sentences, I was inclined to agree -- and then Donald Trump and what's been done to him came to mind. 🙂
That said, your take on the situation vis-a-vis Prigozhin is compatible with the assessment offered by the Institute for the Study of War:
"Suggestions that Prigozhin’s rebellion, the Kremlin’s response, and Lukashenko’s mediation were all staged by the Kremlin are absurd. The imagery of Putin appearing on national television to call for the end of an armed rebellion and warning of a repeat of the 1917 revolution – and then requiring mediation from a foreign leader to resolve the rebellion – will have a lasting impact.... Prigozhin’s rebellion and the resolution of the events of June 23 and 24 - though not necessarily the Prigozhin/Kremlin struggle writ large - will likely substantially damage Putin’s government and the Russian war effort in Ukraine." (https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-24-2023)
isn't Trump's experience basically consonant with this idea? the president isn't just a figurehead; by virtue of being president he holds real power, and so presidents who aren't aligned with the permanent state have to go.
The idea would be that politicians who let themselves be puppets get to stay in office, whereas politicians who cross the real Powers That Be are escorted out the door (or worse).
So the truth may be somewhere in-between: the politicians are not quite figureheads, they do hold real power, but they are allowed to hold it only for as long as they obey the power behind the throne. Aspiring successors then get the hint (maybe).
BTW, I'm not saying that I necessarily adhere to this theory, I'm only entertaining it.
I would go a little further than your in-between scenario: there are different parties/organisations with different kinds of power, and they can be in conflict with each other. some can remove or marginalise others, or be removed or marginalised in turn. but generally there aren't hidden unknown parties orchestrating the actions of public holders of power.
Thanks for the opportunity to comment on this extraordinary and confusing development and its resolution. I'm not quite convinced on it not being a collaboration with MI6 /CIA, as it so looks like one, and quite attracted by Larry Johnson's latest thoughts - Prigozhin best actor since the White Helmets.. But interested in your point here, and there were two things Trump did that illustrated your point - meeting Putin in Helsinki (can you imagine that now!) - which sent the Western media into spasms, and stepping over the line to the forbidden kingdom with Kim Jong Un - an act for which Trump barely won any praise, and which is almost never mentioned. It led to a rapid improvement in relations with the DPRK and moves by South Korea to reintegrate with the North, ALL of which have since been foiled by US interference and regime change in Sth Korea and Japan. I think Trump should have got the NPP for that single act, if it weren't such an insult!
In South Africa if the "President" does not dance to the tune of his party he is simply "sacked" because in our system the leader of the political party in power is the President of the country so he is never really free to do what he wants, unless you get a state of "government capture" as we under our former President Zuma. So our poor President has to dance to the tune of his party
The impression that Putin left with me is that he handles all kinds of situations well and that between those men arguments can arise, so what, and can be solved with intervention of additional men of the same kind. No big deal for me. I don't see he was damaged.
The Institute for the Study of War is a transparent Neocon lobbying group. You don't need to look much further than the wikipedia entry and check the biographies of its key members. A cynic would assume any statement they make would be biased to further the interests of interventionist U.S. policy and for more funding of military, contractors, etc.
There is a popular Russian saying: «if it can't be averted, one must lead it».
Perhaps Wagner mutiny was inevitable because of decreased government financing, and Prigozhin just attempted to carry it out in a relatively harmless manner.
Which brings us to the point of the government being an unreliable customer.
I am waiting for the 2040 History of Europe in the 2020s to be published before even beginning to try and understand what is going on. I am confused enough already and I still
don’t know where the little submarine with three oligarchs on board fits into all this.
My simple brain tells me that one or more of the following situations happened:
- CIA convinces military leader to shell/attack the Wagner group to cause internal strife and distrust.
- Wagner group is attacking too indiscriminately (Putin is trying to keep this conflict cleaner) and wanted to warn them through an attack after perhaps they ignored his wishes.
- Wagner group had supply/logistics issue with making it back to Moscow.
- Leader was given an "offer he couldn't refuse" (perhaps assassination of him or his family) to stop and turn around.
- digging trenches across highways leading back to Moscow would slow down the convoys and make them sitting targets. Then there's all those soldiers laying in the grass everywhere...
- Wagner group finds out the truth or the perpetrator is "dealt with".
Never bet on smart and sinister when stupid and incompetent is the other option
You’re actually hitting on the main problem with all conspiracy theories, namely that people are rarely that smart or prescient, and when two or more get together, their incompetence blossoms far faster than their deviousness. All the more so these days, when political performance all over the world has become as authentic as a Disney cartoon.
I'll tell you what's the most dangerous situation is when people are participating in small actions that brush with evil, but don't breach it, and think they are doing "good"., i.e., the way children were treated during covid...in particular with the masks...or with the depravity being normalized at school.
This can be applied to myriad situations, because this type of evil has a long arc and is not easily detected by normal people...until sometimes too late to recognizes its evil in the aggregate.
IMO, there is no reason evil and incompetence can't coexist.
In fact evil can and has emerged as a byproduct of systems/organizations self-arranged by unthinking utter incompetence.
The depravity in schools definitely crosses the line of evil, but, yes, the well-meaning busybodies who need to fuss with other people's lives create a great deal of harm.
It may not be evil, but it does cross the threshold of where people have the right to make their own decisions. The fact that this do-goodiness was to assuage their own fears makes it much worse.
I agree about evil and incompetence. In fact, evil is often incompetent. One fallout of these two going together is that from the outside it can look like all the chaos we've been seeing was planned. I think ordered people look for order even in chaos (like these last three years). And so we came up with a lot of theories that it must have all been a concerted effort because there was no other justification for all the damage being done. It may have been mostly a lot of evil incompetence.
Conspiracies get treated like they are rare occurrences. They aren’t all that exotic. They are hatched all the time for different objectives. Everything you say is true, but sometimes there is a plan. It may be messy, and there are always ways in which a plan goes sideways, but when things like COVID happen with tremendous coordination and all kinds of clearly evident forethought, it’s not just a bunch of hippies in a drum circle spreading peace and love.
I agree. It's hard to figure out what happened or is happening. Many of those trying to plan something destructive are not what I would call sane.
You have to look at who is involved. The people like Fauci and Birx and other top level federal administrators, including btw theFDA, CDC, CIA, DoD and State Department are a different breed of cat. These people are scheming every day as part of their jobs. They are powerful people in powerful agencies and they know how to manipulate, slit the metaphorical throats, and hide the metaphorical bodies. They are doing power plays all the time.
These aren’t 3 buddies from Home Depot planning a barbecue.
I think you have to assume sanity, and, by inference, self interest, when making any conjecture as to the motives of the actors.
Wow. Well said.
Yeah, when I hear someone say, "the CIA killed Kennedy", my response is, "the fucking CIA can't find its ass with both hands".
A behemoth organization that is inefficient and corrupt on the average by no means rules out the existence of one, perhaps several, elite groups that are highly effective, self-contained, ruthless, and not accountable to anyone.
In fact, it all but guarantees the existence of such groups, doesn't it? These are massive, inefficient, corrupt and incompetent blobs of opaque and unaccountable bureaucracy, corporatism, and exhibitionist political whores that collectively wield enormous power. Very easy for small, well-organized groups to navigate and manipulate.
Like the CDC with Fauci on the point.
I only question how reliable their effectiveness is. I think there are several such entities, but how far and wide they reach may have been overestimated by people who tend to live ordered lives.
ChrisC
Keeeerrrrrecto.
You and I both know that it was Israhell.
Augustus ( Kennedy ) give me back my A-Bombs.
Ben Hur aka Gurion, I resign but I have a present for you.
Not many people know this and not many care. Glad see that your'e not one of them
WBJ
Means, motive, and opportunity. They had all 3 in spades, and then there's the Warren Report, which tries to rationalize a lot of inconvenient facts that point directly to Christians In Action.
Both hands and a flashlight
So how did Joe Biden won the election? Because he's smart and sinister or because he's stupid and incompetent?
I'd say neither. He's telling us every time we get to see him, that he can get in troubles, so my take is that he's The Manchurian Candidate
In his near 50 years in Congress, Biden was generally thought of as a somewhat low intelligence doofus and not taken all that seriously. A blowhard with no talent, and a liar. If he actually were smart and scheming, I doubt he could have played the idiot role so successfully for 50 years. He's a not-so-smart incompetent boob who loves the limelight and playing the role in his aviator glasses, but all that made him a useful idiot to be manipulated at a particular point in time. He was useful to those really in charge as a means to oust Trump, but increasingly he less useful now. They'll figure out a means to get him out of the way for the next election.
This heuristic creates moral hazard. Let's say I am a business owner who is known to believe your rule of thumb. An employee might be emboldened to steal precisely because they're confident that I'll never suspect criminality and would readily believe it's "an accounting error" if caught.
Obviously, rogue government agencies, or small factions within them, can benefit from the same calculus. I believe the Pentagon just "lost" another $6.3B in Ukraine. Well shucks!
Agreed generally, but quite a bit of truly sinister flourishes only because there is so much stupidity and incompetence available to provide cover for it.
Absolutely. Putin was humiliated by this episode. My feeling is that Prigozhin is doomed. How else can Putin retain some cred?
Why humiliated? He came out of it pretty well and his position much strengthened. He was no more humiliated than De Gaule was by the army mutiny in 1962.
No, he was forced to back down, no one is to be prosecuted. He comes out of it as ineffectual and weak.
We shall see.
Maybe he will end up with a case of polonium-210 poisoning or a ricin loaded BB-sized metal ball in his leg.
Oh, the ol' nasty Russian spy cartoon stuff again.
I'm sure the people who died from those rather elaborate poisoning techniques did not think it was cartoonish. Probably more likely he might actually die from friendly fire.
Sure thing: their relatives can take it to the offices of Richard Moore.
Didn't know anything about Richard Moore, but he seems like a woke British spy chief.
Was Victoria Nuland in the neighborhood?
Wherever she goes, death and destruction and color revolutions are sure to happen.
Oh, yes. Nuland has been front and center, along with Kagan driving the fight against Russia.
Agreed. Ms V Nuland makes President O'Biden seem honest (within a 10 per cent error margin).
...and she flew under the radar for quite a long time.
She has been vastly underestimated for more than a decade.
Occam's Razor, applied to putsches, would suggest that it is what it looks like --- and Yevgeny misperceived the existential reality and decided discretion was the better part of valor. However ... that still does not obviate the likelihood that within a year Vlad may be replaced as MFWIC of Russia, likely to be supplanted by a more reactionary oligarch who would be more inclined to stick a nuke up NATO's ass rather than take any more crap from the West. There are some real hard-liners back behind the red curtain, real wild-cards who won't put up with all the Neocon crap. There's only so much poking that the Bear will put up with before he bites someone's arm off. There's some really bad mojo coming by 2025...
Harvey
Bad mojo by 2026?
Well either way, if this Ukraine thing had not happened then by 2025 everyone would have received the death jabs or be interred in refusenik camps. Remember.. that was the plan of the phoney pandemic creators and I know that not one organization, government, churches, groups, civil rights, or human rights organizations would have intervened. But the events in the Ukraine stopped that in its tracks. All of a sudden not an official word on that matter, no more talk of saving grandma yada, yada, yada.
I have to thank Putin for that.
I think there will be many many more revelations and more deaths and injuries revealed caused by these vile injections, including sterility and shortened life spans. So the longer we have to let this come out on the surface the better. I don't believe that the current couple of generations will ever get the message, even if they find themselves processed for termination papers in hand. Their brains are wired for acceptance of everything they are told, its just another trip.
WBJ
But are you aware that an eternal state of exception for anything from potential pandemic to too extreme weather lockdowns is scheduled to start at end of November, for all countries that by then have not used the 18 month deadline to opt out of that amendment to the WHO International Health Regulations? Which eliminates the full respect of individual human rights and bodily integrity? That, unfortunately, has not been stopped by events in Ukraine. That is just lying low, waiting to go live in November. Turnkey totalitarianism.
S. Sonnenschein.
Good point.
WBJ
And if the Wuhan 'flu had not appeared at just the right time the HK protests would have been 10 thousand Tiananmen Squares and gone would be China's entreaties to Silk Road goodwill and prosperity, hands-across-the-water, trade and "investment" Nirvana...
Harvey Smedlapp
In reference to my earlier comment.
Just to bolster my opinion that the current couple of generations will never get the message, even if they find themselves processed for termination with papers in hand.
Canadian Woman Dies Minutes After Getting "Booster" People Who Watched Her Die Remain In Line To Get Their Shot.
Anthony Colpo Substack
via henrymakow.com
I believe this happened around Sept: 15th of last year... but also could have been in 2021. It really doesn't matter does it, it is pathetic and beyond comprehension. In speaking to our own children about Covid they immediately blank out as if they are no longer there, and if pressed further they start to exhibit high anxiety and actually begin to shake. Now that our youngest granddaughter is being taught all the wonders of LBTQ life and sexual perversion as well as holocaust brain washing by being sent home with videos from the teachers about WW2, I am shaking too, with rage.
According to my daughter in law it's not a big deal and she doesn't want to create problems for the child at school.
I am resigned to the fact that our children were snatched away from us somehow. They should know better but they really don't. All except one are university educated and have professional well paying careers. The one with just a high school diploma refused his employers request that he get jabbed, they threatened to fire him but he held his ground and told the employer that he wanted the reason for his dismissal in writing. At the time the company was looking for qualified help at their plant as they were busier than they had ever been. Our son has been a valued asset to the company for 20 years. He started out as someone who you would call a box filler when the company was very small, but has worked his way up to middle management in this outfit that now has about 800 employees in the province.
The Company backed off. It boggles the mind that some jerk bureaucrat was given the power to force this mandate on anybody, business or otherwise.
Since our oldest son as the others completed basic schooling I doubt that the school was to blame. Besides this was in a rural setting hundreds of miles from the nearest city, without the kind of immersion that kids find themselves in today at school. The oldest graduated in 1981 the next 83, then 87 and finally 95. All we experienced was the joy of having wonderful kids full of life, funny happy and ready to begin a life away from the nest.
Something changed several of them whom we greatly loved while raising them, and of course we still do.
In the immortal words of the great Inspector Sledgehammer: What did it.
WBJ
Spot on. It makes me laugh when you hear the neocons talking about regime change, as if Putin will be replaced by some effete Westernised liberal like Gary Kasparov. They don't realise that Vlad is the calm, rational and restrained one.
“Neocon crap”? How about “leftist crap” a la the Obama and Biden boys?
Just can't beat two honest Irish people like O'Obama and O'Biden.
So this morons in media were giddy for what? If coup succeeded a more tough nasty guy than putin would be in nit sparing any Ukrainians anymore!!
I sure hope you are wrong. About somebody worse replacing Putin because you're 100% right the bear To the best of my knowledge that never ends well particularly for the Idiot screwing with the bear
A few weeks ago I saw a video clip of Prigozhin saying something and although I don't recall what the topic was I do recall thinking he sounded even more delusional than the political lunatics in DC, which is saying something these days. I'm not going to claim to know exactly what it is we just saw in Russia but it could simply be Prigozhin completely lost his mind and it took a minute for some among the Wagner force to realize as much.
Never thought it was plausible until you described it.
It makes a lot of sense, because the whole contract army thing is freaking insane for any nation to allow. They all tend to be megalomaniacs lol.
In Russia, false flags, psyops and trickery are the norm. (as we learned in the last few years, they are the norm here as well).
The interesting thing about Prigozhin's mutiny is that it demanded to wage a harder war, and people seemed to cheer him.
Also, Prigozhin is a crazy maniac who loves videotaping himself amongst corpses.
He is an extremely intense person who does accomplish whatever he sets out to do, consequences be damned.
He felt it was so important to depose Russian minister of Defense Shoigu and the General Staff commander Gerasimov, that he literally lost everything with the march to Moscow demanding that.
I am personally not sure of the deeper psyops behind all that, but I am sure there was more than met the eye.
To me it seems putin and this guy are quite close and so he was picked for this psyop because of his loyalty.
Why do I think this. Because putin let him go no charges into safe exile in Belarus! Weird!
But people like Prigozhin do not like being exiled
He wasn't "exiled". If he had actually been stupid enough to even try attacking Moscow, his head would be on a stick already.
It's all a show, a distraction.
But is he exiled really? So it was said to the media?
Wondering if it’s part of plan to move the Wagner group to a new front on the other side of Ukraine
You're right they don't but it's probably preferable to a firing squad. He now has time to regroup or rethink his prerogatives.
I did, however find it amazing how quickly this possible disaster for Russia has been averted; at least for the time being.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out going forward.
can’t remember where i’ve read or heard it but belarus put itself behind putin during the theater. then the guy gets exiled to belarus. does that make sense whatsoever?
Yes it makes to me. Its Theater, psyop, whatever. It wasn't real.
Like I exile you to another room in my house lol...
And not in usa? We found our match lol!
It’s hard to know what think about this one - especially when relying on corrupt media and governments everywhere who like to play make believe. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it plays out and what comes of it.
Watch The Imitation Game and you can see the brutal realities of psyops during war. Knowledge of a ship targeted for torpedoes did not compel the intelligence group to warn the ship. Putin said in his speech that the West's governments, intelligence apparatus and media were all working together using misinformation and propaganda to try to split Russian from the inside. What better way to fight such tactics than using the same tactics on the West? Wagner is moving to Belarus now. That's all we need to know. The rest is just legerdemain..
Excellent movie. And quite historical on important points: Alan Turing, to a large degree, helped the Allies win WW II. For his service, some years after the war he was charged with homosexuality (a crime then) and forced onto hormone therapy which probably led to his death. This has nothing to do with psyops, but if this is how a government treats a man who have been a national hero (if what he did wasn't highly classified -- and still is) it's a pretty safe bet they aren't going to treat the average citizen very well.
And is thought to move on to Africa from there, I hear.
I feel exactly the same about this latest situation. It is really hard what to think right now, given our biased media, governments etc.
It's a pysop, but I suspect an American funded and inspired one. They are now touting the exile in our press as "an emergent strong nationalist leader, an alternative to Putin". As Zelensky is a US plant, as so many " revolutions" have been historically and continue to be CIA funded US plots, I see this scenario as having the stamp of my own disgusting government upon it.
Sadly you are probably right. I am assuming you are an American and I can assure you as a Canadian I feel the same way about our government having a vested interest in all of this. Same goes for Europe and Great Britain.
I remember in the seventies that a generation protested the Viet Nam war. Now it seems that the only protests are based on gender wars. A complete and utter distraction from the true tragedy that is unfolding in both Russia and Ukraine. Fodder for the military industrial meat grinder.
So obvious by now!
Whatever it was, it was in every way postmodern. Soldiers getting out of their tank to fetch coffee, helicopter gunships maybe shooting at the convoy and getting return fire, then again the convoy just merrily trundling along, fakes and decontextualized older videos making the rounds, various information spheres mobilizing their resources to push or quell certain narratives. Fascinating to watch and sort of funny, except at some point a few people got shot. The whole thing was simultaneously a farce and very very serious.
Come to think of it orchestrating something like this would fit Putins earlier political style when he allegedly funded all kinds of political groups just so he could present himself as the bulwark against the chaos.
Mercenaries like money, and we love giving money away. Perhaps we just paid him better to go home? Not a tough sell, really.
6 bill to this mercenaries for his belarus retirement. Good job department of defense lol.
Good job dod lol..
Exactly. That's the easiest retirement decision ever. Stay fighting and risk being killed for money, or alleviate the need for money ever again.........
Real tough call.
Sitting on the fence with this one.
This will be spun 60 ways to Sunday over the next days.
None of what I have read passes the "smell test".
I honestly believe we will never know what transpired.
I tried the link a dozen times, and it came up as "corrupted".
That fence is getting crowded. We live in an era of the universal lie. Everything we hear, and much of what we see, is a lie. Is Herr Goebbels not famously said to have remarked, "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself".
AGREE!
They are pests all of them and their dumb games. I wish they would Just stop! cut it out. then GTFO too
YES!
Imagine if Herr Goebbels and company had the technology we have today.
Now the technology is there and there are many Herr Goebbels out there to use it as a means to further an agenda.
I'm not sure we are going to prevail in this current fight for our humanity and freedom.
I agree with you on this one. Sitting on the fence right now is prudent and very wise. Unfortunately the bought media and our corrupt Western Governments aren't. We won't get the truth from them.
Does not pass the " smell test" at all
A good article, however I think there are situations that overrule your example of "The figurehead politicians can at any time just tell their minders to get lost, and these will have no recourse because the appearance of being in power hardly differs from the reality of it."
I clearly see 2 alternatives with effective deterrence to the "get lost" directive:
1- The JFK solution
2- The Nixon Solution
3- The hopefully soon to be Biden solution where the corruption is allowed to be exhibited
4- Any technology based frame up from child pornography to extortion.
wouldn't the assassination or removal of leaders prove the principle? the problem is that they have power and must be removed (by others who also have power to some degree).
Yes Eugyppius I believe you are right. Look no further than the " beacon of democracy " known as The United States of America.
Their history backs up your theory.
They are working to make child pornography 1. not a crime 2. de-stigmatized. I thought this was esoteric in the past, but it seems to have currency as either one of the last taboos remaining to destroy Western culture or to really allow the "Lizard people" (I speak metaphorically and ironically here) to walk in the light of day.
I think it was a distraction to cover for the fact that the Wagner Group had completed its mission in the Dombas and was needed to repeat their success in banishing the residual Nazis in Kiev.
I think it was also to show a fluid situation to NATO for the duration of their Air Defender exercise. Because so many things can mishappen during exercises what with all the higher alerts. They might have had an idea to pull off. But with such a dynamic situation, they might have said, no, let's wait and see if we can work with the authentic developments going on between Wagner and Putin. That way, they didn't do their potential original plan hoping for a better entry point for their potential toppling scenario to look more organic. They waited and saw, then Defender ended, and lo and behold, the dynamic situation on the ground in Russia is aborted as well. - Outside an exercise I think it is less easy to plausibly-deniably make provocative but oh so lamentable errors involving more dangerous types of weapons. This way, that dangerous period was tided over.
eugyppius, under the scenario that you describe, "There are ordinary elections, politicians and ministers, but they are all mere puppets for this hidden cabal. This might seem a plausible scenario, but if you think about it, it’s a highly volatile and unstable situation. The figurehead politicians can at any time just tell their minders to get lost, and these will have no recourse because the appearance of being in power hardly differs from the reality of it."
As I read those sentences, I was inclined to agree -- and then Donald Trump and what's been done to him came to mind. 🙂
That said, your take on the situation vis-a-vis Prigozhin is compatible with the assessment offered by the Institute for the Study of War:
"Suggestions that Prigozhin’s rebellion, the Kremlin’s response, and Lukashenko’s mediation were all staged by the Kremlin are absurd. The imagery of Putin appearing on national television to call for the end of an armed rebellion and warning of a repeat of the 1917 revolution – and then requiring mediation from a foreign leader to resolve the rebellion – will have a lasting impact.... Prigozhin’s rebellion and the resolution of the events of June 23 and 24 - though not necessarily the Prigozhin/Kremlin struggle writ large - will likely substantially damage Putin’s government and the Russian war effort in Ukraine." (https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-24-2023)
isn't Trump's experience basically consonant with this idea? the president isn't just a figurehead; by virtue of being president he holds real power, and so presidents who aren't aligned with the permanent state have to go.
The idea would be that politicians who let themselves be puppets get to stay in office, whereas politicians who cross the real Powers That Be are escorted out the door (or worse).
So the truth may be somewhere in-between: the politicians are not quite figureheads, they do hold real power, but they are allowed to hold it only for as long as they obey the power behind the throne. Aspiring successors then get the hint (maybe).
BTW, I'm not saying that I necessarily adhere to this theory, I'm only entertaining it.
I would go a little further than your in-between scenario: there are different parties/organisations with different kinds of power, and they can be in conflict with each other. some can remove or marginalise others, or be removed or marginalised in turn. but generally there aren't hidden unknown parties orchestrating the actions of public holders of power.
Yes, that's closer to what I actually think. 😀
Thanks for the opportunity to comment on this extraordinary and confusing development and its resolution. I'm not quite convinced on it not being a collaboration with MI6 /CIA, as it so looks like one, and quite attracted by Larry Johnson's latest thoughts - Prigozhin best actor since the White Helmets.. But interested in your point here, and there were two things Trump did that illustrated your point - meeting Putin in Helsinki (can you imagine that now!) - which sent the Western media into spasms, and stepping over the line to the forbidden kingdom with Kim Jong Un - an act for which Trump barely won any praise, and which is almost never mentioned. It led to a rapid improvement in relations with the DPRK and moves by South Korea to reintegrate with the North, ALL of which have since been foiled by US interference and regime change in Sth Korea and Japan. I think Trump should have got the NPP for that single act, if it weren't such an insult!
In South Africa if the "President" does not dance to the tune of his party he is simply "sacked" because in our system the leader of the political party in power is the President of the country so he is never really free to do what he wants, unless you get a state of "government capture" as we under our former President Zuma. So our poor President has to dance to the tune of his party
Yup. The United States seems to have a bit of history with that concept. Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy and possible candidate Bobby Kennedy.
I am no fan of Donald Trump as a Canadian but I did find him interesting as a President.
I don't think he was aligned with the permanent state. That's probably why his entire time as President was a modern day witch hunt.
The irony is the hunt is still on for this individual. It seems the prevailing powers are still terrified of him
It hasn't escaped my notice that while this is still going on the " Biden/Hunter situation" is trying desperately to stay out of the limelight.
" Titanic Anyone".
The impression that Putin left with me is that he handles all kinds of situations well and that between those men arguments can arise, so what, and can be solved with intervention of additional men of the same kind. No big deal for me. I don't see he was damaged.
The Institute for the Study of War is a transparent Neocon lobbying group. You don't need to look much further than the wikipedia entry and check the biographies of its key members. A cynic would assume any statement they make would be biased to further the interests of interventionist U.S. policy and for more funding of military, contractors, etc.
Any statement they make may as well be in Yiddish.
There is a popular Russian saying: «if it can't be averted, one must lead it».
Perhaps Wagner mutiny was inevitable because of decreased government financing, and Prigozhin just attempted to carry it out in a relatively harmless manner.
Which brings us to the point of the government being an unreliable customer.
On a funny side note, here's Putin using the phrase:
https://www-rosbalt-ru.translate.goog/russia/2021/03/26/1894060.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
I am waiting for the 2040 History of Europe in the 2020s to be published before even beginning to try and understand what is going on. I am confused enough already and I still
don’t know where the little submarine with three oligarchs on board fits into all this.
There will never be a THE HISTORY of anything, much less of an age of information warfare. It's a depressing state of affairs but there it is.
I live in hope...
agree
My simple brain tells me that one or more of the following situations happened:
- CIA convinces military leader to shell/attack the Wagner group to cause internal strife and distrust.
- Wagner group is attacking too indiscriminately (Putin is trying to keep this conflict cleaner) and wanted to warn them through an attack after perhaps they ignored his wishes.
- Wagner group had supply/logistics issue with making it back to Moscow.
- Leader was given an "offer he couldn't refuse" (perhaps assassination of him or his family) to stop and turn around.
- digging trenches across highways leading back to Moscow would slow down the convoys and make them sitting targets. Then there's all those soldiers laying in the grass everywhere...
- Wagner group finds out the truth or the perpetrator is "dealt with".