"It Is Time To Return To Sanity" Gorbachev Urges Trump And Putin To Save Crucial Cold-War Arms Pact

Former Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev the last Soviet leader, is urging Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump to meet face to face to resolve their differences as each side accuses the other of violating a Cold War-era arms-control treaty that Gorbachev believes is essential to maintaining peace between the two world powers.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a landmark arms control treaty signed in 1987 by Gorbachev and former US President Ronald Reagan, helped end the Cold War by requiring both countries to eliminate all nuclear ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers.

But recently, both sides have called for the treaty to be scrapped as perceived encroachment by NATO “missile-defense” systems in South Korea and Europe has unnerved Putin, while Russia’s efforts to influence the US presidential election with a “sophisticated” propaganda campaign

In an essay that was published in a local newspaper, and re-published by the Washington Post, Gorbachev explains why preserving the treaty – which he sees as the most vulnerable link in the system of limiting and reducing weapons of mass destruction - is imperative to maintaining the Russia-US relationship.

In the essay, Gorbachev argues that the US-Russia relationship is “in a severe crisis” and only a dialogue based on “mutual respect” can help repair it – if only the two leaders could scrounge up the political will to make it happen.

So what is happening, what is the problem, and what needs to be done?

Both sides have raised issues of compliance, accusing the other of violating or circumventing the treaty’s key provisions. From the sidelines, lacking fuller information, it is difficult to evaluate those accusations. But one thing is clear:

The problem has a political as well as a technical aspect. It is up to the political leaders to take action.

Therefore I am making an appeal to the presidents of Russia and the United States.

Relations between the two nations are in a severe crisis. A way out must be sought, and there is one well-tested means available for accomplishing this: a dialogue based on mutual respect.

It will not be easy to cut through the logjam of issues on both sides. But neither was our dialogue easy three decades ago. It had its critics and detractors, who tried to derail it.

In the final analysis, it was the political will of the two nations’ leaders that proved decisive. And that is what’s needed now. This is what our two countries’ citizens and people everywhere expect from the presidents of Russia and the United States.

If Trump and Putin could agree to preserve the agreement, it would encourage the generals and diplomats responsible for implementing and monitoring the terms to fall in line, Gorbachev said.

I am confident that preparing a joint presidential statement on the two nations’ commitment to the INF Treaty is a realistic goal. Simultaneously, the technical issues could be resolved; for this purpose, the joint control commission under the INF Treaty could resume its work. I am convinced that, with an impetus from the two presidents, the generals and diplomats would be able to reach agreement.

We are living in a troubled world. It is particularly disturbing that relations between the major nuclear powers, Russia and the United States, have become a serious source of tensions and a hostage to domestic politics. It is time to return to sanity. I am sure that even inveterate opponents of normalizing U.S.-Russian relations will not dare object to the two presidents. These critics have no arguments on their side, for the very fact that the INF Treaty has been in effect for 30 years proves that it serves the security interests of our two countries and of the world.

Unfortunately, the INF isn’t the only important treaty in danger of collapse. As we reported last month, US officials are preparing restrictions for Russian military flights over American territory permitted by the 2002 Treaty on Open Skies after accusing the country of concealing movements of personnel and military equipment near its western enclave of Kaliningrad as Russia prepared to stage its “Zapad-2017” drills, its biggest display of military power since the end of the Cold War.

In another sign of mounting tensions, the US suspended joint military exercises with its Gulf allies after a historic Russia-Saudi Arabia summit.

Gorbachev led the Soviet Union from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991.

Russian Collusion: Hillary Clinton Invited Vladimir Putin To “Pay For Play” Event

In newly released emails which the mainstream media is willfully ignoring, Hillary Clinton invited Russian president Vladimir Putin to a Clinton Foundation event. The Russian collusion between Hillary Clinton is becoming very apparent.

Hillary Clinton likes to talk a tough game about Russian President Vladimir Putin. And she likes to put him on the list of those at fault for her loss in the election last November to Donald Trump. But that didn’t stop her from inviting him and other top Russian officials to a Clinton Foundation gala right after she became Secretary of State.

Clinton Foundation director of foreign policy Amitabh Desai sent dozens of invitations to world leaders including then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and Former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, emails recently obtained by Judicial Watch revealed.

While Democrats blast any Republican who has the nerve to even look Russia’s direction, Hillary and her minions in the Clinton Foundation were begging the Russians to come to an event put on by the “pay for play” organization.  Hillary offered political favors in exchange for money filtered through the Clinton Foundation.

On March 13, 2009, Desai emailed the list of invitations to Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro, who then forwarded the email to top Clinton aide, Jake Sullivan. This happened at approximately the same time that the newly appointed Clinton tried to “reset” U.S. relations with Russia. Yet, Donald Trump has been blasted for trying to do the same thing. The propaganda in the media is becoming clear as they continue to brush this story under the rug too.

Hillary Clinton repeatedly attacked Putin during her 2016 presidential campaign and often tried to link president Donald Trump to the Russian leader. Clinton and her staff, with help from Barack Obama and the media also allegedly concocted the “Russian hacking” narrative within 24-hours of her election defeat, as documented in the Clinton campaign tell-all book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign:

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

Clinton’s public display of contempt for Putin does not match her track record of how she interacted with the Russian leader in the past as controversy swirled following a uranium deal she approved while at the State Department. The deal was quickly followed by a massive donation to her foundation, proving the “pay for play” policy she herself used to become wealthy.

“One year after inviting Putin to the Clinton Foundation event, she approved the sale of 20% of America’s uranium capacity to Russia,” Conservative Review noted. “Shortly thereafter, donors connected to the company that was sold to Russia contributed $145 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation.”

These newly released emails simply prove what most already knew – Hillary Clinton’s collusion with Russia is far deeper than Donald Trump’s.

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Author: Mac Slavo
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Date: September 19th, 2017
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

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"On The Beach" 2017 - The Beckoning Of Nuclear War

Paul Craig Roberts writes that the admirable and honorable truth-teller John Pilger warns us that nuclear war is closer than we think.

The 1957 book, On The Beach, introduced awareness that war in the nuclear age is terminable for life on earth. This realization explains President John F. Kennedy’s rejection of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s recommendation to launch a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Today as evidenced by the behavior of the US government, its European vassal states, and neoconservative pundits, this realization no longer informs US policy.

Pilger speaks of the lobotomy performed on each generation that removes facts from history. Pilger himself is a victim when he chooses to stress that Ronald Reagan defended the Vietnam war instead of emphasizing that Reagan worked with Gorbachev to reduce the threat of nuclear war. The lobotomy that has been performed on the Western world has destroyed knowledge that the US and Russia were on peaceful terms prior to the Soviet collapse.

These peaceful terms lasted a short time, only through the administration of President George H.W. Bush. With the advent of the Clinton regime, all peaceful agreements that were made have been consistently broken by Washington for 24 years throughout the two-term presidencies of three regimes, and now Congress is set on destroying what remains of the work of 20th century US administrations to remove the specter of nuclear armageddon. The defense authorization bill currently before Congress overturns the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. This treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons and signaled the end of the Cold War.

John Pilger tells us of the certain consequences of the renewed nuclear arms race:

The US submarine captain says, "We"ve all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you"re never ready, because you don"t know when it"s coming. Well, now we do know and there"s nothing to be done about it."

He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.

The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and lifeless now.

A curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and New Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last cities, towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most buildings will remain untouched, some illuminated by the last flickers of electric light.

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

These lines from T.S. Eliot"s poem The Hollow Men appear at the beginning of Nevil Shute"s novel On the Beach, which left me close to tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same.

Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent.

Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the living world.

I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as the US Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world"s second most lethal nuclear power.  There was no justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder.

The "sanctions" are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.

Their main aim seems to be war - real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.

The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste whole societies - the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called "a noble cause" and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an "exceptional people"He was not referring to the Vietnamese.

Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young teenagers. "Listen up," he said. "We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom."

At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders took their own lives. Listen up, indeed.

A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls "an eternal present".

Harold Pinter described this as "manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn"t happening. It didn"t matter. It was of no interest."

Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously "the left" are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today revert to one name: Trump.

Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for "liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics", wrote Luciana Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man - not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system - beckons great danger for all of us.

While they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardian suppress the essence of the most important political story of our time as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.

On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a "Soviet agent"), the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the United States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war on Russia. Unlike every other Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a caveat from Trump himself that it was "clearly unconstitutional".

A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia.

This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the "national security" managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther King called them "the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today".

They have encircled Russia and China with missiles and a nuclear arsenal. They have used neo-Nazis to instal an unstable, aggressive regime on Russia"s "borderland" - the way through which Hitler invaded, causing the deaths of 27 million people.  Their goal is to dismember the modern Russian Federation.

In response, "partnership" is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin - anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon. Their history tells them to get ready.

The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea, through which pass China"s economic lifelines.

The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, "if required", he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute"s fiction.

None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits, dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding clichés. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.

The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on China, John Bordne, a member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based in Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 - during the Cuban missile crisis - he and his colleagues were "told to launch all the missiles" from their silos.

Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded - but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not "stand down".

At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United States was such that US officials who were on official business in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 - the year Shute wrote On the Beach - no official in the State Department could speak the language of the world"s most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed, aimed at Russia.

The bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. The terms "left" and "right" are meaningless. Most of America"s modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats.

When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America"s longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings - murder - by drones.

In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study, Obama, the "reluctant liberal warrior", dropped 26,171 bombs - three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.  Having pledged to help "rid the world" of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War.

Trump is a wimp by comparison. It was Obama - with his secretary of state Hillary Clinton at his side - who destroyed Libya as a modern state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration groups knew him as the "deporter-in-chief".

One of Obama"s last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a record $618billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has endorsed this.

Buried in the detail was the establishment of a "Center for Information Analysis and Response". This is a ministry of truth. It is tasked with providing an "official narrative of facts" that will prepare us for the real possibility of nuclear war - if we allow it.

Putin Tells Oliver Stone About His Days As A KGB Spy

Russia"s President Putin talked to Oliver Stone not only about politics and international affairs, but also about his family, childhood, and hobbies, as well as the time when he served as an under-cover KGB agent in Dresden in 1980s. These recollections are part of a book of full transcripts that includes material left out of the documentary series The Putin Interviews (which was panned last week by Rolling Stone in its "10 Most WTF Things We Learned From Oliver Stone"s Putin Interviews").

Vladimir Putin said he joined the KGB, the Soviet Committee for State Security, in 1975, because he had “always wanted to."

“I entered law school because I wanted to work for the KGB. And still when I was a pupil at school, I went to the KGB office in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) by myself. And I asked them what I had to do in order to work for the KGB. And the workers told me that I had to have a higher education and a better legal education.”

Putin said he did not have “any contact with the KGB” following the visit, so it was “quite unexpected that the KGB found me and offered a job” after he graduated from law school.

When asked by Stone, Putin acknowledged he watched many films about the agency and their intelligence work and was particularly inspired by a Soviet-era espionage thriller called Seventeen Moments of Spring, in which the main character played by famous actor Vyacheslav Tikhonov is a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany. The president admitted to romanticizing about getting a job at the KGB.

Putin served as an under-cover spy in Dresden from 1985 through 1990 and retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel when the USSR collapsed. In the late 1990s, he briefly served as the head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor.

* * *

While Putin"s walk down memory lane with Stone was rather limited, the BBC recently conducted an extensive look on Putin"s days in Dresden. Some excerpts below:

Putin had arrived in Dresden in the mid-1980s for his first foreign posting as a KGB agent. The German Democratic Republic or GDR - a communist state created out of the Soviet-occupied zone of post-Nazi Germany - was a highly significant outpost of Moscow"s power, up close to Western Europe, full of Soviet military and spies. Putin had wanted to join the KGB since he was a teenager, inspired by popular Soviet stories of secret service bravado in which, he recalled later, "One man"s effort could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people."

Initially, though, much of his work in Dresden was humdrum. Among documents in the Stasi archives in Dresden is a letter from Putin asking for help from the Stasi boss with the installation of an informer"s phone.

And there are details too of Soviet-East German social gatherings Putin attended, to celebrate ties between the two countries. But if the spy work wasn"t that exciting, Putin and his young family could at least enjoy the East German good life. Putin"s then wife, Ludmila, later recalled that life in the GDR was very different from life in the USSR. "The streets were clean. They would wash their windows once a week," she said in an interview published in 2000, as part of First Person, a book of interviews with Russia"s new and then little-known acting president.

The Putins lived in a special block of flats with KGB and Stasi families for neighbours, though Ludmila envied the fact that: "The GDR state security people got higher salaries than our guys, judging from how our German neighbours lived. Of course we tried to economise and save up enough to buy a car."

A former KGB colleague, Vladimir Usoltsev, describes Putin spending hours leafing through Western mail-order catalogues, to keep up with fashions and trends. He also enjoyed the beer - securing a special weekly supply of the local brew, Radeberger - which left him looking rather less trim than he does in the bare-chested sporty images issued by Russian presidential PR today.

East Germany differed from the USSR in another way too - it had a number of separate political parties, even though it was still firmly under communist rule, or appeared to be.

"He enjoyed very much this little paradise for him," says Boris Reitschuster. East Germany, he says, "is his model of politics especially. He rebuilt some kind of East Germany in Russia now."

The block of flats nearby, where the Putins lived

But in autumn 1989 this paradise became a kind of KGB hell. On the streets of Dresden, Putin observed people power emerging in extraordinary ways. In early October hundreds of East Germans who had claimed political asylum at the West German embassy in Prague were allowed to travel to the West in sealed trains. As they passed through Dresden, huge crowds tried to break through a security cordon to try to board the trains, and make their own escape.

Wolfgang Berghofer, Dresden"s communist mayor at the time, says there was chaos as security forces began taking on almost the entire local population. Many assumed violence was inevitable.

"A Soviet tank army was stationed in our city," he says. "And its generals said to me clearly: "If we get the order from Moscow, the tanks will roll.""

After the Berlin Wall opened, on 9 November, the crowds became bolder everywhere - approaching the citadels of Stasi and KGB power in Dresden.

The former KGB headquarters in Dresden

Putin and his KGB colleagues frantically burned evidence of their intelligence work. "I personally burned a huge amount of material," Putin recalled in First Person. "We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst."

Two weeks later there was more trauma for Putin as West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl arrived in the city. He made a speech that left German reunification looking inevitable, and East Germany doomed. Kohl praised Gorbachev, the man in Moscow who"d refused to send in the tanks, and he used patriotic language - words like Vaterland, or fatherland - that had been largely taboo in Germany since the war.  Now they prompted an ecstatic response.

It"s not known whether Putin was in that crowd - but as a KGB agent in Dresden he"d certainly have known all about it. The implosion of East Germany in the following months marked a huge rupture in his and his family"s life.

"We had the horrible feeling that the country that had almost become our home would no longer exist," said his wife Ludmila. "My neighbour, who was my friend, cried for a week. It was the collapse of everything - their lives, their careers."

One of Putin"s key Stasi contacts, Maj Gen Horst Boehm - the man who had helped him install that precious telephone line for an informer - was humiliated by the demonstrating crowds, and committed suicide early in 1990. This warning about what can happen when people power becomes dominant was one Putin could now ponder on the long journey home.

"Their German friends give them a 20-year-old washing machine and with this they drive back to Leningrad," says Putin biographer and critic Masha Gessen. "There"s a strong sense that he was serving his country and had nothing to show for it."

He arrived back to a country that had been transformed under Mikhail Gorbachev and was itself on the verge of collapse.

"He found himself in a country that had changed in ways that he didn"t understand and didn"t want to accept," as Gessen puts it.

His home city, Leningrad, was now becoming St Petersburg again. What would Putin do there? There was talk, briefly, of taxi-driving. But soon Putin realised he had acquired a much more valuable asset than a second-hand washing machine.

In Dresden he"d been part of a network of individuals who might have lost their Soviet roles, but were well placed to prosper personally and politically in the new Russia. In the Stasi archives in Dresden a picture survives of Putin during his Dresden years. He"s in a group of senior Soviet and East German military and security figures - a relatively junior figure, off to one side, but already networking among the elite.

Vladimir Putin is standing second from the left in the front row

Prof Karen Dawisha of Miami University, author of Putin"s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, says there are people he met in Dresden "who have then gone on… to be part of his inner core".

They include Sergey Chemezov, who for years headed Russia"s arms export agency and now runs a state programme supporting technology, and Nikolai Tokarev head of the state pipeline company, Transneft.
And it"s not only former Russian colleagues who"ve stayed close to Putin.

* * *

While Showtime has limited the distribution of "The Putin Interviews", in the interview below Stone speaks to the FT"s Matthew Garrahan and explains why western world has Vladimir Putin all wrong.

The Washington Post Actually Takes Russian Government Money (Unlike The Websites It Helped Slander)

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson interviewed the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple and brought up the fact that the paper regularly receives money from the Russian government to publish propaganda known as “native advertising” within the contents of the newspaper. This was news to me.

Here’s the clip.

As you heard, the paid Russian propaganda sections are known as “Russia: Beyond the Headlines.” The earliest article I found about it was published in Slate back in 2007 in the piece, Hail to the Return of Motherland-Protecting Propaganda! 

Here are a few excerpts:

Soviet propaganda hit the skids during the Gorbachev era, and as the empire broke up, its propaganda essentially vanished. But the heavy-handed purveyors of party-line orthodoxy and nationalist cant have returned with the rise of President Vladimir Putin, and a demonstration of this lost art’s resurgence can be found in a 10-page advertising supplement to today’s (Aug. 30) Washington Post, titled “Russia: Beyond the Headlines.” (It can also be viewed on the newspaper’s Web site.)

Produced by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official Russian government newspaper, the section mimics the look and feel of a hometown paper, with news, an op-edsection, a sports feature (Maria Sharapova), two business pages, an entertainment page, and even a recipe for “Salad Oliver.” But beneath the shattered syntax of these laughable pieces beats the bloody red heart of the tone-deaf Soviet propagandist.

On the opinion page, we learn in “Dog-Walking - a Gateway to Wisdom” that Vladimir Putin likes Labradors and takes Connie, his Lab, with him to televised events. “Russia’s citizens like Putin, and that’s probably why there are a fair number of Labradors on my neighborhood streets,” the writer states. All glory to Labrador-loving Comrade Putin and his patriotic walking-dog, Connie!

Now check out the following excerpts from a 2015 article on the topic from The Daily Caller titled, China, Russia Pay Washington Post To Publish Their Propaganda:

Chinese and Russian propaganda supplements are regularly included in The Washington Post, but the widely read newspaper won’t say how much money it gets on the deals.

China Watch – a China Daily publication – and Russia Beyond The Headlines – a Rossiyskaya Gazeta publication – have both appeared in the Post for years as paid advertising supplements. Both foreign periodicals are owned and operated by their respective governments.

The Russia Beyond The Headlines material has appeared in other major news papers, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

I find all of this extremely interesting, as well as disturbingly dishonest and hypocritical, considering that The Washington Post itself played a major role in falsely claiming that 200 websites (including this one), were somehow doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin.

As I discussed in last year’s post, Liberty Blitzkrieg Included on Washington Post Highlighted Hit List of “Russian Propaganda” Websites:

What’s particularly interesting about this list, isn’t the fact that a bunch of anonymous whiners decided to demonize successful critics of insane, inhumane and ethically indefensible U.S. government policy, but rather the fact that the Washington Post decided to craft an entire article around such a laughably ridiculous list. This just further proves a point that is rapidly becoming common knowledge amongst U.S. citizens with more than a couple of brain cells to rub together. The mainstream media is the real “fake news.”

Let’s take Liberty Blitzkrieg for example. Despite the fact that my site is mentioned on “the list,” nobody from PropOrNot bothered to contact me while doing their “research.” They could’ve asked very simple questions about how the site is run, who owns it, and who makes decisions about editorial content. Furthermore, I doubt they did any such research with regard to any of the mentioned sites before slandering them.

Since they failed to do any real work, let me answer several of these questions. I, Michael Krieger, am the 100% owner of Liberty Blitzkrieg. I am the only person who makes decisions on what to publish and when. I have absolutely no connections, financial or otherwise, to the Russian government, Russian interests, or the interests of any other government or government related group. Moreover, there is simply nobody on planet earth who has any influence on what I write or what I publish. I left a very successful and financially lucrative job to do what I do now because my passions and ethical grounding pushed me in this direction. If I was interested in making enormous sums of money, I could’ve easily stayed on Wall Street.

Moreover, I rarely write about Russia, with the exception of trying to prevent insane neocons and neoliberals in our government from actively seeking a military confrontation, because I — like most normal human beings — would prefer not to contribute to the manifestation of World War 3. Likewise, I try to prevent war breaking out in all circumstances where I think it can and should be avoided. I intentionally almost never use RT as a source, and I’ve never quoted anything from Sputnik. Unlike The Washington Post, I try to be extremely diligent about not publishing fake news, but I am a very strong critic of U.S. government policy, because much of U.S. government policy is certifiably insane and unethical. You can disagree with my opinion on that all you’d like, but I challenge anyone to find anything that could reasonably be considered pro-Russia propaganda on my website. If Liberty Blitzkrieg really is a Russian propaganda site, this should be easy to do since I’ve published thousands of articles over the years.

The fact that The Washington Post would give credibility to a obviously ridiculous organization with an entirely invented list of “Russian propaganda websites,” knowing all the while that they themselves were the ones taking Russian government money is the height of hypocrisy, dishonesty and deceitful journalism. Once again proving the obvious point: The mainstream media is the real fake news. 

Finally, if you want to help us in the struggle between real, independent media and fake, billionaire-owned mainstream propaganda press, consider visiting our Support Page.

Gorbachev: ‘It All Looks as If the World Is Preparing for War’

January 28, 2017   |   Darius Shahtahmasebi

(ANTIMEDIA) The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced on Thursday of this week that the Doomsday Clock now stands at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. This spine-tingling announcement suggests that existential threats now pose a greater threat to humanity than they have at any time since the height of the Cold War.

“This is the closest to midnight the Doomsday Clock has ever been in the lifetime of almost everyone in this room. It’s been 64 years since it was closer,” said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and the chair of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors.

Now is the time to panic — or not, depending on your level of resolve (or apathy).

Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union and author of The New Russia, wrote an article published in TIME Magazine entitled “It All Looks as if the World Is Preparing For War.” In the article, Gorbachev notes:

“Today, however, the nuclear threat once again seems real. Relations between the great powers have been going from bad to worse for several years now. The advocates for arms build-up and the military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands.”

Gorbachev is not overstating the threat of global warfare. In an interview with Prism magazine, retired Army General Stanley McChrystal issued two warnings that, as noted by Foreign Policy magazine, are “hair-raising” to say the least.

“A European war is not unthinkable,” McChrystal explained. “People who want to believe that a war in Europe is not possible might be in for a surprise. We have to acknowledge great power politics; we can’t pretend that they are gone.”

McChrystal admits the U.S. made vital mistakes in speedily invading Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as “paying a high price” in Syria. As he has observed:

“In the case of Afghanistan, immediately after 9/11, in terms of military action we should have done nothing initially. I now believe we should have taken the first year after 9/11 and sent 10,000 young Americans—military, civilians, diplomats—to language school; Pashtu, Dari, Arabic. We should have started to build up the capacity we didn’t have. I would have spent that year with diplomats traveling the world as the aggrieved party,” McChrystal stated.

Now that the world is headed down the path toward a possible world war, McChrystal acknowledges the unthinkable is to follow: the erosion of our civil liberties, which will directly impact on ordinary civilians.

“We are beginning an era in which our ability to leverage technology to track people and control populations is going to create a lot of tension; I think we are going to see a lot more population control measures. We are going to have to give up a lot more of our precious civil rights than most of us imagine because we want security,” McChrystal added.

Speaking to Republican policymakers in Philadelphia, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May stated that Britain and the U.S. will no longer invade sovereign foreign nations “in an attempt to make the world in their own image.” Such an ambiguous statement makes it unclear whether this means Britain and the U.S. will still invade sovereign nations for other reasons, especially in light of May’s statement that “nor can we afford to stand idly by when the threat is real and when it is in our own interests to intervene.”

What May’s address really symbolizes is that the U.K. will still continue to follow the U.S. hand-in-hand, as has been the case for decades. This can be seen most clearly in the events following Donald Trump’s calls to focus more on ISIS as opposed to Assad in Syria. Britain’s answer to Donald Trump in the form of Foreign Minister Boris Johnson followed suit, stating it is “better sometimes to have a tyrant than not to have a ruler at all.”

Not surprisingly, as a result of her comments and commitment to the U.S.-U.K alliance, May just secured “100% support” for NATO from President Trump.

Instead of focusing on Assad in Syria, as Obama and former prime minister, David Cameron did, May made it clear the U.K. and U.S.’ renewed focus is on this recently adopted approach to foreign policy: Iran. May stated that pushing back on “Iran’s aggressive efforts” to increase its “arc of influence from Tehran through to the Mediterranean” was a “priority.”

Essentially, despite May’s rhetoric, nothing will actually change in practice. War is still a reality; it just might take place in a different theater.

As a result, it is no surprise that the U.K. and the U.S. have been the most staunch backers of the Saudi-led brutal assault on Yemen, as it is argued a Houthi-led government in Yemen could align itself with Iran, creating an Iranian-influenced adversary on Riyadh’s doorstep.

It should also be noted that Iran is bound to Syria by a mutual defense agreement. Russia and China have made it abundantly clear they will not tolerate any attack on Syria or Iran, as evidenced by Russia’s decision to overtly intervene in the Syrian war in 2015. Further, Iran may eventually join the Eurasian security bloc, placing the Islamic Republic into a direct alliance with nuclear powers Russia and China.

In turn, the U.K. and the U.S. are surrounding Russia with troops, missiles, tanks, and everything in between.

Does this sound like the actions of two countries that will no longer invade sovereign nations to shape the world in their image?

There is no way around this delicate issue other than to completely dismantle the world’s current system of war. As noted by Forbes:

“However, there is more to averting nuclear holocaust than having a robust strategic force. The U.S. needs to avoid getting into non-nuclear conflicts and crises that could escalate to the nuclear level. Eastern Europe is the place where such a scenario is most likely to unfold, because since the Cold War ended, the U.S. has extended security guarantees to former Soviet republics and satellites that lie close to the Russian heartland.”

Gorbachev himself has acknowledged this chilling fact and offered his vast experience in this area. The whole world should heed his words:

“In modern world, wars must be outlawed, because none of the global problems we are facing can be resolved by war — not poverty, nor the environment, migration, population growth, or shortages of resources.” [emphasis added]

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This article (Gorbachev: ‘It All Looks as If the World Is Preparing for War’) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Darius Shahtahmasebi and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.

In His First Foreign Trip As President, Trump Plans To Meet With Putin In Reykjavik

Donald Trump and his advisers have told British officials their administration’s first foreign trip will be a meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in the capital of Iceland, the Sunday Times reported, citing an unidentified source, a move that is certain to unleash even more domestic and foreign criticism of Trump"s alleged proximity to the Russian leader.

According to The Sunday Times, Trump hopes to conduct the Putin "summit" within weeks of his January 20 inauguration in the Reykjavik, "emulating Ronald Reagan’s Cold War deal-making in Reykjavik with Mikhail Gorbachev."  

The meeting with Vladimir Putin, which would be Donald Trump’s first foreign trip, is where Trump will start working on an agreement limiting nuclear arms within a "reset" in US-Russian relations. The Times adds that according to sources close to the Russian Embassy in London, Moscow would agree to a summit between the two heads of state.

A summit between Putin and Trump could reset western relations with the Kremlin.

The meeting would come just over 30 years since the historic summit on October 11-12, 1986, between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the second in a series of meetings that relaunched the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and ultimately led to a material de-escalation in the raging, at the time, nuclear arms race between the USA and USSR.

And, just like Ronald Reagan then, Trump wants to discuss nuclear disarmament with Putin, the Times reported, adding that sources said Trump wants to meet Putin outside of Russia and that Reykjavik was a strong contender.

The latest report comes just a day after Trump told the WSJ he is open to lifting the sanctions against Russia “under certain conditions.” In an hour-long interview on Friday, Trump said he wants to keep the sanctions that the Obama administration recently imposed on Russia “at least for a period of time.” However, the President-elect added that he would consider lifting the restrictions, depending on how helpful the Russians are in the fight against terrorism, as well as assisting with other goals that he feels are key to the US.

The meeting has not officially been announced by Trump team officials or Russian officials, and reports say Iceland has not been formally contacted about such an event. But more importantly, the talking points for all of Sunday"s news shows and media talking points are currently being updated to reflect this latest olive branch by the Trump administration toward the Kremlin, which will be promptly spun as further "proof" of Putin"s diabolical control over his brand news Oval Office puppet.