US Navy turning Australia into full-service submarine hub

By Dave DeCamp 

Antiwar.com

Australia is set to spend over $100 billion over the coming decades on submarines under the AUKUS deal 

The US Navy wants a full-service submarine hub in Australia that can oversee all underwater activity in the Asia Pacific, including production and repairs, Defense News reported.

The report cited comments from Navy Secretary Carlos del Toro, whose vision will be possible under AUKUS, the military pact signed between the US, Britain, and Australia in 2021 as part of an effort to build alliances against China.

AUKUS focuses on technology-sharing and will give Australia access to American and British nuclear-powered submarine technologies. Del Toro said that AUKUS is about “being able to repair our submarines much further out, being able to build them in Australia as well, too, and create that much more presence in the Indo-Pacific where we need it the most.”

President Biden, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are expected to unveil the details of AUKUS submarine deals on Monday during a meeting aboard a submarine in San Diego. Australia is expected first to purchase American Virginia class attack submarines, which will be delivered in the early 2030s. 

Australia will then purchase a new British-designed submarine, called the SSN-AUKUS, that’s expected to arrive in the 2040s. The ultimate goal is for Australia to be able to build its own SSN-AUKUS submarines with US or British-provided nuclear propulsion. Over the next few decades, Canberra is expected to spend over $100 billion on the plan. 

The submarines Australia will acquire are not expected to be armed with nuclear weapons, but that could always change. Either way, China views the submarine buildup as a provocation since the underwater craft will be used to patrol the waters of the South China Sea. The US also has plans to deploy more troops and aircraft to Australia as part of its buildup, including nuclear-capable B-52 bombers.  

U.S.-NATO strategy: Attack Crimea next

 

 

SouthFront 

 

Kiev threatens Crimeans 

Amid the wave of loud claims on the upcoming Ukrainian offensive on Crimea, the Kiev officials do not hide the Nazi nature of their goals. Adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine turned to direct threats to the citizens of the Russian peninsula.

The tourist season in Crimea this year will be “hot,” said Mikhail Podolyak, adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine, in his recent interview.  

  “Ukraine will explain that it needs to be treated not with respect, but with great fear,” he claimed.

Podolyak believes that the population od Crimea has always been “oriented incorrectly” and did not understand that there is a state of Ukraine. Today, Kiev is publicly declaring its wet dreams of changing the people’s mind and force them to treat the terrorist Kiev correctly, i.e. with great fear.

The Kiev regime does not stop claiming its rights on the strategically important peninsula. However, it openly admits that the population of Crimea did not even acknowledge such a state as Ukraine and has always identified itself as Russian.

Podolyak’s claims once again confirm that:

•     Nazis are in power in Ukraine;

•     they are still ready to force the Russian people to “love Ukraine” by military and terrorist means, as they have been trying to do for a decade in Crimea as well as in the republics of Donbass;

•    that the Crimeans made the right choice during the referendum in 2014, which indeed showed the true will of the population of the peninsula.

 

In 2014 Crimean citizens watched the chaos in Kiev on TV during the Obama administration orchestrated coup d'etat, Crimean people immediately self-organized a referendum asking to return to the Russian Federation.

The Kiev regime has completely lost the country’s statehood. It has no means to rebuild an economy that has been in decline for decades and has been badly damaged by years of hostilities. Kiev has no means to restore its own regions, not to mention Russia’s Donbass and Crimea, which it dreams of returning by force, realizing that the population of these regions will never voluntarily become part of the Nazi Ukraine.

Ukraine has been sold to the West, and Kiev will have to pay for all the “support” from NATO. For Kiev, control of Crimea is just a populist narrative disseminated by officials to assure the population that they lose no hope of wining the Russians. For Washington, control of Crimea, which it would gain if the Russian army failed, is control of a strategically important peninsula from which it could threaten the European part of Russia and prevent Moscow from its power in the Black Sea.

Control of Crimea is vital to Moscow, which it is likely to fight for by all means, including nuclear weapons.

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Any US-NATO directed attack on Crimea would very likely be a key trigger that could escalate into nuclear war. 

Good luck trying to find water, shelter, food after such a global nuclear battle. If you even live long enough to need those things. Hiroshima & Nagasaki times 100%.

I've got a new sign and held it during vigils in the area. Getting interesting reactions. It reads Nuclear war with China and Russia?!!?

We've got to get more folks thinking about that very question.

We had 19 people at Bath Iron Works shipyard last Saturday for Lenten vigil. BIW is owned by General Dynamics and they build Navy Aegis destroyers which are outfitted with nuclear-capable cruise first-strike missiles. They also can launch so-called 'missile defense' interceptors that are key elements in Pentagon first-strike planning - what they call Prompt Global Strike. 

During our closing circle in front of the BIW admin office building, Mary Beth brought up the recent news that a Bath-built Navy Aegis destroyer had recently ported at the new base on Jeju Island, South Korea. 

Because of the nature of this US-forward deployed naval warship aimed at China, our friends on Jeju Island are now targets. Most Americans have no idea - nor do most of them appear to be at all interested. Why? You take a crack at that one. Leave your ideas in the comments.

Best wishes to all.

Bruce 

Drug Warriors of Ukraine

 

SouthFront

During the ongoing Russian military operation in Ukraine, Russian forces find not only a large amount of foreign weapons, but also drugs in numerous captured Ukrainian positions. This is the main tool used by the Ukrainian military commanders to motivate their subordinates. It turns out that it is not patriotic feelings that support the Ukrainian army and Nazi military formations, but drugs and psychotropic substances.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky himself sets an explicit example of “patriotism” to the Ukrainian soldiers and regularly appears drugged in public. Ukrainian soldiers do not lag behind their leader and are also heavily addicted to drugs and various “war chemicals”. 

Ukrainian military commanders, who are interested in boosting the morale of their fighters, are turning a blind eye to the use of psychoactive substances on the military positions. In fact they personally control the supply of drugs to their units. 

Another Ukrainian artilleryman captured by the DPR fighters who admitted that he had shelled civilians in Mariupol, confirmed that almost all Ukrainian servicemen are using drugs.

Earlier, during the battles for the city, a drug laboratory of the notorious Right Sector Nazi battalion was captured by Russian forces in the village of Sopino near Mariupol, where the cheapest illegal drugs were produced.

A lot of drugs are produced at home laboratories, while there is industrial scale of drug production in the country and numerous logistical chains for transporting foreign drugs, including through humanitarian and military aid channels from NATO countries.

Drug trafficking to Ukraine is controlled at the highest level. In particular, it is supervised by the Security Service of Ukraine throughout the country’s independence.

~ See videos of POW's telling their drug stories while in Ukraine army here

Bad economic news: Does Washington know what it is doing?

 

George Galloway

"INTERVIEW: Professor Richard Wolff on being in Yale economics class with current US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who learned everything alongside him and betrayed it all.

India's view on U.S. bank collapse

 

Firstpost

Biden Tries To Avert A Banking Crisis In the U.S. 

 

Vantage with Palki Sharma.

President Joe Biden has said the US will do "whatever is needed" to shore up the banking system. 

This comes after two American banks collapsed in less than 48 hours.

Is the US under threat of another major financial crisis? 

Palki Sharma tells you more.

South Korea: Stop U.S. war games aimed at NK & China

 

South Korean civil groups on Saturday rallied near the Office of the President in Seoul to protest against the upcoming military drills with the U.S. scheduled from March 13 to 23. 

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on Friday vowed to strengthen deterrence against threats from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) by establishing a nuclear planning and implementation system with the United States. He also said South Korea will step up joint military drills with the U.S., which worried South Korean people that such large-scale drills could lead to direct confrontation.

Forced conscription in Ukraine

 

Kiev has taken to rounding up men 16-65 years of age on the streets, dragging them into vehicles and sending them to the front lines with little to no training and armaments. The perfect description of 'cannon fodder'

By Petr Lavrenin (Odessa-born political journalist and expert on Ukraine and the former Soviet Union)

Cases where law enforcement officers have applied force when handing out conscription notices and illegally delivered men to enlistment offices have given rise to public discontent. However, the Ukrainian authorities clearly have no intention of pausing enlistment because the situation remains critical at some sections of the front. 

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are losing their grip on fortified areas around Artyomovsk (Bakhmut), and taking huge numbers of casualties, according to the Guardian and other media outlets. Meanwhile, Kiev continues to issue mobilization summonses and is sending people without proper training. 

Men of military age are being hunted down, and videos showing military commissars going to extreme lengths to hand out summonses, including by force, constantly circulate on social media. 

Odessa, in particular, stands out in this respect. For example, military commissars were caught driving around the city in ambulances. When they came across men of the appropriate age, they stopped, handed over summonses and drove on. After videos emerged on social networks, local military commissars had to explain themselves and claimed that they were given the ambulance to use for their work. 

The case of Bogdan Pokito received particularly wide attention. The 33-year-old resident of Ternopol was handed a summons at a bus stop at the end of January and, without any military training, sent to the front near Artyomovsk, where he died just a few days later.  

Ukraine badly needs conscripts, but the enthusiasm of military-age men is declining and the authorities know it. 

In August 2022, the Ministry of Health calculated the approximate number of Ukrainians who will suffer from mental disorders in the aftermath of the war. At the time, Minister Viktor Lyashko predicted that 15 million people would be affected. “We are already predicting in absolute terms the number of people who will suffer from mental disorders as a result of this war — that’s over 15 million people. These are the people who will at least need psychological support,” the official said. 

It is still unclear how many people the Armed Forces of Ukraine plan to draft in the near future. But over the past two months, about 30,000 servicemen have been sent to Western Europe for training. These are mostly people without prior military experience who need to be trained on Western equipment. Add to this the number of conscripts required to urgently replace losses at the front and those needed for auxiliary work outside the active war zone, and the figures may drastically grow. 

~ Reprinted in part from a much larger article that ran in RT

~ ~ See this short video on Ukrainian troops killing civilians in the Dombass region of eastern Ukraine where the Russian-ethnics predominate 

Swedish researcher: U.S. did Nordstream

 

Swedish researcher Jan Oberg, the co-founder of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, alleged that the U.S. had both the motive and the capability to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline in order to wage an "economic war" against its European allies for selfish gain. 

Oberg said U.S. sales of higher-priced LNG [fracked] gas (at 4X the sale cost in the US) to European countries since the explosions belie its motive.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One must wonder why the leading enviro groups are saying virtually nothing about the massive methane release after Biden's Nordstream attack as well as the damage done in the US during the fracking process. Surely these are HOT environmental issues. 

If Trump was in office those groups would be screaming. Are they so quiet now because many of them get funding from foundations/donors linked to the Dem party?

Bruce

The EU empties the arsenals to fill the arsenals

 

After each US-NATO war game near the Russian border, the weapons used

 are sent to Poland and stored at this Pentagon weapons hub for future use. The US-NATO have been planning this proxy war in Ukraine for many years.

EU plans for long-war against Russia

By Manlio Dinucci (Italy)

The defense ministers of the 27 EU countries meeting in Stockholm approved the plan - Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy presented it - for "the joint purchase of large-caliber ammunition". The meeting was attended by the Minister of Defense of Ukraine (despite the fact that Ukraine is not a member of the EU), who "explained what are the military needs of Ukraine". Borrell said: "We are in times of war and we must have a war mentality."  

He then illustrated the Plan, which includes three phases:  

1) To draw artillery shells, especially 155 mm ones, from stocks of EU Member States and immediately supply them to Ukraine. The money comes from the European Peace Facility (EPF), which has already set aside €3.6 billion (paid by European citizens) for this purpose. 

2) To achieve an agreement between the 27 EU Member States for the joint purchase of 155 mm shells by signing the first seven-year contracts as early as next month. This is a "massive order" both to restore and augment national stockpiles and to secure supplies to Ukraine. 

3) To ensure the long-term increase of ammunition production in Europe support defense industries to secure supplies to Ukraine in the long term. (The EU expects to supply about one million artillery shells).  

Borrell also communicated that “by the end of March, our Military Assistance Mission will train more than 11,000 Ukrainian soldiers. By the end of the year, we expect to  train 30,000 soldiers.” The EU has allocated 18 billion euros to support Ukraine (they are always paid by European citizens). It also summed up the purpose of the Plan with these words: "To win peace, Ukraine must win the war. And that is why  we must continue to support Ukraine in order to win the peace.” The European Union thus openly goes to war against Russia within the framework of the increasingly dangerous US-NATO strategy. 

In Moscow, the assassination of Konstantin Malofeev, CEO of the Tsargrad group, has been foiled. It is the same type of attack with a bomb placed under his car as the kind of attack that killed journalist Daria Dugina in August 2022. It is part of a series of terrorist attacks against Russian journalists and media managers, carried out by the Ukrainian secret services under US-NATO direction. 

Sunday song

 

 

Too many blacks in UK for Ukraine refugees

 

 

 

African Diaspora News Channel

Wongel Zelalem reports on Ukrainian refugees that fled their country to live in the UK complaining about being around black people.

U.S. must 'retreat from the region'

 

CGTN Europe spoke to Mohammad Marandi, Iranian American academic and political analyst.

 

Iran and Saudi Arabia have agreed to resume diplomatic relations after seven years of tensions. The two countries released a statement on the agreement which was brokered by China. 

Embassies will re-open within the next two months. 

Riyadh and Tehran severed their diplomatic ties after protesters stormed the Saudi embassy in 2016 over the execution of a Saudi Shia cleric. 

Iranian affairs analyst Seyed Mostafa Khoshcheshm unpacks what led to this breakthrough. 

U.S. regime change in Pakistan continues

 

 

Imran Khan is running at 70-80% in official polls, which is why they have been banned by the puppet regime in Pakistan and why he’s banned from all TV channels.

U.S. using North Korea as pretext to attack China

 North Korea has an estimated military budget of $4 Billion.  That amount is less than that of the NYPD.

 

By K.J. Noh
 
The Japan, ROK, and US military budgets are respectively, 12x, 12x, and 200+x that of North Korea (NK).   

NK does not constitute a military threat.  It is attempting to deter threats the only way it can.  

See here for my detailed article explaining why NK seeks a nuclear deterrent.

Also to be very clear, this escalation in hostilities is only incidental to NK.  NK is a pretext.

This has to do with US plans to roll back and take down China by initiating a multi-front kinetic war in order to maintain US global hegemony in the Pacific and across the Asian continent.  China, the BRICS, the SCO, and BRI-partners are in the process of creating a multi-lateral order that breaks out from the US-led Western Atlantic Rules Based International Order (RBIO).  This signals the decline of western colonial/imperial domination, the end of the 'Washington consensus'/US RBIO, and the recreation of a truly multi-lateral economic and political order (that was previously snuffed out after Bandung through the 'Jakarta method'). US dollar seigniorage and its exorbitant privilege will not be spared if this is successful.  The US will wage war to prevent this pluripolar world from arising and to prevent its extractive, neo-colonial relationship with the rest of the world from being disrupted and its unlimited credit card from being taken away.  

Because of this, the US is escalating to war; and using NK specifically as a pretext to rehearse and escalate war against China.  NK-SK relations were calm when military exercises were suspended.  Now exercises/wargames have been increased 20 fold; non-stop wargames have been taking place over the past 6 months; in reaction, NK has fired some missiles (over 17,000 missiles have been launched & tested by countries other than NK). 

 

During the Korean War (1950-1953) the U.S. forced North Korean and Chinese POW's to build replicas of the Statue of Liberty and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. U.S. media ran stories and photos of this and proclaimed that the POW's had seen the light and now supported the U.S. war and real 'democracy' for North Korea. 

This coming war is not about Korea per se, but is likely to be dispersed across multiple theaters: the South China Sea, Taiwan island, Korea and across multiple archipelago platforms across the Pacific, especially along the first and second island chains. Japan is key because of its force projection capacity as a remilitarizing power and the bases on Okinawa (Japan has the 5th most powerful military in the world, and will have the 3rd largest military budget soon).  South Korea is key because the ROK army is still under US 'operational control' and will serve as the main military force against China (SK has the largest military manpower in the world -- 3.5 million troops, including reservists; it is the only country of the three to have a meaningful conscription). 

Taiwan is critical for its geostrategic position: the Japanese and the US have historically used Taiwan island as an unsinkable aircraft carrier to launch attacks against China, and it controls the Bashi channel that allows China to move into the blue waters of the pacific for a credible deterrent.  Taiwan island is being prepared as a Kamikaze platform: it is being prepared as a bait; a "suicide" porcupine, a Ukraine 2.0.     

The ruling Democratic People's Party (with close ties to the US and Japan are driving this; the opposition KMT and the vast majority of the people on Taiwan Island are not).  The plan is to keep crossing red-lines and stuffing Taiwan full of weapons and troops until China reacts.  Then, through a 'binding strategy', similar to that used against Russia, the US plans to sanction China and usher its allies into kinetic action.  

Another thing to remember is that Korea-Japan-Taiwan have always been historically-bound triplets: Nothing historic happens in Korea without it affecting Taiwan and vice versa.  A few examples:

1895: China fought a war against Japanese colonial ambitions on the Korean peninsula after a request for help from Korea.  The Japanese won and took Taiwan as war booty.  (This can be seen as the unofficial beginning of the Japanese colonization of Korea; Taiwan and Korea have always been paired colonial beachheads against China)

1950: China was preparing to retake Taiwan island when war broke out on the Korean peninsula, forcing the Chinese to aid NK.  (The Korean war can be considered one prong of a  three-pronged war along Myanmar, Korea, and Taiwan to rollback China.  The war in Myanmar, waged by the KMT lasted until the 1970's).

2023--2025: The US has designs to trigger a war with China over Taiwan Island while simultaneously escalating against NK, a similar dynamic to 1950. 

 

~ K.J. Noh is a scholar and peace activist focused on the geopolitics of the Asian continent. He writes for Counterpunch and Dissident voice, and reports for local and international media.

Latest on AI - very important video

 

 

GNspace4peace

The Global Network's latest educational video. 

This month board member Will Griffin has created one about AI and some of the serious implications involved.

Help us by sharing this video widely as most folks don't know much about AI.

Also considering subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Thanks for watching.

See links to all Global Network social media outlets at https://linktr.ee/space4peace

Bruce

One year mark: My weekly vigil

 

I was on the cold windy street in Brunswick, Maine again today. During the past year, I've gone out to hold a sign saying 'No war with Russia' or the one pictured above about NATO. I've only missed a handful of weeks due to severe weather.

Today I was alone - usually there are 1-2 others who join me at the weekly vigils. During warmer weather we would have 5-6 of us.

Two cars stopped today. The first one rolled down the window and an older man said to me, 'It's the deep state, the neo-cons pushing this war with Russia'. The second car, a younger man, leaned toward me from behind the wheel and said, 'I am whole heartedly with you. No war with Russia'. 

People usually don't stop and roll down their windows to talk. I'll take it as a good sign.

I got one extended middle finger from an older guy driving a luxury car. I chalked him up as likely retired CIA or military. (Camden, Maine on Hwy 1 is a hotbed of retired CIA types.) 

Got a good number of waves and some honks too.

I plan to keep these Thursday peace vigils going as long as necessary.

Coming up on March 18 is the national protest at the White House in Washington. Many national and local groups are endorsing the event. 

Here in Maine on that same day we will do a similar protest on a busy street in Westbrook (next to Portland). 

We will hold our 'No war with Russia' peace vigil on Saturday, March 18 at 1:30 pm in Westbrook. (Intersection of Stroudwater St. & William Clark Dr. (Westbrook Market & Dunkin are there).

 

Co-Sponsors: Maine Natural Guard, PeaceWorks of Greater Brunswick, Maine Green Independent Party, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, Communist Party of Maine, Party for Socialism & Liberation Maine, Maine Veterans For Peace

Please join us if you can. After the event we will go together to a local Mexican restaurant for a late lunch and discussion.

Bruce 

Free Assange film coming to Maine

 

 

The campaign to free Julian Assange takes on intimate dimensions in this portrait of a father’s fight to save his son. #Ithaka

Filmed over two years across the UK, Europe and the US, this documentary follows 76 year-old retired builder, John Shipton’s tireless campaign to save his son, Julian Assange. 

The world’s most famous political prisoner, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, has become an emblem of an international arm wrestle over freedom of journalism, government corruption and unpunished war crimes.

Now with Julian facing a 175 year sentence if extradited to the US, his family members are confronting the prospect of losing Julian forever to the abyss of the US justice system.

This film will play on March 25 at the Maine Film Center in Waterville, Maine on March 25 at 7:00 pm.

U.S. re-militarizing the Philippines

 

 Click on image for better view

Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Hawaii

 26 Feb 2023 

Washington playing with nuclear fire

 

U.S. has constructed two 'missile defense' bases in Poland and Romania. They can fire MD interceptor missiles (the shield) after a Pentagon 'first-strike attack' or can launch Tomahawk first-strike nuclear capable cruise missiles. A Cuban missile crisis in reverse. (These same launch capabilities are loaded on Navy Aegis destroyers built at Bath Iron Works in Maine.)

 

By Drago Bosnic (Independent geopolitical and military analyst)

SouthFront

Amid incessant NATO aggression and escalation of hostilities within Russia, now also including US-backed Kiev regime terrorists targeting schoolchildren, Moscow has started revamping the doctrinal approach to the use of its strategic arsenal. Rather curiously, the new document, published by the “Military Thought” magazine run by the Russian Ministry of Defense, attracted little attention in Western media. It should be noted that such changes are made only once in several decades or even longer. The strategic posturing of countries, particularly superpowers, is usually “set in stone”, meaning that changes are prompted only by major events of historical proportions.

It was only a week ago that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Russia is suspending its participation in the New START arms control treaty. Putin cited continuous, blatant US and NATO violations of the agreement as the primary reason for the decision. With the treaty becoming a mere formality, Russia is not bound to honor it anymore, as this would undermine its own strategic security. With that in mind, the Russian Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN) started implementing new ways to deter any possible direct US/NATO attacks on Russia, particularly as the belligerent thalassocracy has repeatedly floated the idea of “decapitation strikes” on Moscow in the last several months.

The authors of the document are Deputy Commander of the RVSN Igor Fazletdinov and retired Colonel Vladimir Lumpov. They argue that the US is on a collision course with Russia, as Washington DC and its vassals are becoming increasingly aggressive due to their political elites’ frustration with the loss of the “sole superpower” status. With America seeing Moscow as the main culprit for this, it plans on defeating Russia in a “single blow”, thus eliminating the main obstacle to total US global dominance. Fazletdinov and Lumpov argue that Washington DC plans to defeat Russia in a “strategic (global) multi-sphere operation”, the primary goal of which will be the elimination of its strategic arsenal.

    “[The US believes] this goal is only achievable in the event of an instantaneous nuclear strike against the RVSN or at least with the deployment of ABM [anti-ballistic missile] systems around Russia. The US plan is to destroy at least 65-70% of Russian strategic nuclear forces as part of its Prompt Global Strike concept, with the rest eliminated by American ABM systems. The US would then launch an all-out nuclear attack on the Russian Federation in order to destroy it,” authors warn, further adding: “We aim to repel a potential [US] nuclear strike, preserve our own nuclear capabilities, suppress the deployed US missile defense systems and cause unacceptable damage in case of [US/NATO] aggression.”

 

 

 

Pentagon 'missile defense' systems - the shield to be used after a U.S. first-strike attack on Russia or China is launched. Washington is encircling Russia and China with these systems. How are those two nations supposed to react to these aggressive US-NATO strategies?

Russia certainly has the capability to almost instantly change its strategic doctrine. Unlike its NATO rivals (including the US itself), Moscow leads the world in several key military technologies, which also include at least a dozen operational hypersonic weapons deployed over the last 5-10 years. And indeed, in early December President Putin stated Russia could adopt a US-style concept of preemptive strikes. The program mentioned by Russian military experts, called PGS (Prompt Global Strike), is a US attempt to develop a capability that enables it to attack enemy strategic targets with precision-guided weapons anywhere in the world within just one hour. Still, the US is yet to deploy a weapon that can achieve that.

On the other hand, with the Mach 12-capable “Kinzhal” air-launched hypersonic missile carried by modified MiG-31K/I interceptors and Tu-22M3 long-range bombers, the Mach 28-capable “Avangard” HGV (hypersonic glide vehicle) deployed on various ICBMs and the Mach 9-capable scramjet-powered “Zircon” hypersonic cruise missile deployed on naval (both submarines and surface ships) and (soon) on land platforms, Russia is the only country on the planet with the capability to immediately implement such a program. And yet, Moscow still refrains from going ahead with such plans, although its justification for this would hold much better than that of the US.

The authors further emphasize “the need to make sure the US was perfectly aware of the impossibility of the complete destruction of our strategic capabilities and the inevitability of a crushing retaliatory nuclear strike”. However, the problem with this is that the establishment in Washington DC has become so detached from reality that they believe the Kiev regime has the capacity to not only “push Russia back from Donbass”, but also “retake Crimea”, despite relevant reports on the Neo-Nazi junta’s staggering losses. It can hardly be expected from them to be aware of Russia’s wholly undeniable capability to obliterate the continental US in minutes.

American policymakers take advice from former high-ranking generals and officers who somehow managed to lose a war against outnumbered and outgunned AK-wielding insurgents in sandals while wasting trillions of dollars and deploying hundreds of thousands of troops during the two decades of continuous NATO aggression in Afghanistan. This is without taking into account the technological disparity which was so overwhelmingly on the side of the aggressors that it can quite literally be measured in centuries rather than decades. Still, delusions and living in parallel reality seem to be a given for the warmongers at the Pentagon.

In addition, considering the fact that Afghanistan became more peaceful and safer after the US and NATO have been soundly defeated and driven out of the country devastated by decades of incessant conflict, this clearly implies that being able to militarily beat the political West is of utmost importance for the safety of any given country. Russia’s new strategic doctrine will certainly ensure this, not just for itself but also for the entire world, as the Eurasian giant will surely remain the only global power with such a capability in the foreseeable future.

Giroux on American fascism

By  Henry Giroux

 "As the United States tips over into the abyss of fascism, state violence must be interrogated within the historical conditions that have both legitimated and normalized it over time. It must be viewed with a long durée of neoliberalism and racist violence that has become normalized in almost every aspect of daily life. The militarization of American society is now readily embraced and revealed in its turn toward a fascist politics. As long as we allow neoliberal capitalism to disconnect the fascist past from the present, the violence will continue as a matter of common sense.

"The histories of repressed others must be made visible, along with the struggles and resistance they have waged against such repression. In this instance, the apocalypse of violence must be addressed not through limited reforms but through a call for eliminating a capitalist society whose history only leads to mass suffering, staggering inequality, endless injustice and fascism itself. Labor historian Michael Yates is right in stating that 'The long rule of capital has created profoundly alienated conditions for nearly all of humanity [and we] cannot afford to settle for incremental changes….The radical upending of the social order is now hard headed realism, the only path forward.' The struggle for revolutionary socialism is no longer a utopian longing. It is an urgent necessity."

~  Henry Giroux is an American-Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.