According to the Russian Constitution amendments adopted in 2020, Vladimir Putin can run for re-election in 2030 and win another term until 2036, when he will be 84. The contest over the presidential succession may thus be postponed for another decade.
Or else it is under way already. That’s one of the stakes in the present argument in Moscow over how the Ukraine war should end between the General Staff and the Kremlin – between unconditional capitulation of the regime west of the Dnieper River to the Polish border, and the east-of-Dnieper terms Putin proposed at Istanbul in March 2022, and repeated in a speech to the Foreign Ministry this past June.
The debate in Moscow over the terms of Istanbul-I and of Putin’s proposed Istanbul-II involves much more than future control of the territories east of the Dnieper and of the territories to the west. The question is whether the military trust Putin to administer the outcome of the war which Russian voters believe has been won by the General Staff. In his June 14 speech Putin admitted to his audience of senior Foreign Ministry officials what they all knew – that he and the General Staff had disagreed over the “preservation of the Ukrainian sovereignty over these territories, provided Russia has a stable land bridge to Crimea.” Putin’s “land bridge” and other territorial concessions were dismissed by the General Staff.
One candidate has already tossed a military style cap into the succession race: this is Dmitry Medvedev, the one-term president and currently deputy secretary of the Security Council; he is 59 now, 71 in 2036.
In his Telegram platform, Medvedev has been a consistent advocate of the General Staff line: “In my opinion, recently, even theoretically, there has been one danger – the negotiation trap, into which our country could fall under certain circumstances; for example. Namely, the early unnecessary peace talks proposed by the international community and imposed on the Kiev regime with unclear prospects and consequences [Medvedev was referring to Istanbul-I]. After the neo-Nazis committed an act of terrorism in the Kursk region, everything has fallen into place. The idle chatter of unauthorized intermediaries on the topic of the beautiful world has been stopped. Now everyone understands everything, even if they don’t say it out loud. They understand that there will BE NO MORE NEGOTIATIONS UNTIL THE COMPLETE DEFEAT OF THE ENEMY! [Medvedev’s caps]”
Medvedev implies criticism of Putin but remains loyal in the hope of negotiating an amicable transfer of power between the two of them. At the same time Medvedev is signalling the General Staff that the military can trust him. But they don’t.
There is another succession candidate who is trusted by both the military and the voters, but who has not announced he is running. Putin is well aware of him; he has repeatedly tried to sideline him. This is Dmitry Rogozin, a presidential campaigner against Boris Yeltsin; Duma deputy and negotiator in Chechnya; ambassador to NATO; deputy prime minister in charge of the military industrial complex; head of Roskosmos, and now, after surviving a Ukrainian assassination attempt, senator for the Zaporozhye region in the Federation Council. Rogozin is 60; in 2036 he will be 72.
Rogozin is the son of a Russian Army general, grandson of a Russian Navy officer, great-grandson of a Red Army pilot, great-great-grandson of a general of the Russian Army in the war against Japan of 1904-05. Rogozin’s ancestors have been recorded in the Russian fight against the Teutonic Knights (13th century) and with Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin in the war against the Poles (17th century). “That is to say,” Rogozin has written, “there have been some rather decent people in my family tree”.
In a recently published book, On the Western Front, Rogozin has said more explicitly: “The war against Ukrainian radical nationalism and Russophobia is not a confrontation between armies and military technologies, but our country’s response to an existential threat to our entire people, the entire Russian civilization. This is the restoration of historical justice. This is a common cause, in which the unity of the army, society and its political class must be manifested. This is the opportunity to kick out of the country (and not let back in!) the fifth column of traitors and globalisation-mongers. The war in Ukraine is a war for Ukraine and Russia, it is a holy war for the right of the Russian people to exist and reunite on their ancestral territory. This is a war against a much stronger and more resourceful enemy, a war to force the collective West, manipulated by the Anglo-Saxons and German revanchists, to recognize Russia’s right to a safe and independent future for our children. Therefore, there should be no ‘red lines’ for us in this war…I consider it fundamentally important to constantly show universal solidarity with our army. It is impossible to maintain the illusion that the army is ‘out there doing its job’, and we continue to live as before.”
A well-informed Moscow source explains: “I will agree that the General Staff have no friends in Kremlin. [Ex-Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu and Putin’s mismanagement is blamed on them. Once they win the war, they will hit back. Or if they are not allowed to win, they will hit back. Among politicians Rogozin will be the only one with their confidence. His presence in the war zone earned him the respect of officers and men. He distanced himself from [Wagner rebel Yevgeny] Prigozhin in time. So he is not damaged goods.”
“How and when he can leverage this isn’t obvious,” the source adds a caution, warning that Putin understands the Army is a threat to his succession and is recruiting military officers to become his political protectors in the succession. Putin announced this scheme in a Kremlin ceremony on October 2, calling it “The Time of Heroes”.
The Moscow source comments: “I will not exclude several officers of mid rank – those Putin calls the new elite – will come into politics through Rodina at local and regional levels. The potency and potential is in mid ranking officers. Generals will be given cushy retirements. They will not go against Putin or the successor. This all has bad omens for Rogozin.”
Talk of the presidential succession in Moscow is strictly private. There has been no discussion, not even a passing reference to Rogozin’s credentials as a presidential candidate, in the mainstream media, in the running commentary on war operations in the military blogs, or in the nationalist press like Tsargrad.
Those who support him acknowledge the danger of provoking the Kremlin. “I don’t see any signs Putin will allow him to rise to that level” comments a Moscow source. He understands the debate over Putin’s end-of-war terms and territorial concessions is also a test of domestic political power, a rehearsal for the next presidential election.
Rogozin’s writing deals explicitly, and with the assurance of a direct participant in many of the policy and partisan battles, with ex-presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, their rise and fall from power, together with their associates. He is scathing towards the Russian foreign ministers Andrei Kozyrev (1990-96) and Igor Ivanov (1998-2004). He is not less so towards the “devilish trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin”. “It has to be pointed out that the classics of Marxism and Leninism generally disliked Russia and the Russian people; therefore, the fact that socialism had been established for the long seventy years is to be regarded as a misunderstanding , a paradox and an irony of history. The contempt with which Karl Marx refers to the Slavic nations is simply astonishing.”
Putin does not appear until Rogozin is more than half way through his book. “Young and energetic”, Rogozin acknowledged him at first. “[He] got down to business straight away…Frankly, I took a liking to ‘Putin the Hawk’.”
Rogozin chronicles his direct dealings with Putin with neutral precision on several issues – Russian engagement with the European parliament; the Chechen wars, the Beslan hostage-taking (2004) and negotiations with the Chechen leader, Akhmad Kadyrov; the status of Transdniestria and Kaliningrad; and domestic party politics and electioneering. “My previous personal experience of contacts with Mr Putin led me to believe that we held similar views.” He identifies the points on which Putin did not agree with him. He also hints that Putin would lead him to believe one thing, then do another.
“’Why don’t we combine ideas of healthy conservatism with the struggle for social justice in this country that is ripped off by corrupt thieves and oligarchs?’ I thought and decided for the time being not to attempt to unconvince Putin as to the potential ideological and practical objectives of a new project that we had come up with.” This was in 2004. In his retelling of his career in political and military administration since then – Rogozin has doctorates for two theses, “Philosophy and Theory of Wars” and “Weapons theory, military-technical policy, weapons systems” — Rogozin has challenged Putin’s constituencies but not Putin directly.
Rogozin has been consistently hostile to Putin’s economic policy advisors, Anatoly Chubais and Alexei Kudrin, the longest standing leftovers Putin has preserved from the Yeltsin administration; and to the oligarchs whom Rogozin has castigated as their paymasters. “Astounding it is how people like [Chubais] came to power”, Rogozin comments in his 2013 book. His tongue was in his cheek, and in check: Rogozin implies he knows exactly how Chubais (and his protégé Kudrin) came to power and how they kept it through 2022.
The Kremlin archive records Rogozin’s direct meetings with both President Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev over 22 years. Top: July 30, 2002 – Putin meets Rogozin, then chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs and Putin’s special envoy to the Kaliningrad Region. Below: April 12, 2022 – Putin and Rogozin meet in Blagoveschensk when Rogozin was General Director of the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities. Putin signed a decree dismissing Rogozin twelve weeks later on July 15, 2022. The opposition platform Meduza reported from Latvia that “Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin is slated to join the Russian presidential administration in the near future, Meduza has learned from three sources close to the Kremlin and an acquaintance of Rogozin’s. Exactly what position Rogozin will take is still under discussion. According to one of Meduza’s sources, Rogozin is currently one of several candidates for chief of staff (the other candidates are unknown)… Another possibility, according to Meduza’s sources, is that Dmitry Rogozin will become one of the Kremlin’s supervisors for the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics and the other Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine. In that case, Rogozin would officially be a presidential aide or a deputy chief of staff, and would replace Dmitry Kozak.” In the outcome, Rogozin was passed over for Kozak’s post, and instead Putin replaced him with Vladimir Medinsky. For the significance of Medinsky in Putin’s end-of-war negotiations with the US, read this. For Kozak’s role in running the Ukraine portfolio, read this. Before Kozak on the Ukraine portfolio, there was Vladislav Surkov. Surkov, Kozak and Rogozin are unacceptable to the US; all three are sanctioned. Medinsky is acceptable to Washington and is not sanctioned. For seventeen months after Putin had removed Rogozin from Roskosmos, the president delayed before announcing Rogozin’s appointment as senator for Zaporzhye on September 23, 2023. The milbloggers saluted: “Today, the commander of the ‘Tsar’s Wolves’ is perhaps the only senator in Russia, or even in the world, who fights on the front line. Rogozin once said that his main goal was to liberate Ukraine from fascism.” Putin had decided to subordinate Rogozin to Medinsky, and keep him out of Moscow.
In the prologue to his latest book, Rogozin writes: “I tried to write this book as truthfully as possible, reproducing important dialogues and details of events from memory. Of course, my assessments of the behaviour of specific politicians of the modern Russian and European eras may seem subjective to you, dear reader. All right. After all, I was a direct participant in the events described in the book. To some, these assessments will seem overly emotional, to others – completely politically incorrect. I apologize in advance. It’s all our bad Russian habit: to call a scoundrel a scoundrel, and a hero a hero…”
“Unfortunately, the events of recent years have confirmed all my previous concerns about the possible development of the situation in Ukraine. I could not ignore this topic, just as I could not help but speak out about the behavior of our so-called ‘cream of society’ in a time threatening for the Motherland. With such ‘friends of the people’, we don’t need enemies either. Even now, during the period of the Special Military Liberation Operation [sic], which is objectively inevitable, given the threats emanating from the Kiev junta to exterminate the Russian population of Ukraine and the approach of NATO’s military potential to our borders, little has changed in our ‘elite’. What can this ‘elite’ offer to the people of Ukraine being liberated by our army? How is it better than the Kiev ‘elite’, which has brought Ukraine to the bestiality of Russophobia? How can you pretend that nothing has happened in the country and continue to drink champagne and eat éclairs at fireworks festivals at the very moment when tens of thousands of our soldiers, risking their lives, are performing a combat mission? Do our people really have a split personality? Or those who do not stop having fun even in the most threatening moments for our army.”
A search of the Russian press has found no review essays or analyses of Rogozin’s books or the views he has advocated in his political commands. The Kremlin-directed television talk shows and the internet media like Vzglyad ignore him.
On the platform left to him, Rogozin reveals between the lines that the present and pressing context is the end-of-war negotiations being conducted by the Kremlin with Donald Trump and others.
On September 16 — “[NATO secretary-general
just retired Jens Stoltenberg is] the rarest specimen
of the earth’s freaks… The skeleton of Goebbels,
or whatever else was left of that bastard, was
even sweating with envy. It’s necessary to say something like Germany is not a party to the conflict with the USSR if its planes bomb Moscow. Listen Stoltenberg, tell your wife fairy tales that you spent too much time in the NATO library in the evening. Lying scum. Air strikes by NATO countries on the territory of our country are a declaration of war. There will be no other interpretation of this act of aggression. If you keep lying, I’ll go back to Brussels and box your ears, you disgusting liar. And then I’ll string you up on one of those poplars I planted there.”
On September 26 — “Yesterday overnight, several colleagues who worked with me in Brussels informed me, without giving too many details, that now the most important question that is being discussed in NATO is: how many days after the appearance of NATO troops in Ukraine, Russia will use nuclear weapons against them. That is, what will apply suddenly dawned on everyone, the only question is exactly how many days will remain before the Apocalypse. They argue — some say in two weeks; others say it will take no more than 10 days.”
“[Putin] Thus, the draft Basic Principles expand the category of states and military alliances in respect of which nuclear deterrence is exercised and expand the list of military threats to be neutralised by nuclear deterrence measures. I would like to draw your attention specifically to the following. The updated version of the document is supposed to regard an aggression against Russia from any non-nuclear state but involving or supported by any nuclear state as their joint attack against the Russian Federation. It also states clearly the conditions for Russia’s transition to the use of nuclear weapons. We will consider such a possibility once we receive reliable information about a massive launch of air and space attack weapons and their crossing our state border. I mean strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, UAVs, hypersonic and other aircraft.” Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/
In the Security Council Putin had spoken of a draft of the revised nuclear deterrence to include non-nuclear states like Ukraine, Romania, Poland and Germany acting under US control; the implication in the Kremlin communiqué was that the president was delaying his personal approval of the “updates…proposed in terms of defining the conditions for using nuclear weapons.”
In Rogozin’s view, the Russian decision to use nuclear weapons against the non-nuclear states allowing the US to store, install and aim their nuclear weapons at Russian targets is a collective military decision, and that it has been made.
“This time, reports on the results of yesterday’s meeting of our Security Council were perceived in Brussels not as bluff and empty threats, but more than seriously. In the corridors of the Brussels headquarters of the North Atlantic Alliance, after reading the embassy dispatches from Moscow, the fear of losing everything in the imminent and rapidly impending nuclear conflict began to spread with the speed of a stink. Well, yes, it’s one thing to poison a Russian bear locked in a cage, it’s another thing to go into his cage after all this harassment. You can make good money by pitting Russia against Ukraine, this bastard product of Bolshevism. But to die for Ukraine? No, of course not. In the West, no one is ready for such a development of this story. And if we really prove, probably not to them, but, above all, to ourselves, that we are ready to go on to the end, then this is the only way to stop the bloodshed and defeat the collective enemy. If we falter, we will begin to dodge, dodge, fawn — death awaits us.”
“Today, on September 30, our country celebrates a memorable date – the Day of the reunification of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic, the Zaporozhye region and the Kherson region with the Russian Federation. On this day in 2022 in the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the heads of the two people’s republics and the two regions signed international agreements on entering (more correctly to say, return) of the regions of Novorossiya to Russia – based on the results of earlier referendums. And this means that the capital of my region is the city of Zaporozhye, as well as Stepnorsk, Gulyaipol, Orekhov should be liberated from the presence of foreign troops – Ukrainian and NATO… If we do not want the war to spread to our children and grandchildren, we must finally crush this bastion and go further to the Polish border. Otherwise, the bloodshed and threats of Russia and the Russian people will never end.”
Last year in the book On the Western Front Rogozin had written: “The country and society must live by the interests of the front. The one who is ready to go to the end always wins. And our people are ready to go into battle only for a clear goal for them. Not for money. You can learn to kill for money, but you can’t learn to die for money. Our army in Ukraine is fighting for the Motherland. We have no right to lose. This is our army and our destiny.”
This means no Kremlin negotiations until the Russian Army reaches the Polish border, and on the way eliminates the regime in Kiev.
By Konstantin Remchukov, editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. A former MP, he is regarded as a leading thinker in Russia
1. Putin makes all fundamental decisions personally, on the basis of his own ability, expertise, and sense of historical responsibility. A vivid example of this was the president’s speech at the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14, in which he outlined the key provisions of Russia’s foreign policy priorities and his vision for the formation of a new international order. Most participants in the meeting expected the head of state to speak for no more than half an hour. In practice, Putin spoke for almost 80 minutes on theses he had written out himself, which he later explained to journalists.
The task of ensuring the security of the country and protecting Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, which Putin has been facing since 2014, has become the main existential factor of his rule. He will not hand over power to anyone before the final, internationally guaranteed settlement of this issue.
He cannot give up control until there is a final, globally recognized solution. Anything short of this would mean handing his successor a messy bunch of unresolved problems. Today, no one in Putin’s entourage is better at solving problems than the president. He knows this and is firmly convinced of it.
Putin will not resign. At the beginning of September, a schoolgirl in Tuva asked the president: “How would you spend your days if you were an ordinary man, i.e. not the president?” Putin replied succinctly and clearly: “It’s hard for me to imagine that now.” This is his most important message of recent times – both for Russians and outsiders. Putin is saying that in your own future planning, proceed from the basis that I will be in the Kremlin. In this way, the president has delivered a reality check to the many Western politicians and indeed Russian opposition activists who have been dreaming and deluding themselves, claiming that “if there is Putin, there is a problem; if there is no Putin, there is no problem.”The fact is, the president is here to stay.
It is now clear that after more than two years of a nuclear threat hanging over us all, the world is ready for real negotiations on this issue. However, there are doubts about whether talks will be successful. The most serious Western politician – and someone who actually understands the consequences of nuclear war – is US President Joe Biden. Sadly, he will be gone in a few months. Neither Kamala Harris nor former President Donald Trump has the foreign policy credentials to even grasp the importance of this issue and the dangers involved.
The past years and months of the Ukraine conflict, the brutal sanctions, and the radical transformation of the driving forces of the Russian economy have clearly demonstrated that it is time for our own domestic public and political consciousness to decisively abandon the notion, once sown by the Polish/American thinker Zbigniew Brzezinski, that Russia’s greatness rests on its unity with Ukraine. If the country is torn out of Moscow’s sphere of influence, Russia’s status as a great power will come to an end, he warned.
But that was then, and this is now. Today it is obvious that Russia’s place in the world is guaranteed regardless of the degree of proximity to any country or group of countries. Liberation from speculative constructs in the minds of influential ideologues is a powerful factor in normalizing the development process and assessing fundamental risks and opportunities. Russia can be a great and important power regardless of the degree of integration with other states. The greatness of a country is measured by the level of well-being and opportunities of its citizens, by achievements in health care, education, science, and technology.
Talking about the Russian economy, we should keep in mind one simple detail: the federal budget submitted to the State Duma (parliament) is based on an oil price of $60 per barrel. According to forecasts, the average annual oil price in 2025 will be $69 per barrel. This is a very high level of conservatism, realism, and sober calculation on the part of the Mikhail Mishustin government. The Russian economy is expected to remain manageable and the pace of development will be sufficient to meet the challenges we face. The obvious structural and technological difficulties will not be decisive in 2025. At this level of industrial development, a balanced budget and currency stability are crucial.
Today’s fighting makes it clear that the main goal of Russian troops on the ground is to reach the administrative borders of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. When listing his objectives, Putin increasingly uses the following words: the liberation of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and Novorossiya. It can be assumed that Novorossiya is only part of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. The main issue here is the land connection with Crimea. If my observations are correct, it is possible to draw a more concrete picture that will allow us to say that the military operation has been completed and its goals have been achieved.
It should be stressed that in recent months there has been a clear change in the Russian leadership’s assessment of the nature of Ukrainian statehood. This is the main difference from February 2022. Today, Moscow recognizes that a significant number of Ukrainians voted for the current government, consider themselves Ukrainians, and do not want to see a future with Russia. In this way, the Kremlin recognizes the state of Ukraine. When the West promotes the narrative that Moscow wants to destroy Ukraine as a state, this is an obvious contradiction, given today’s realities. Moreover, it is this narrative that allows Western politicians to claim that by destroying Ukraine, Russia will move further into Europe – into Poland and the Baltic states.
Speaking of possible negotiations, the West fails to mention the question of the legitimacy of Vladimir Zelensky’s signature in Putin’s eyes. They say it is obvious because Zelensky is flying around the world with his ‘peace plan’. I would warn Western partners against simplistic interpretations of Putin’s remarks and his concern that the Ukrainian Constitutional Court might later rule that Zelensky had not properly renewed his credentials and that his signature was therefore invalid. ‘Cheated, deceived, hoodwinked, and then deceived again’ is something that won’t be allowed to happen again. The level of mutual trust is not even at zero. Total mistrust now makes it necessary to have full negotiating powers in terms of the legal certainty available.
It seems that the issue of a new international order that provides equal security for states is equally relevant today for the critical majority of countries in the world – in the West as well as in the East. The main question is whether it will be possible to create a new international legal framework for peaceful coexistence. Let us remember that the worlds of Versailles and Yalta-Potsdam were born on the ruins of the catastrophes of the First and Second World Wars. The situation is different now. But hopefully humanity has learned something.
Israel’s latest incursion into south Lebanon repeats the same tactical missteps of the past, plunging the occupation army into a familiar quagmire and raising the urgent question: How long can the cycle of failure continue before lessons are finally learned?
Once again, history reverberates through the mountains and valleys of south Lebanon.
On 2 October, Israel launched its ‘limited ground incursion’ – a renewed attempt to force Hezbollah behind the Litani River.
But what began with familiar arrogance quickly unraveled into disaster. Three Merkava tanks left smoldering in the dirt, and eight soldiers from the Egoz unit eliminated. Yet, as the sun rose on 13 October, the grim pattern persisted.
Anti-tank fire struck again, wounding 25 Israeli soldiers in separate incidents. Overhead, helicopters cut through the morning sky, ferrying the wounded and the dead from the battlefield to Rambam Hospital in Haifa – each flight a harsh reminder of an offensive spiraling out of control.
Despite its technological edge and attempts at military censorship to hide the extent of the losses, the US-backed Israeli army pushes onward, blind to the lessons carved in its past. Hezbollah’s resistance, precise and unyielding, exposes the same fatal flaws of an aggressor clinging to force.
As this new chapter unfolds, one can’t help but wonder – how many times will the occupation army tread this doomed path before considering Einstein’s warning – that insanity is repeating the same thing over and over, expecting different results.
The Kornet redefined the battlefield
In the days following 8 October, Hezbollah’s battlefield updates have consistently emphasized one key phrase: direct hits – Israeli radar stations obliterated, military convoys shattered by precise strikes, and armored vehicles reduced to smoldering wreckage.
These operations, carried out in support of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, have been so devastatingly effective that Tel Aviv invoked military censorship, desperate to conceal the full extent of its losses, as it has been doing throughout the conflict on the northern front over the past year. But behind the phrase “direct hits” lies a weapon few might recognize – the Kornet missile.
Although not always visible to the viewer, the Kornet’s role is unmistakable. First deployed by Hezbollah in 2006, the Kornet transformed into a battlefield game-changer, proving its worth in ambushes against Israeli Merkava tanks.
On 11 August 2006, 24 Merkava tanks rolled into a deadly trap, as if swallowed by the Bermuda Triangle, vanishing under a barrage of Kornet missile fire. By the end of it, 11 tanks lay in ruin – charred remains of Israel’s once-feared armored division.
This decisive moment showcased Hezbollah’s mastery of asymmetric warfare, where small, mobile units equipped with precision-guided Kornets could dismantle Israel’s armored might.
The Merkava, long regarded as the symbol of Israeli dominance in ground warfare, was designed to excel in direct combat. However, in the unforgiving Lebanese terrain, the Kornet missile revealed a critical vulnerability: the Merkava’s reliance on heavy armor, which, despite its thickness, was helpless against the Kornet’s ability to pierce reactive plating.
The missile’s precision focused on the tank’s soft spots – its engine and lower hull – areas that conventional defenses struggled to protect against long-range, guided strikes. The once-formidable Merkava, crippled in its ability to maneuver through Lebanon’s rugged landscape, became an easy target for well-planned ambushes.
Now, with Israeli convoys once again making daily incursions into Lebanon – repeating the very missteps of 2006 – it’s as if history is whispering its warnings, only to be ignored. Israel’s persistence in retracing these familiar steps shows a refusal to reckon with past lessons, locked in a cycle that leads to the same inevitable failures.
Entrapped in the Resistance’s web
The Kornet missile, first deployed by Hezbollah during the 2006 war, has become a defining force in its tactical operations.
This Russian-made, laser-guided anti-tank missile, capable of penetrating up to 1,200 millimeters of reactive armor from distances of up to 5.5 kilometers, turns Israel’s Merkava tanks into unsuspecting prey caught in carefully planned ambushes.
Hezbollah’s elite Radwan special forces, particularly within the Aziz and Nasr units, utilize this weapon with precision, turning each ambush into a coordinated strike that devastates Israel’s most advanced armored forces.
The Kornet’s range allows Hezbollah fighters to strike from concealed positions and swiftly reposition, ensuring they remain elusive in the heat of battle. These units, operating across the varied terrain of southern Lebanon, have made the Kornet indispensable in their strategy of attrition warfare.
Meanwhile, the Badr unit, stationed north of the Litani River, remains vigilant, holding strategic points and using ambushes to deal significant damage to Israeli forces.
The Kornet’s role has expanded beyond targeting armored vehicles, as Hezbollah has creatively adapted it to strike at military installations, including radar stations, blinding Israel’s northern defenses.
This tactical shift has forced military analysts to reconsider the missile’s potential, showing how even a relatively simple weapon can reshape the dynamics of warfare when wielded with ingenuity and precision.
Lifting the ‘Trophy’
Israeli engineers quickly sought solutions to protect their armored vehicles following the significant vulnerabilities exposed in 2006.
By 2007, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems unveiled the Trophy APS, specifically designed to safeguard Merkava Mark 3 and Mark 4 tanks. Equipped with the Elta EL/M-2133 radar, Trophy provides 360-degree detection and launches explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) to intercept incoming threats.
This system enabled Israel to maintain its technological edge, significantly reducing anti-tank missile threats. However, Trophy’s 1.5-second reload time created a narrow but exploitable window – an opportunity Hezbollah quickly seized.
In response to Israel’s technological advancements, Hezbollah sought a way to exploit this reload time. The solution came with the Tharallah Twin Anti-Tank Guided Missile (ATGM) system, equipped with Dehlavieh missiles, an Iranian variant of the Kornet-E.
Designed by Iran’s Aerospace Industries Organization, the Dehlavieh, introduced in 2012, boasts a range of 10 kilometers and tandem warheads capable of penetrating 1,200 millimeters of reactive armor.
The Tharallah system fires two missiles in rapid succession. The first missile triggers the Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA), while the second penetrates the main armor, exploiting Trophy’s reload time.
Acquired by Hezbollah in 2015, the Tharallah system is mounted on a quad launcher, configured for both day and night precision strikes.
This clever countermeasure reveals the Axis of Resistance’s strategic ingenuity, turning modest resources into powerful, game-changing tactics – much like a master chess player outwitting an opponent with far superior pieces.
While Israel’s war machine thrives on an endless flow of US dollars, it’s not brute force but creative strategy that shifts the balance of power on the battlefield.
Cake from Shipunov to Nasrallah
In a little-known detail, revealed during a 2020 interview on Al-Manar TV, Hezbollah’s political advisor Hussein al-Khalil shared a story that took many by surprise. After the 2006 war, Arkady Shipunov, the renowned Russian designer of the Kornet missile, sent an unexpected gift to the recently-assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – a cake.
It was more than just a gesture of appreciation; it symbolized Shipunov’s pride in how Hezbollah had wielded his creation to devastating effect. The Kornet had proven itself not just as a weapon, but as a game-changer on the battlefield, punctuating Israel’s military vulnerabilities with each direct hit on their once-vaunted Merkava tanks.
This cake, a simple token, carried profound significance as a tribute to the strategic brilliance that turned the Kornet into a symbol of asymmetrical warfare. Shipunov’s pride reflected the growing recognition that the Lebanese resistance had showcased the missile’s superiority in a way few had expected.
Galloway’s echo
As Israel once again finds itself entangled in Lebanon, the echoes of George Galloway’s legendary 2006 Sky News interview with Anna Botting resonate more powerfully than ever. Despite Sky News’ attempts to bottle up the harsh truth of Israel’s military failures, the reality spilled out – undeniable – even as military censorship and media bias worked overtime to obscure it.
Galloway’s biting words, “Look at the other half of the screen” and “Israel is getting a bloody good hiding,” sliced through the carefully-crafted media narrative, exposing Israel’s recurring military blunders for what they truly were.
While Botting clung to the narrative of Israeli success, the live footage painted a different picture – Israeli soldiers being carried away after devastating Kornet missile ambushes. It was irrefutable evidence of a tactical failure that no amount of censorship could hide.
‘Not tank country’
Fast forward to 2024, and the scene is eerily familiar. Israeli helicopters, their rotors slicing through the morning air, shuttle the dead and wounded from the battlefield to Rambam Hospital in Haifa, a stark reminder of an offensive spiraling out of control. And still, the same efforts are underway to cover the mounting damage and losses.
As the late Hezbollah secretary-general warned in July, “If your tanks come to southern Lebanon, you will not suffer a shortage of tanks, because you will have no tanks left.”
One can’t help but wonder – how long will it take for Israel to understand, as Einstein warned, that repeating the same actions and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity?
Ebrahim Rostami has suggested that the munitions have already been used in the past but that information about them is top secret
Tehran possesses weapons that are “superior” to nuclear bombs, Iranian Brigadier General Ebrahim Rostami has claimed. His statement came in response to calls from Iranian lawmakers to review the country’s non-nuclear military doctrine amid threats by Israel to strike the country.
In an interview with Iranian media on Tuesday, Rostami, who previously served as the secretary of the Development and Equipment Commission of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), supported calls to change the doctrine but said parliamentarians were unaware of “some aspects” because they involve “highly classified and top-secret information.”
The general claimed that Iran has “weapons that are far superior to nuclear weapons,” hinting that this military equipment had already been deployed in the past, recalling an attack on oil tankers in the United Arab Emirates in 2019.
“When Trump wanted to reduce our oil exports, there were a number of tactical operations,” Rostami claimed. “I will not say who carried them out, but five tankers blew up in the highly guarded port of Fujairah. They did not even know where the attack came from. They even filed a complaint with the UN. The UAE accused us, but could not provide evidence. These are some of the examples I can mention.”
Last week, a group of Iranian parliamentarians called on the Supreme National Security Council to review the country’s defense doctrine and remove the ban on developing nuclear weapons. The demand came amid continued threats by Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities.
Tensions between Iran and Israel escalated following the killings of the heads of Hamas and Hezbollah and an IRGC general by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) last month. In reprisal for the attacks, Iran conducted a massive missile strike on October 1, claiming to have targeted only military facilities.
Following the attack, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant threatened a “deadly, pinpoint accurate, and surprising” response, while Israeli officials have been advocating for devastating retaliatory strikes on Iranian energy infrastructures, including nuclear facilities.
Tehran has urged the Jewish state to refrain from taking further disproportionate escalatory steps and warned that Iran would be fully prepared to defend itself and retaliate against any attacks.
One Iranian source told RT last week that, if West Jerusalem decides to target Iran’s oil infrastructure, Iran will respond by attacking Israel’s own oil refineries. Attacks on power plants and nuclear facilities would also prompt retaliatory strikes on corresponding Israeli targets, he said.
Later today I will be appearing on ‘Dialogue Works’ with host Nima Alkhorshid. In preparation for that challenging exercise, I am doing what my peers surely also do: listening to what everyone else has been saying on this platform, or on the latest ‘Judging Freedom’ broadcast, or on and other highly popular shows where we are given the microphone. After all, the hosts routinely put the very same questions to a succession of interviewees, and we each should be au courant if we are to be taken seriously when our turn to speak comes.
I applaud this methodology because it should provide the audience with a chance to hear various interpretations of the otherwise confusing daily barrage of news presented in major media. Whether that is true, we will explore below. And I have the further caveat that this methodology tends to draw each of us out of our area of genuine expertise into areas beyond our depth, and that is something not easy for the audience to see.
My only very special point is that we should listen to more than one another.
As for today, the leaders in the Alternative Media are stressing the dangers ahead of us in the Middle East conflict. For the most part they bring to the discussion military expertise, which I do not possess and so I listen very closely. I think in particular of Jacques Baud with respect to the THAAD air defense, or Scott Ritter with respect to the Iranian nuclear program and its readiness for deployment should the showdown with Israel go all the way.
Then in the top ranks of geopolitical experts today there is Jeffrey Sachs who has just returned from a visit to the Middle East and presumably has picked up some very valuable intelligence to share with the audience. For good reasons, Sachs is silent about his sources, but he speculates on US subservience to the will of Benjamin Netanyahu going back 30 years and what that means for the implementation of the escalatory ladder that the Israeli leader is now plotting.
Apart from Baud, who does not address American politics, the others paint very dire pictures of what lies ahead and assume that Netanyahu will defy the US and stage a major attack on Iran that quickly brings the US fully into the war. The latest decision of the Biden administration to dispatch 100 American soldiers to Israeli to man the advanced THAAD system being delivered there suggests such a further development. The several experts named above see the Russians being obliged to join the fight. One of their peers who often sides with their evaluations, former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, disagrees, pointing to Russian foot-dragging over signing a military cooperation pact with Iran that is essentially a mutual defense alliance.
I listen to these gentlemen and think what they are saying is very important to spark a public discussion in the US and to put pressure on the otherwise very distracted US Congress to exercise its right and obligation to empower or not empower the President to wage war on Iran, before we get in over our heads.
Yet, I believe what most of them are saying is unnecessarily fatalistic. At a minimum, with the exception of McGovern, they assume that Iran and Russia are joined at the hip so that we are well on our way to Doomsday.
As I hear what my peers are saying, I am drawn to the moment in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol when Scrooge is taken in hand by the Ghost of Christmas Future and views the death of Tiny Tim, as well as his own miserable and unmourned death. The Ghost tells him that this is what may happen but not necessarily what will happen.
So it is with the trajectory of the Middle East conflict today, especially if you add to the equation what no one seems to be discussing, the position of China with respect to Middle Eastern developments. In an essay published yesterday on these pages, I suggested that Beijing has issued a warning to the United States via its military exercises around Taiwan. The message is that damage to Chinese oil supplies from the Persian Gulf resulting from a U.S. attack on Iran can lead to the immediate absorption of Taiwan into China, thus vitiating entirely the U.S. strategy for the Pacific theater.
In recent weeks, I have offered contrarian opinions on air regarding the tail wagging the dog interpretation of the US-Israeli relationship. My point was that the Alternative Media need some ‘disrupters’ in their midst if they are to draw close to Truth and not only to Consensus.
So it is with what I have to say today on the latest developments in the Middle East conflict.
I note that even in the military sphere about which I have the least to say, my expert colleagues can know less than they should when they are not exposed to what is freely available on Russian state television.
I have in mind now the question of the significance of the Hezbollah drone attack on the Israeli military base south of Haifa, a question that Andrew Napolitano has posed to his latest expert guests on air. The answers of my peers have focused on the damage to Israeli morale that can follow the loss of even the four reported deaths and 60 or more seriously wounded. When asked how this attack by Hezbollah can have been accomplished without the Israeli air defenses sounding the alarm, we heard the view of military expert Larry Johnson that the Israelis never expected an attack coming in from the sea and so did not have their radars pointed there. He called this ‘a sucker punch.’
Well, my friends, here we have a good demonstration of why everyone should pay more attention to open sources in Russia, namely Russian state television news and political talk shows. Once again, The Great Game, proved last night its invaluable qualities when one panelist explained what was the real significance of the Hezbollah attack on the military base: the drone set off no alarms because it was invisible to radar, being made almost entirely of composite materials, not metal parts. This drone corresponds to the latest models being used by the Russians in the Ukraine war.
Was this drone supplied to Hezbollah by the Russians? Or did they assemble it themselves from Russian designs? That is not essential. The point is that the Russia-Ukraine war has taken both participating sides into wholly new technological levels of warfare for which the United States and its allies, including Israel are utterly unprepared. This is what must send jitters up the spine of the Israeli high command, not the loss of four soldiers.
Shipment of the THAAD system to Israel, in this context, is one more example of the United States investing in Maginot Line technologies that the Russians today easily outrun. The military experts interviewed on ‘Judging Freedom’ and ‘Dialogue Works’ agree that this system is no match for the hypersonic missiles that Iran will deploy. Baud goes on to say that adding one more layer of air defense to the existing multiple layers makes it still harder to devise a command and control system that uses these assets effectively, so that they are not wasted chasing one and the same incoming missiles.
Finally, on the subject of the Hezbollah attack, I call attention to the entirely overlooked reality of their ability to conduct sophisticated intelligence operations on their target in Israel. After all they knew where and at what hour the soldiers would be sitting at table for their dinner. This comes against the background of the decapitation of Hezbollah’s top leadership and of the supposed damage to its internal communications from the explosive walkie talkies and pagers several weeks ago.
In closing, I salute the efforts of colleagues to bring the dangers before us all to the attention of our audiences and beyond them to the political classes in the West. At the same time, I remain committed to open conversation among ourselves without any compulsion to support some half-baked Consensus.
Postscript: here is the link to the just concluded interview on Dialogue Works
Of course, a free discussion on air such as this without previously agreed questions is always a risky proposition. On this occasion, I acknowledge that I got ahead of myself in my explanation of the Maginot Line. It was made useless precisely by the German decision in 1940 to ignore international law and to invade France by passing through the Low Countries, thereby running around the Maginot fortifications. On the positive side of the ledger, I correctly identified 2018 as the time when Vladimir Putin rolled out Russia’s new strategic weapons systems during his State of the Nation address.
The main world news today: Israel promised Washington to attack Iran not on its nuclear or oil facilities, but only on its military bases, as a retaliatory strike against Iran.
This is a contractual war.
Iran responded to the murders of the leaders of Iran’s allies. But it responded softly.
Iran agreed with Washington that Israel would also respond softly to this strike.
Washington is very afraid of a hard strike from Israel. Because in this case, the pro-Palestinian left forces in the US will refuse to vote for Harris and Harris will lose the election.
And then the Washington Post published a publication that they had agreed secretly: Israel would only strike on military bases. And Iran would not respond harshly.
These are the kind of deals: those in power are ready to secretly agree on everything, but their own citizens are in the way.
And it is almost impossible to hide these secrets. They are like semi-secrets.
China has completed the world’s first fully unmanned paving construction project!
Unmanned construction drone swarms paved and rolled across a 157.79km stretch on the Beijing-HK Expressway, completing the world’s first fully unmanned road paving project!
Humans were there to secure and observe in case something goes wrong, as with all autonomous projects in the beginning.
High-speed surface construction has extremely high requirements for rolling equipment and operation technology.
This time, multiple Sany high-end unmanned road equipment were used, including a 20-meter wide paver, six 13-ton double steel wheel rollers, and three 30-ton rubber wheel rollers.
The 1+3+3+3 lineup formed a huge construction fleet, and the standardized operation of the fleet was achieved by relying on intelligent scheduling algorithms.
Beidou’s centimeter-level high-precision positioning system and the self-built low-latency communication network implement real-time optimal path planning for the fleet in strict accordance with the rolling process requirements, achieving “close following and slow rolling”, avoiding missed pressure or under-pressure, and ensured rolling quality.
What is particularly striking is that the SAP200C-10 large-width unmanned paver deployed by Sany this time achieved one-time paving with a paving width of 19.25 meters in actual construction, which is the first time in the field of domestic and even international road construction.
The SAP200C-10 paver is a construction tool designed for wide-width asphalt construction on high-speed 2-lane to 4-lane roads. In this project, the SAP200C-10 large-width paver not only greatly improved construction efficiency and reduced the number of joints, but also effectively improved the flatness and durability of the road surface.
The Sany drone swarm used in this project, through high-precision path tracking algorithms and self-developed fusion high-precision self-sensing positioning systems, can accurately identify and locate the curbstones, truly achieving “0” edge-to-edge operation. No small roller is needed for edge trimming, and the road surface is formed in one step, greatly improving the work efficiency and quality.
Construction site safety is a top priority, and safety is even more important for drone swarms. The unmanned spreading machine swarm obtains the full operating status of all equipment and surrounding obstacle information in real time.
The drones are equipped with multiple redundant safety protection strategies such as collaborative safety, electronic fences, emergency stop systems, perception and obstacle avoidance systems. According to the risk level, the equipment can be decelerated, paused, and emergency stopped in real time to ensure operation safety.
This attempt is undoubtedly a major breakthrough in traditional paving technology, marking a double leap in China’s road construction technology in terms of width and efficiency.
On the afternoon of the 27th of september, the paving project controller Hubei Communications Investment, the project general contractor China Railway 11th Bureau & the construction unit Liaoning Guotai Road and Bridge jointly completed the unmanned clustered intelligent paving and rolling operation on the large-width road surface. All of these groups are state owned.
The machinery was provided by Sany Group, a mixed ownership firm, successfully completing the industry’s first unmanned paving construction demonstration on the largest width road surface and the largest scale, marking a new step in the level of intelligent construction of China’s highway construction.
“Breaking trauma cycles” is the phrase du jour, yet there’s almost no focus on breaking societal cycles.
In the contemporary West, there’s an obsessive focus on psychology, childhood trauma, and breaking cycles. The emphasis is squarely on the self, with the belief that if individuals can break generational patterns by consciously exploring the rabbit hole of their inner wholeness, they’ll evolve into better, more enlightened humans—and society, as a whole, will “level up.” Western society is beholden to this theory without noticing the glaring holes within it. If we’re all to become more whole, then our institutions must also reflect wholeness and decency, rather than glorifying greed and power. Instead, we see systems rewarding the most morally bankrupt among us, legitimising their continued unholy existence. “Breaking trauma cycles” is the phrase du jour, yet there’s almost no focus on breaking societal cycles. In fact, most history curricula fail to teach the cyclical nature of history or the Hegelian dialectic that explains cause and consequence over time.
Polybius, one of the earliest historians to write about the cyclical nature of politics and history, once stated, “Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods and the belief in punishment after death.” Just look at the modern news cycle for proof of how this tactic persists today. The relevance of Polybius’ insight becomes even more pertinent when you consider that he wrote it during the decline of the Hellenistic empire—just as it was collapsing into the black hole of history—and holy sh*t that’s eerily applicable as we watch the fall of U.S. hegemony in real time. Western society’s fixation on the self and the use of scare tactics by institutions to maintain control inevitably leads to deceptions surrounding the conspiratorial and collaborative causes of events designed to induce fear. The narrative often attributes the cause of disruptive events to a “disturbed” individual, to wholly deflect from the all-encompassing truth, which, on the whole, is often far more disturbing.
Take, for example, the first assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. The official narrative of Crooks, a lone teenage gunman—disturbed, of course—crumbles under scrutiny. The behaviour of the security detail that day, the delayed response after the threat was identified, and the gunman’s ability to get into position, firearm and ladder in hand, are all deeply suspicious. That he appeared in a Blackrock promo video only raises further questions. We’ll get to the role of “banksters” soon enough, but citizen journalists have uncovered links between the gunman and phone calls to an FBI office, both months and days before Trump’s Pennsylvania rally. Only a conspiracy nut could conjure such nonsense that the security state may have been involved because, of course, it’s highly regular for most teenagers to be involved in some capacity with Blackrock and the FBI, and only a wholly rabbitholed kook could see the cyclical pattern of this narrative.
Consider Lee Harvey Oswald, perhaps the most famous “disturbed” lonewolf of all. We’re asked to believe that this unhinged man somehow outsmarted an entire Secret Service detail to assassinate a president he claimed to admire. Oddly, Oswald’s little green address book notes that Kennedy wasn’t even his intended target, suggesting that the death of arguably the most popular president in U.S. history might have been accidental. Coincidentally, Oswald, a former Marine, allegedly defected to the USSR after becoming disillusioned with American propaganda. His own writings suggest he was on a secret mission for the CIA, working as an informant within Russia. Whether or not this is true, Oswald’s links to the military-industrial complex should be a glaring red flag to anyone with critical faculties. How many people have even minor connections to the security state? Probably less than 0.01%, yet these ties keep emerging in case after case involving infamous, high-profile assassins.
The connections between Charles Manson, MKUltra, and the security state were long dismissed as conspiracy theory. But documents now confirm Manson’s involvement in MKUltra, as well as his curious meetings with his parole officer—who, it turns out, shared office space with one of the program’s leaders. Despite multiple parole violations, Manson was never returned to prison. Why? The security state’s best-case motive seems to be that they allowed Manson to cultivate a murderous cult to sow fear. The establishment feared that groups like the Black Panthers, along with the anti-war movement in Hollywood, posed a threat to the old institutions of power. So, they induced a climate of fear within the people to prevent unity, utilising identity politics and racial baiting to create division and distrust, destroying any mounting threat to the old hegemony. Does this tactic sound familiar?
Similarly, the cycle of disturbed young men committing atrocities to terrify the public remains a powerful tool of control. Look at Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. The official narrative paints McVeigh as a white supremacist and anti-government extremist. Yet, paradoxically, his actions seemed to do the government a favour. Some sources claim crucial documents tied to the Whitewater scandal—which could have led to the indictment of the Clintons—were conveniently lost in the explosion. Unsurprisingly, the bombing also served as a pretext for the government to crack down on anti-establishment groups, which had grown in response to events like Waco and Ruby Ridge. If we subscribe to the theory that the cause is manufactured to justify the “consequence,” which usually relates to tighter government control, it’s easy to question the official version of events. The key point, however, as with Oswald and Manson, is that yet again McVeigh had ties to the military-industrial complex and the CIA. In a letter to his sister, McVeigh claimed he was recruited into a secret black-ops team involved in smuggling drugs into the United States to fund covert activities and was “to work hand-in-hand with civilian police agencies to quiet anyone whom was deemed a security risk.” His co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, backed up the claims, alleging that an FBI agent, Larry A. Potts, oversaw these activities. While there’s no definitive proof, the coincidence is striking: yet another “disturbed” man with connections to the security state. What are the chances?
The same pattern surfaces outside the U.S., too. Most British citizens have no idea that Salman Abedi, the disturbed young man responsible for the 2017 Manchester bombing, was an MI5 asset. Both he and his father were members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and were provided UK passports and citizenship on the proviso that they’d do the bidding of the British foreign office, first in Libya and then in Syria to overthrow Assad. Despite the FBI warning MI5 that Abedi was becoming radicalised and posed an imminent threat on home soil, no action was taken, and the consequences have left many Ariana Grande fans forever disturbed. Why did the security state allow this to happen? It’s no coincidence that a general election was approaching, with Jeremy Corbyn—an untouchable, incorruptible, anti-war peace advocate—poised to become Prime Minister. The establishment couldn’t allow that. They deployed their media machinery to paint Corbyn as a terrorist sympathizer. When the bombing occurred, it served as the perfect pretext to turn public sentiment in favour of the “tough on crime” party of the two-party duopoly; the timing couldn’t have been more opportunistic. Under this frame of analysis, the UK security state was lackadaisical with one of its assets at best. Another strange coincidence of links between the government and lone terrorists. We shall leave 9/11 Bin Laden and the Bush’s for another day.
But if most of the examples above were plots to induce fear within the public, then why assassinate Kennedy? Did the media spread the narrative that the general public was in danger from deranged lone gunmen mass murderers, as it did in the predictive programming post-Rambo era? Perhaps it was to destroy the hopes, a few rungs down on inducing pure fear, of the masses. More likely, it was Kennedy’s meddling with the Federal Reserve, the CIA, and the “banksters” that made him a target. His lack of support for escalating the Bay of Pigs invasion and his push for diplomacy—rather than toppling governments that defied U.S. interests—made him a persona non grata to the deep state. Probably the most troublesome president to the aspirations of the military industrial complex in the modern era alongside Trump. How coincidental that, aside from Reagan, possibly the only truly lone wolf, attempted assassination (fostered by John Hinkley Jr.’s love of Jodie), attempts have not occurred. However, when looking back at empirical evidence, it’s more likely his issuance of silver-backed United States Notes through Executive Order 11110, which circumvented the Federal Reserve, likely sealed his fate.
Interestingly, all four U.S. presidents who were assassinated—Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy—opposed central banking and the Federal Reserve. Lincoln even forgiving the debt of the European central bank-backed Confederacy to the outrage of the Rothschilds. The second, Garfield, warned of the dangers to America should these Central Bankers ever gain power by stating shortly before his murder in 1881, “Whoever controls the money of a nation, controls that nation, and is absolute master of all industry and commerce. When you realise that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.” Then McKinley, who was assassinated shortly after implementing the “Sherman Antitrust Act,” against the Rothschild, supported and funded the JP Morgan financial empire. It’s worth noting that without the Fed, the wars America has undertaken couldn’t have occurred without raising taxes, hence requiring public support for state-sponsored violence. Again, it’s no coincidence that America is currently sending billions to Ukraine with little real public support.
The most remarkable feature of these coincidental relationships between disturbed young men, acts of terrorism, the security state, and assassinations of presidents opposed to central banks is how easily we’ve been taught to dismiss patterns as coincidence. We’re told it’s paranoid to see connections, that only crazy conspiracy theorists would dare join such ludicrous dots. Yet almost all ancient traditions teach the cyclical nature of existence—yin and yang—and the duality of good and evil. Even Carl Jung wrote extensively about synchronicity and the metaphysical forces at play in the world. So why are we conditioned to reject the idea of patterns? Probably because we’ve been programmed to. Behavioural psychology understands the power to be accepted, and so the majority of humans would opt to uncritically accept official narratives rather than bravely question power in pursuit of truth, or even more bravely still, question the legitimacy of the framework that we’ve been indoctrinated to view life through.
As individuals, we must be brave enough to be the square peg facing the round hole; we must recognise the collective consciousness as a whole, and we must wholeheartedly commit to breaking the trauma cycles imposed on society by those with holes where their hearts should be.
As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates the 75th anniversary of their state, party poopers necessarily abound within and without their Middle Kingdom.
As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates the 75th anniversary of their state, party poopers necessarily abound within and without their Middle Kingdom.
Leaving their supposed internal turmoils to one side for a moment, India and the NATO alliance are two sets of competitors China will have to come to terms with by fair means or foul. Though India claims it is operationally prepared to take on China over their border disputes, tensions do not end there. India and China are in competition for every imaginable resource, not the least of which is water and the urbanisation and industrialisation of both countries have put major strains on their relatively limited natural resources.
The scale of development in both India and China is such that it is almost unimaginable in the West, which cannot hope to stay in the race without resorting to the tried and trusted techniques of divide and conquer.
And, Lord knows, there is much to divide and conquer the locals with in that neck of the woods, and much of it has to do with the mercantilist and neo-mercantilist policies of arrogant China.
The United States and her colonies are putting an end to the days of China dumping its wares on the Western world, which is also focused on ending China’s grip on critical minerals. All of that leaves opportunities galore within the Pax Americana ambit for countries like India and Vietnam, which still remembers its 1,000 years of shame under Chinese imperial rule.
The Vietnamese are far from being the only South East Asians with a bone to pick with China. Chinese aggression against the Philippines and their claims to the seas around the Philippines, Vietnam and a host of other countries are totally unacceptable, no matter how many of their clapping seals argue the opposite.
Likewise, China cannot be allowed annex Taiwan or the waters around it, as that will allow her to repeat Imperial Japan’s trick of using Taiwan as a springboard to capture all of South East Asia, where expatriate Chinese have been periodically massacred with machetes, iron bars, bamboo spears and whatever other low tech weaponry was at hand.
Not that the United States will allow that happen. Once tempers cool in the Middle East and Ukraine, it will be full steam ahead to neutralise China by a series of sanctions reminiscent of those put on imperial Japan that will make those more recently put on Russia, Iran and North Korea seem like a slap on the wrist.
Having collapsed China’s exports and caused internal havoc in China, the Yanks will then implement their island chain defence strategy, which is growing more credible by the day, as Bangladesh, Thailand and even the tiny pinprick of Palau are coerced into joining NATO’s Coalition of the Willing against China.
All of that will eventually throw the Chinese navy into a flurry and, once she starts punching down on Palau and the Philippines, the Western media and the United Nations will have a field day showing up the Chinese for the arrogant bullies that they are.
Although the Chinese Navy is highly rated here, here and here it still lags far behind the awesome firepower of the United States and her colonies, Japan in particular.
The great Admiral Yamamoto‘s imperial Japanese navy, lest we forget, gave the British and Yankee navies, then the world’s two most powerful navies, a great run for their money and they also captured the Dutch East Indies in a campaign, whose origins remain controversial to this day. Although no higher praise could be given to Admirals Dong and Hu than to compare them to their illustrious Japanese predecessor, to my untrained eye at least, they have much the same Achilles Heel Yamamoto knew he had when he dropped his calling card on Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941.
For the boys from Beijing to prevail, they must make Pearl Harbor and its Pacific aftermath seem like it was all a storm in a teacup which, to the Americans at least, it was not. But even though the Americans have feasted on their laurels since Victory over Japan day, they have not rested on them. As well as being a powerhouse in her own right, the United States has crafted the Pacific Rim to her own selfish needs. Although this is most notable with her three east Asian spokes of Taiwan, Japan and Korea which are all subservient to their American hub, de-industrialised Australia is also noteworthy as, since the time of Gone with the Wind, a country like Australia without an independent industrial base, cannot have a viable or sovereign war strategy. No matter whether we are talking about Australia, New Zealand or the Solomon Islands (where the Chinese presence almost guarantees a CIA colour revolution), the Yankees call the shots not least because they refuse to allow their colonies have any real independence of thoughts or actions.
The Yankee game plan from her safe-as-houses Kiwi and Ossie bases is crystal clear. Give the Chinese imperialists enough rope and then hang them with it. Although an imploding post-Putin Russia would make that lynching infinitely easier, the Yankees’ island defence strategy has followed the first rule of war, which is to pick the terrain to engage their enemies.
If that is the case, then all bets are off. The response to the 1997 Asian tsunami showed that China’s blue water capabilities lagged very far behind those of India, Japan and the United States and it is unlikely they have yet closed the gap to any sizable degree.
Though all such scenarios are the wet dreams of madmen in authority, recent wars have shown that such figures rule the roost in Washington and, for all their babble, perhaps in Beijing as well.
At day’s end, though the choices of jaw jaw versus war war Asia faces are simple in theory but hard to implement, diplomacy would be much easier to implement if the Yanks could refrain from setting the world alight for ten seconds and if the Chinese could get down off their own equally obnoxious high horse, and give Russia, Vietnam and other mature countries the chance to save us all from their selfishness, arrogance and greed. We live in hope.
Today marks the one year anniversary of the remarkably successful Hamas raid on Israel, in which some 1,500 lightly-armed Islamic militants from Gaza so greatly humiliated the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his country’s entire national security establishment. The consequences of these last twelve months have been enormous, not merely for the Jewish State and the rest of the Middle East, but also for America and the entire world.
For many fatal diseases the cause of death is less the result of the infection itself than that of the defensive immune system, whose massive over-reaction destroys vital tissue, killing the entire organism. And I think that the Hamas raid of October 7, 2023 and the Israeli response may eventually be seen in this light.
Some 1,200 Israelis died that day, probably many or most of them killed by their own country’s panic-stricken and trigger-happy IDF forces, whose Apache helicopters were ordered to blast anything that moved. Although such losses were hardly insignificant in a Jewish population of some 7.2 million and the national humiliation was enormous, if the Israeli government had merely been content to launch a few weeks of punitive bombing attacks against Gaza and then grudgingly accept an exchange of prisoners with its Hamas adversaries, I doubt the results would have been too serious.
Israel had long held many thousands of Palestinians without charges or trial and often under brutal conditions, so releasing these in exchange for the 200-odd Israelis that Hamas had carried back to Gaza would have meant a huge loss of face for the Jewish State, but hardly a threat to the country’s survival. The Israelis could have merely fired a few of their complacent and incompetent local military commanders and strengthened their Gaza defenses, and matters would have probably gone on much like before.
Israel had been riding high at that point, on the very verge of accomplishing its decades-long project of fully normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Arab state. Israel’s strong partisans totally dominated the Biden Administration while Donald Trump promised to do even more for that country if he somehow managed to regain the White House. Although Netanyahu was hugely unpopular domestically, Israel had just celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding, and its international strategic position seemed better than it had been in many years, so it could have easily taken its Hamas debacle in stride.
But after the events of the last twelve months, I tend to doubt that the country will survive much longer in anything like its existing form, and its collapse may also take down with it the entire political structure of organized Jewry worldwide, which today so heavily dominates both America and the rest of the West. While Israel may face very serious risks from the major regional war its government seeks to ignite, I think the greatest threat to its existence comes from the massive distribution of devastating information that has taken place during this last year.
If the Israeli government had cut its losses and exchanged prisoners with Hamas in November or December, the country might have been humiliated but Netanyahu would have been utterly destroyed. So partly because of his own desperate political situation, he reacted in very different fashion, unleashing massive, relentless attacks against Gaza’s helpless couple of million civilians, clearly hoping to save his own political skin by using the Hamas raid as an excuse to kill or expel all the Palestinians in that enclave and then afterwards do the same in the West Bank. This would have allowed him to establish his name in history as Israel’s second founding father, finally creating the Greater Israel that all of his predecessors had dreamed of establishing but failed to achieve. This bold project was obviously spurred on by the small extremist parties that his government depended on for its survival since their ideological leadership regarded those territories as their God-given heritage under the fierce version of the religious Judaism that they espoused.
Unfortunately for Netanyahu’s plans and despite all his massive bombing attacks, Gaza’s Palestinians refused to leave, perhaps remembering how their parents or grand-parents had previously been expelled by Zionist militants in 1948 from their homes in Haifa and the other cities of what became Israel. I had discussed that history in a long December article:
Moreover, despite massive financial enticements, over-populated Egypt was adamant that it would not accept a couple of million displaced Gazans, who would likely become a source of social instability and future border clashes with Israel. So with the Gazans refusing to leave and the Egyptians refusing to take them, this left little choice but for the Israelis to keep bombing Gaza in hopes of changing their minds, perhaps further assisted by the pressure of famine as the flow of food supplies into the besieged enclave was blocked by mobs of angry Israelis.
Meanwhile, Hamas and its determined fighters were hidden in their heavily-fortified network of tunnels and during the year that followed IDF troops had little success in rooting them out, instead suffering continuing casualties as they tried, while only freeing a tiny number of the Israelis held prisoner.
Angry, frustrated armies naturally tend to take revenge against the entire civilian population of their enemies. In an August article I’d summarized the unspeakable war crimes that IDF troops have been regularly committing against their helpless Palestinian victims, with some of these incidents finally starting to receive coverage in mainstream American media outlets.
According to American physicians interviewed by Politico Magazineand CBS News Sunday Morning, Israeli military snipers have regularly been executing Palestinian toddlers with precisely aimed shots to the head and the heart; indeed, for many years Israelis have proudly marketed tee-shirts boasting of their success in killing pregnant women and children. An article in the New York Times also reported that IDF forces have seized and tortured to death leading Palestinian surgeons and other medical doctors, with some of the survivors describing the horrific torments they endured at the hands of their brutal Israeli captors.
All of these barbaric atrocities have been justified and encouraged by the sweeping public statements of top Israeli leaders. For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly identified the Palestinians with the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew god commanded must be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Just a few days ago, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that it would be “just and moral” for Israel to totally exterminate all two million Palestinians in Gaza, but he emphasized that world public opinion was currently preventing his government from taking that important step.
Although this officially-stated Israeli goal of eradicating all Palestinian men, women, and children has not yet been achieved, more than ten months of bombs, bullets, and famine have made significant progress in that direction. The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals and a few weeks ago it published a short piece conservatively estimating that relentless Israeli attacks and the complete destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure may be responsible for nearly 200,000 civilian deaths, a figure many times larger than any previous total mentioned in the media.
The massive, ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians together with these widespread, explicit public statements by top Israeli leaders led the esteemed jurists of the International Court of Justice to issue a series of near-unanimous rulings that Israel appeared to be undertaking a campaign of genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians. By late July even the notoriously pro-Israel editors of the English-language Wikipedia had finally endorsed the same conclusion.
In addition to these ongoing massacres, many thousands of Palestinian civilian captives have been seized, none of whom have ever been tried or convicted of anything. But with Israeli prison space overflowing, National Security Minister Itomar Ben-Gvir proposed summarily executing all of them by shooting each one in the head, thereby freeing up their prison space for new waves of captives.
Although the militaries of many countries have occasionally committed massacres or atrocities during wartime, sometimes even with the silent approval of their political leadership, it seems quite unusual to have the latter publicly endorse and advocate such policies, and no similar examples from recent centuries come to mind. I don’t doubt that if television journalists had interviewed Genghis Khan while he was ravaging all of Eurasia with his Mongol hordes, he might have casually made such statements, but I’d always assumed that standards of acceptable international behavior had considerably changed over the last thousand years.
When top leaders regularly issue such wholesale sanguinary declarations, some of their more enthusiastic subordinates may naturally decide to partly implement those same goals on a retail basis. These horrible recent Israeli atrocities merely continued the pattern from earlier this year, which had often been documented on social media by Israelis themselves, eager to emphasize the terrible punishment they were successfully inflicting upon their hated Palestinian foes. As I wrote a few months ago:
Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.
I also suggested that the near-stranglehold that pro-Israel Jews had gradually gained across American society, especially including politics, academia, and media, was having very fateful consequences. For example, Netanyahu’s deliberate slaughter of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians actually prompted his recent invitation to address a joint session of Congress for an unprecedented fourth time, with his bombastic speech interrupted by 58 standing ovations, coming at a rate of more than once each minute.
Meanwhile, American students had been heavily indoctrinated for generations with an absolute horror of genocide, war crimes, Apartheid, and racial oppression. But when they reacted against full American government support for the worst example of these seen anywhere in the world in many decades, their peaceful protests at elite colleges were brutally suppressed by harsh police crackdowns. This problem arose because their moral instructors had failed to properly emphasize that all those sweeping prohibitions actually included the key exclusionary phrase “except when committed by Jews”…
In one of the highest-profile and most grotesque recent incidents, Israeli doctors reported that a Palestinian captive had been severely injured after being brutally gang-raped and sodomized by nine IDF soldiers. Israeli military leaders have been facing the threat of arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, so they decided to demonstrate their adherence to international law by having the soldiers arrested and tried, but a huge, violent mob of Jewish activists invaded the army base to free them, and the government later ordered them released. Israeli TV has widely broadcast footage of Palestinian prisoners being raped and sodomized by IDF soldiers, with claims that these brutal scenes were sometimes even live-streamed for the edification of gleeful Israeli political leaders…
Mike Whitney had summarized much of the shocking early evidence in late July when the story first broke in the Israeli media and a more recent article by journalist Jonathan Cook collected together a great deal of the background information. Cook noted that according to human and legal rights groups, Israeli soldiers and police have a very long history of raping and sexually assaulting Palestinians, including children, and such behavior has been endorsed by the country’s highest religious authorities:
In 2016, for example, the Israeli military appointed Colonel Eyal Karim as its chief rabbi, even after he had declared Palestinians to be “animals” and had approved the rape of Palestinian women in the interest of boosting soldiers’ morale.
I’ve always had a strong interest in the Middle East conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and I’m sure that I’ve followed the issue much more closely than the vast majority of people. But over the last twelve months I’ve probably devoted more attention to that topic than I had during the previous fifty years combined, and I’d expect that the same may be true for all but those who have long specialized in the subject. Billions around the world who had previously remained totally unaware of the Palestinians or had only known of their plight in the vaguest terms have now watched scenes of enormous suffering unfolding hour by hour on their smartphones.
In past decades all of these horrific Israeli crimes might have remained hidden away, kept from the view of the American public and the rest of the world by the staunchly pro-Israel gatekeepers of the Western mainstream media. But the existence of the Internet drastically changed the informational landscape, especially the relatively uncensored social media platforms of TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter, which allowed the rapid dissemination of shocking images. Meanwhile, YouTube channels such as those of Judge Andrew Napolitano gradually brought together a critical mass of highly-credentialed academics, national security experts, and knowledgeable journalists who could share their analysis of events with large audiences around the world.
Two of Napolitano’s regular guests are Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, earnest young Jewish progressives who run the Grayzone, a webzine and YouTube channel of their own. I noted their lengthy discussion of how the pro-Israel donor class had recently crushed any political dissent within the Democratic Party, contrary to the overwhelming views of its voter base.
In that same livestream, Blumenthal and Maté also focused on the methods used to keep American elected officials in line on this issue, noting that a few days ago Zionist billionaires spent an almost unprecedented $8 million to defeat Rep. Cori Bush in her own Democratic primary, angry that the black progressive member of “the squad” had called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Just a few weeks earlier, roughly twice as much money had been spent by similar individuals for very similar reasons to successfully eliminate her close political ally Rep. Jamaal Bowman.
Those two primary races were by far the most expensive in American history, and in their aftermath most members of Congress must surely realize that they only remain in office at the sufferance of AIPAC and its ideological allies. Although leading progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the role of big money in those primary races, she was obviously too fearful of pro-Israel donors to even mention whose big money had been involved. The Grayzone editors were far more candid and accurately characterized the dollars as being deployed by “the foreign agents of an Apartheid state.”
Both Blumenthal and Mate had long focused on the plight of the Palestinians, and a couple of years ago I’d read Goliath, the former’s fine 2013 book reporting his personal experiences during a visit to the region.
But despite their previous coverage of the conflict, I do not think that either of them had ever contemplated the horrors currently being inflicted upon the suffering Palestinians, nor the total slavish support for Israel expressed by the entire Biden Administration. These shocking developments prompted ideological reassessments and in May I’d described some ironic statements they had made in an earlier podcast:
This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.
They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.”Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.
By August, I noticed that they had explicitly used that incendiary term in their most recent podcast:
That particular article of mine proved quite popular so it’s possible that my remarks may have directly or indirectly found their way to those individuals. Whether or not that was the case, in their current podcast they mentioned that although they’d always dismissed “ZOG” as some ridiculously antisemitic expression, recent events had demonstrated its reality, and Americans were obviously now living in “one nation under ZOG.” I think this marked an important step forward in their understanding of our world.
Soon afterward, their Grayzone channel was temporarily banned from YouTube, and when it returned a week later, the two hosts nervously joked about the acronym they must carefully avoid uttering, using several rhyming words to enlighten their audience. I suspect that just like them, many other thoughtful Americans have recently begun entertaining ideas that they would have always previously dismissed as ridiculous.
Nearly all of us, members of the media included, live our lives in the media-bubbles that constitute our understanding of the world. When real-life events puncture such a bubble, we are forced to take stock and reassess our view of reality.
Those two young journalists were deeply concerned about America’s current situation, in which so much of the basic democratic system they had always assumed seemed to have been lost, with political control of our country now being exercised by obvious agents of a ruthless and bloodthirsty foreign power.
Yet oddly enough, although America’s current political predicament would have alarmed some knowledgeable individuals from the first half of the last century, it might not have greatly surprised them. Five or six years ago I read a fascinating book by Prof. Joseph Bendersky, an academic historian specializing in Holocaust Studies and the history of Nazi Germany. As I wrote at the time:
Bendersky devoted ten full years of research to his book, exhaustively mining the archives of American Military Intelligence as well as the personal papers and correspondence of more than 100 senior military figures and intelligence officers. The “Jewish Threat” runs over 500 pages, including some 1350 footnotes, with the listed archival sources alone occupying seven full pages. His subtitle is “Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army” and he makes an extremely compelling case that during the first half of the twentieth century and even afterward, the top ranks of the U.S. military and especially Military Intelligence heavily subscribed to notions that today would be universally dismissed as “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”
Put simply, U.S. military leaders in those decades widely believed that the world faced a direct threat from organized Jewry, which had seized control of Russia and similarly sought to subvert and gain mastery over America and the rest of Western civilization.
In these military circles, there was an overwhelming belief that powerful Jewish elements had financed and led Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, and were organizing similar Communist movements elsewhere aimed at destroying all existing Gentile elites and imposing Jewish supremacy throughout America and the rest of the Western world. While some of these Communist leaders were “idealists,” many of the Jewish participants were cynical opportunists, seeking to use their gullible followers to destroy their ethnic rivals and thereby gain wealth and supreme power. Although Intelligence officers gradually came to doubt that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an authentic document, most believed that the notorious work provided a reasonably accurate description of the strategic plans of the Jewish leadership for subverting America and the rest of the world and establishing Jewish rule.
Although Bendersky’s claims are certainly extraordinary ones, he provides an enormous wealth of compelling evidence to support them, quoting or summarizing thousands of declassified Intelligence files, and further supporting his case by drawing from the personal correspondence of many of the officers involved. He conclusively demonstrates that during the very same years that Henry Ford was publishing his controversial series The International Jew, similar ideas, but with a much sharper edge, were ubiquitous within our own Intelligence community. Indeed, whereas Ford mostly focused upon Jewish dishonesty, malfeasance, and corruption, our Military Intelligence professionals viewed organized Jewry as a deadly threat to American society and Western civilization in general. Hence the title of Bendersky’s book.
Let us take a step back and place Bendersky’s findings in their proper context. We must recognize that during much of the era covered by his research, U.S. Military Intelligence constituted nearly the entirety of America’s national security apparatus—being the equivalent of a combined CIA, NSA, and FBI—and was responsible for both international and domestic security, although the latter portfolio had gradually been assumed by J. Edgar Hoover’s own expanding organization by the end of the 1920s.
Bendersky’s years of diligent research demonstrate that for decades these experienced professionals—and many of their top commanding generals—were firmly convinced that major elements of the organized Jewish community were ruthlessly plotting to seize power in America, destroy all our traditional Constitutional liberties, and ultimately gain mastery over the entire world.
I have never believed in the existence of UFOs as alien spacecraft, always dismissing such notions as ridiculous nonsense. But suppose declassified government documents revealed that for decades nearly all of our top Air Force officers had been absolutely convinced of the reality of UFOs. Could I continue my insouciant refusal to even consider such possibilities? At the very least, those revelations would force me to sharply reassess the likely credibility of other individuals who had made similar claims during that same period.
Israel’s leaders may be confident that they can successfully estimate the risks of their military conflict with Hezbollah or Iran, and such calculations might be correct. But I think that the greater danger they now increasingly face comes from the widening ripples of knowledge that their brutal actions have now spread across much of the American population and the rest of the world.
During the last few months the Israelis have unleashed an unprecedented wave of assassinations against the leaders of their regional adversaries, making absolutely no pretense of respecting national sovereignty, diplomatic immunity, or the basic laws of warfare. In one of the earliest examples, they used a missile-strike to kill the chief Hamas peace negotiator in his Beirut office and later employed similar means to assassinate the Hamas political chief who had replaced him at the negotiating table. That latter assassination took place in Tehran while the victim was attending the inauguration of the new Iranian president, whose own predecessor had died together with Iran’s finance minister in a highly-suspicious helicopter crash. A few months earlier another Israeli missile-strike had destroyed part of Iran’s embassy compound in Syria, killing several important Iranian generals. An apparent Israeli false-flag attack killed a dozen Druze children playing soccer in the occupied Golan Heights, and Netanyahu’s government then used that atrocity as an excuse to assassinate a top Hezbollah military official in Beirut.
In September, this campaign of Israeli assassinations massively escalated, as many thousands of booby-trapped electronic pagers and other devices were used to kill or severely maim enormous numbers of Lebanese civilians who were associated with Hezbollah. This was soon followed by the use of eighty-odd huge bunker-buster bombs to level an entire city block of southern Beirut, successfully assassinating the longtime leader of that organization, whose successor was similarly killed a few days ago under a wave of equally large bombs in that same city. Israeli leaders have regularly declared that they feel free to kill anyone, anywhere in the world whom they consider hostile to their national interests.
The obvious immediate intent of this wave of Israeli assassinations was to provoke Iran into the sort of military retaliation that could pressure a subservient America into destroying that powerful regional rival and Iran’s large retaliatory missile-strike of a few days ago may lead to this result. But whether or not it does, those Israeli assassinations may have other political consequences, perhaps far less beneficial to the future of the Jewish State.
Although the successful killing of those enemy leaders may have enhanced Israel’s reputation for the ruthless effectiveness of its intelligence services and achieved the tactical result of temporarily disrupting their opposing organizations, I think there are great strategic risks in undertaking so many high-profile assassinations in such a short period of time. More and more outside observers have probably now become aware of crucial historical matters, long concealed or de-emphasized by our overwhelmingly pro-Israel mainstream media. The State of Israel and its Zionist predecessor organizations have established a record of bold assassinations perhaps unrivaled in world history. As I originally wrote in 2018:
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchillapparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.
The most comprehensive source for this sort of material is Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman’s highly authoritative 2018 history of Mossad assassinations, which runs 750 pages and although far from complete, served as the starting point for my own very lengthy January 2020 analysis of that same subject.
As I described its contents:
The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Timessuggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s extremely long book.
As a very useful supplement to Bergman’s magisterial work, I would strongly recommend State of Terror, published in 2016 by Thomas Suarez, a book that I only finally read a couple of weeks ago. Most of the author’s material was based upon declassified British government documents as well as the major newspaper archives of the period he covers, and he provided an enormous wealth of information not available elsewhere.
Although his primary focus was Zionist terrorism, political assassinations are a closely related topic, and he discussed many of these as well. As an example, he explained how the Zionists pioneered the technology of deadly letter-bombs, ruthlessly lacing these with cyanide to increase their effectiveness, and employing them to target a very long list of their perceived enemies, notably including all of Britain’s senior political leaders and America’s president, though those latter efforts proved unsuccessful. Suarez demonstrated that all of Israel’s early leaders were supporters of these policies, and these same individuals continued running their country for decades, even into the 1990s.
Suarez’s book is long out of print and used copies on Amazon are exorbitantly priced, but fortunately it is also available on Archive.org, including in PDF and ePub
formats, and I would highly recommend it to those who seek to deepen their understanding of the circumstances surrounding Israel’s creation.
Our word “assassin” comes from the Ismaili sect founded almost a thousand years ago, whose members spent nearly two centuries terrorizing the entire Middle East with their successful killings of so many of its important Muslim and Christian leaders. But with the possible exception of that one non-state organization, I am not aware of any other political entity during the last two thousand years whose record of major political assassinations remotely approaches that of the Israeli state and its Zionist predecessor groups.
For obvious reasons, Bergman’s book had avoided discussing many of the high-profile killings of American or pro-Western leaders that can probably be attributed to Zionist or Israeli forces, notably that of James Forrestal, America’s first secretary of defense and the leading public opponent of Israel’s creation.
American presidents have hardly been immune to such attacks, with Zionists making repeated attempts on the life of President Truman and Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky revealing the 1992 plot to assassinate President George H.W. Bush.
Max Blumenthal grew up in elite Democratic circles in DC, with his father Sydney being a prominent former journalist and influential political operative very close to Hillary Clinton. Presumably based upon the personal knowledge he had picked up in such circles, earlier this year he flatly declared that President Barack Obama was extremely fearful that the Israelis might try to assassinate him for his Middle East peacemaking efforts, something I’d occasionally suspected but had never previously heard stated by any knowledgeable insider.
But by far the highest-profile example would certainly be the case of the Kennedy brothers. Our president and his younger brother had made determined efforts to block Israel’s nuclear weapons development program and break the growing power of the Israel Lobby, and there exists very strong, perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the Israeli Mossad played a central role in their deaths. I’ve discussed that issue at considerable length and would also strongly recommend the 2018 article by French researcher Laurent Guyénot or his more recent short book, which very helpfully summarizes the evidence and can be easily read within just a day or two.
Many patriotic Americans may take in stride the Israeli killing of foreign leaders whom our dishonest pro-Israel media has often falsely portrayed as enemies of the United States. But if those same individuals came to believe that the Israelis have also had a very long record of killing our own American leaders in order to subvert our political system and gain control of our country, their reaction might be far more negative. For decades, such ideas and the supporting evidence have been confined to only the most marginal and isolated portions of the conspiratorial fringe, but there now seem indications that recent events may have propelled those theories into much more mainstream venues.
Consider Anya Parampil, another young journalist who has spent many years focused on Palestinian issues. Married to Max Blumenthal, she works with him at the Grayzone, and in her many video appearances there and on Napolitano’s channel, I’ve never seen any sign of her support for implausible conspiratorial beliefs. Instead, she has always struck me as someone of very mainstream if strongly progressive views on public policy matters.
Yet in a remarkable half-hour interview last week, she explicitly described Israel as America’s “greatest enemy,” expressing outrage that her country seemed to have lost its political sovereignty to the agents of that murderous foreign state. She went on to suggest that the crucial turning point in our national subjugation had probably come with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, whose vigorous efforts to prevent Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons had been suddenly ended by his violent death. She also noted that his brother Robert had led the efforts to severely curtail the power of the Israel Lobby, and he too had soon died by an assassin’s bullet. I think that her very self-confident public statements on such extremely controversial matters may represent a bellwether, indicating that many of those same ideas are now rapidly but quietly circulating within important mainstream segments of the American population.
The JFK Assassination might easily rank as the single most famous incident of the twentieth century and it has been the subject of countless books, articles, and documentaries.
Those Americans who conclude that the Israeli Mossad played a central role in that killing, thereby successfully subverting our entire political system, will naturally consider the implications of that revelation. If a matter of such gigantic importance could have remained almost totally concealed for more than six decades, they may begin to grow very suspicious about the true nature of other major events as well.
The most obvious and important of these would be the 9/11 Attacks, which killed thousands of Americans. Pro-Israel elements within our national government immediately used these as an excuse to launch a series of wars that destroyed most of Israel’s leading regional rivals, wars that cost our country thousands of additional lives and many trillions of dollars, while killing or displacing millions of Muslim civilians.
As I’ve discussed at considerable length, Israel’s record of international terrorism, quite often of the false-flag variety, is just as unmatched as its record of political assassinations, with an Israeli Prime Minister even publicly boasting that he had been the founding father of terrorism across the entire world.
One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew.
The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.
Once the circumstances of those 2001 terrorist attacks are carefully considered, the evidence that the Israeli Mossad once again played the central role seems extremely strong, even stronger than the case for Mossad’s role in the killing of the Kennedys several decades earlier. No other organization around the world possessed anything like the same set of skills and experience in carrying out such a massive operation, and the FBI quickly rounded up some 200 Mossad agents, many of whom had been found behaving in very suspicious ways in the immediate vicinity of the destruction, including five who were caught red-handed, gleefully celebrating the successful attack on the WTC towers.
Although their findings have been almost totally ignored for more than two decades by our fervently pro-Israel mainstream media, numerous diligent 9/11 researchers have amassed an enormous quantity of compelling evidence implicating Israel and its domestic American collaborators in that terrorist attack against our country. Much of that evidence has been summarized in a number of our major articles:
Israel Did 9/11
Wyatt Peterson • The Unz Review • September 12, 2024 • 13,300 Words
9/11 Was an Israeli Job How America was neoconned into World War IV
Laurent Guyénot • The Unz Review • September 10, 2018 • 8,500 Words
9/11 represented the greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world and it was the worst hostile blow our nation has ever endured. As the true facts of what actually happened on that fateful day quietly circulate in the wake of Israel’s very high-profile assaults on other Middle Eastern countries, I think that the existential risks that country faces may become far greater than anything associated with retaliatory strikes from Iranian ballistic or hypersonic missiles.
