Author Archive for: Rupture.Capital

The Final Days and the End Times are big on the evangelical circuit. Different denominations claim dibs on actually predicting the final days.

Earlier today, Pat Robertson told his 700 Club audience that if you read Ezekiel, it tells you that Putin is being compelled by God to link up with Turkey and then attack Israel.

Robertson spent almost five minutes showing ancient maps overlapping current ones to make his case.

“Do I think Putin is out of his mind. Yes, maybe so, but at the same time he is being compelled by God. He went into Ukraine, but that was not his goal. His goal was to move against Israel, ultimately…,” Robertson said.

Robertson defended Putin again by quoting the Bible, “God said, I am going to put hooks in your jaws. I’m gonna draw you into the battle whether you like it or not. He’s being compelled.”

So in Pat’s mind Trump was called by God to strengthen Putin, praise him, then weaken NATO as much as possible to make it easier for Putin to attack Israel.

That’s like seven dimensional chess, right there.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene, the lunatic Georgia MAGA congressman who only recently stopped loving QAnon and thinks that Jewish space lasers might be starting wildfires out west, is one of the right’s biggest stars. Stripped of her committee assignments and banned from Twitter for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, Greene is a completely ineffectual, downright useless—even by congressional standards—representative. But that only adds to her wide appeal on the American right: Here is someone who only wants to own the libs—even if the whole Twitter ban has made that a bit harder.

Greene’s centrality to Republican politics was on full display last weekend. On Friday, she appeared as a surprise speaker at the far-right America First Political Action Conference, or AFPAC. Founded in 2020 by white nationalist Nick Fuentes as an alternative to the more buttoned-up (but often still batshit) Conservative Political Action committee, or CPAC, the conference featured a slew of controversial figures, from fellow representatives Paul Gosar and Steve King to Gavin McInnes and Milo Yiannopoulos. During this year’s conference, Fuentes asked attendees to applaud Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and heaped praise on the January 6 insurrectionists—he was there and called the storming of the Capitol “awesome”—as well as Adolf Hitler. Yes, Hitler. “And now they’re going on about Russia and ‘Vladimir Putin is Hitler’ — they say that’s not a good thing,” Fuentes said with a grin. Greene was introduced at the conference not long after Fuentes made these remarks.

The following day, Greene appeared at CPAC. Speaking on a panel at the country’s pre-eminent conservative conference about cancel culture—itself something of an oxymoron—Greene lashed out at social media companies for silencing her. “As Americans, we can no longer stay silent, we can no longer shut up,” she said. “Big Tech has aligned with the government, they’ve aligned with the Democrat communists, and what they want to do is they want to silence Americans who are willing to speak the truth,” she continued. “If there’s anything worth fighting for, it’s our freedom of speech and all of our rights.”

Pressed at the conference the previous day by reporters, she merely deflected, claiming that she did not know Fuentes or the other organizers of AFPAC. Responding to criticism from, among others RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, Mitch McConnell, and Mitt Romney, Greene returned once more to the same tired defense she always uses, claiming that adherents of “identity politics” were trying to “cancel her” for her insane views.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m speaking to Democrat union members or 1,200 young conservatives who feel cast aside and marginalized by society,” Greene said in a statement. “The Pharisees in the Republican Party may attack me for being willing to break barriers and speak to a lost generation of young people who are desperate for love and leadership.” Clearly this is a freedom fighter.

But despite the criticism from McDaniel, McConnell, and Romney, most Republicans have been largely muted in their criticism. That shouldn’t be surprising. Greene’s presence at both conferences tells you everything you need to know about her current place in GOP politics. Sure, she’s hardly popular—her approval rating sits at 24 percent among Republicans. But she is extremely popular among the party’s far-right, which has only grown in importance since Donald Trump was elected president six years ago. Greene is, perhaps more than any other member of Congress, someone with deep ties to Trump’s base. As such, she’s invited everywhere: Both to Nick Fuentes’s white nationalist conference and the Republican establishment one. The one barrier she seems likely to break is the already gossamer-thin border between these two competing right-wing confabs.

Fourteen months after Trump supporters attempted to use violence to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, figures like Greene are arguably more central to the party than ever before. Greene’s mere presence at CPAC further legitimized her. She might say crazy things all the time, but she is no pariah. Instead, she is consistently welcomed into Republican circles because, while her views may be reactionary, stupid, and senseless, it’s understood that those are views shared by many Republican voters. Terrified of attracting the wrath of those voters—let alone their fearless leader, Donald Trump—Greene has been embraced.

Her presence at CPAC is also a telling reminder that, while the conference has long since ceased being a model of anything related to conservative ideology, it remains tied to the reactionary, often racist politics of that movement. Greene’s views may have been fringe within the Republican Party not that long ago. But she’s broken out of the fringes and is swimming with the mainstream now. Who can say who might follow in her wake and what high offices they might soon attain?

In the West, media outlets are claiming that Russia’s agenda to “denazify” Ukraine is unfounded. At the same time, public opinion in Western countries is totally alienated from the Ukrainian reality, tending to believe only what is reported by the hegemonic media. The result of this is strong disapproval of the Russian attitude based on the lie that there is no trace of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine. In this sense, it is urgent that quality information be disseminated to the Western audience to avoid the proliferation of lies about the Ukrainian reality.

On almost every TV channel and newspaper in the West, Ukrainian Nazism is questioned with the worst possible arguments: Zelensky is Jewish, and the Ukrainian state is democratic. This kind of superficial thinking prevents a detailed analysis of the catastrophic situation in Kiev since the Maidan, when, through a coup d’état, an anti-Russian junta took power and institutionalized a racist and anti-Russian ideology, which remains until the current days.

When we talk about “Ukrainian Nazism” we are not saying that Kiev is a contemporary copy of Hitler’s Berlin, but that the neo-Nazi element is a fundamental point of post-2014 Ukraine. The Maidan coup was openly supported and financed by NATO as a way of undermining any Russian influence in Moscow’s own strategic environment. The aim was to make Ukraine a puppet state, commanded from Washington, ending any link with Russia. There was not only the objective to annihilate political, economic, and diplomatic relations between Kiev and Moscow, but also to eliminate cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic ties between both nations.

Since then, anti-Russian plans have been implemented. Ethnic Russians have been persecuted for the past eight years – even through systematic extermination in some regions. The Russian language has been criminalized in entire cities where the population does not speak Ukrainian. Schisms in the Orthodox Church have been supported to form a Ukrainian “national church” out of the Moscow Patriarchate. But the question remains: how has this been possible if Ukrainians and Russians are such close peoples? Many Ukrainians speak Russian and marry ethnic Russians, in addition to the fact that most of the country’s population follows the Orthodox Church. So how was it possible to initiate such a successful racist policy?

This was certainly one of the biggest concerns of the Maidan planners. And the answer lies in the Nazi element, which was very well worked out by Arsen Avakov, Minister of the Interior during the Poroshenko government. Avakov initiated a process of instrumentalizing neo-Nazi militias that had supported Maidan, making these extremist groups key points in the defense of the new Ukrainian regime. In the West, due to collective ignorance about Slavic history, many people think that Nazi racism was restricted to Jews, but in fact, anti-Russian hatred was one of the biggest locomotives of WWII, having led Hitler to the irrational decision to invade and try to annex the USSR. This sentiment is alive in these neo-Nazi militias, who are literally ready to do anything to annihilate the Russians, being much more fanatical in their racist convictions than the Ukrainian armed forces.

Groups such as the Azov Battalion, C14 and the armed militias of rightist parties such as Pravyy sektor and Svoboda operate freely in Ukraine and are most responsible for the extermination of ethnic Russians in the Donbass. These groups act with more violence and using more sophisticated equipment than the Ukrainian armed forces themselves, being the real face of Kiev’s anti-Russian brutality. As neo-Nazis, these militias have no obstacles in complying with the government’s objective of destroying any ties between Russians and Ukrainians, thus being the main allies of the Maidan era.

In a 2020 Freedom House’s report, “A new Eurasian far right rising”, it is said that the far right is one of the strongest and most influential elements in Ukrainian society today, being a sophisticated, highly professionalized, and visible political force. In other words, what would be violent and criminal urban groups elsewhere on the planet have been converted by Kiev into a pro-Maidan parallel armed force. The inspiration for this model of action comes from the original Nazism: the Schutzstaffel (SS) was one of the largest German armed political forces during the 1930s and 1940s, but the group was not part of the German Armed Forces, but a paramilitary militia instrumentalized by the government apart from the official troops. There was a major strategic objective with this: while the German military was commanded by the government, the SS fought for the Nazi Party and for Hitler – that is, if Germany surrendered, the SS would declare war on the German military. This type of “double-shielded” military system is the same one that Kiev has implemented: if one day a pro-Russian government is elected, the neo-Nazi militias will declare war on Kiev – and will be strong enough to defeat the official troops in the same way as the SS was stronger than the German armed forces.

It is necessary to note that these groups operate not only in the sphere of military force, but also in the cultural field, fomenting anti-Russian hatred among ordinary Ukrainians. The exaltation of Stepan Bandera (Ukrainian anti-Soviet nationalist leader who collaborated with Nazi Germany) is one of the symptoms of this. Before the Maidan, Bandera was a name like any other in Ukrainian history, but he came to be remembered and venerated as a national hero by neo-Nazis and anti-Russian politicians. In the same sense, these groups vandalize parishes and monasteries of the Russian Orthodox Church and are responsible for the consolidation of a Ukrainian mentality entirely hostile to Russia, which is gradually permeating the local population.

Ukraine is in fact ruled by a Jew and the country’s power structure is indeed publicly “democratic”, despite being internally authoritarian and corrupt. But the Nazi element is not in these aspects, but in the structure of protection of the post-Maidan Ukrainian state, which is supported by a national coalition of neo-Nazi militias whose objective is simply to persecute and kill Russians, regardless of who is in power in Kiev. It does not matter to these militias if the President of the Republic is a Jew – what matters is that Russians are dying, which favors both neo-Nazis and the pro-NATO politicians they protect. In other words, the Western media’s arguments to deny Putin’s claims about Ukrainian Nazism are weak and superficial.

Moscow is right in its concern to denazify Ukraine. It is a measure that should be taken in coalition by several countries. All over the world, Nazism is “condemned”, but only when it benefits the West. The closest political experience to Nazism in the present days has been seen and peacefully tolerated by liberal governments that claim to be defenders of human rights and democracy. Russia is simply no longer willing to put up with crimes being committed by neo-Nazis against its people and there is nothing wrong with that decision.

Lucas Leiroz, researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

When the corporate media push for war, one of their main weapons is propaganda by omission.

In the case of the recent crisis in Ukraine, Western journalists have omitted key context about the expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War, as well as US support for the Maidan coup in 2014 (FAIR.org, 1/28/22).

A third and crucial case of propaganda by omission relates to the integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian armed forces (FAIR.org, 3/7/14, 1/28/22). If the corporate media reported more critically about Western support for the neo-Nazi-infested Ukrainian security services, and how these forces function as a front-line proxy of US foreign policy, public support for war might be reduced and military budgets called into greater question.

The post Western Media Fall In Lockstep For Neo-Nazi Publicity Stunt In Ukraine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Speaking at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser shortly before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Donald Trump heaped praise on the despot. Putin was “very smart,” Trump said with apparent admiration. “I mean, he’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart,” Trump said. “He’s taking over a country, literally, a vast, vast, location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”

Trump’s long-standing affection for Putin has hardly been the stuff of secrets. In the same speech, Trump bragged that he knows the Russian leader “very well … almost as well as anybody in this room,” suggesting that their very special relationship might have prevented war—this in spite of the evident pride that Trump took in Putin’s decision to launch an invasion that will likely lead to the deaths of thousands and the potential collapse of a nascent European democracy, flawed though it may be.

But Trump’s comments were arguably tame compared to those of many in the right-wing media. His suggestion that his cozy relations with Putin might have averted war was a dubious bit of magical thinking—one that ignored the many ways he either enabled Putin or undermined NATO—but at least the former president was willing to countenance the notion that peace was preferable. By contrast, on Fox News and in other corners of the right-wing media, hosts aggressively cheered Russia on, while using the invasion as a hackneyed and pathetic attempt to hype the culture war—and to continue to boost Putin as a natural ally while denigrating vulnerable democracies.

“Russia collusion and the tens of millions of dollars spent on that ridiculous Mueller investigation, we’re paying the price right now,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on Wednesday. “The world is paying the price right now.” Ingraham was touting Trump’s line, saying that she laid “the blame at the feet of the people who tried to hound him out of office.” The idea here was that Trump had a secret plan—no doubt involving more coddling of Putin—that might have halted the invasion, even though the former president had never previously shown an interest in protecting Ukrainian sovereignty or democracy. When Trump called in, later in the show, he suggested that war was the fault of the “rigged election.”

Candace Owens, one of the right’s rising stars, pointed her readers to a Putin speech that was chock full of lies—before suggesting that what America really should be doing is sending troops to Canada to protect a small number of truckers who are angry about vaccines. For Steve Bannon, the argument was even more explicit: Russians—and, in particular, their hypermacho leaders—are natural allies in the war against the woke left.

But no one has done more to hype Russia—and, by extension, been more indifferent to the people of Ukraine—than Fox News’s biggest star, Tucker Carlson. He has suggested that the invasion was the result of a mere “border dispute.” He has repeatedly echoed the Kremlin’s own talking points on the war, suggesting that the real issue was that Democrats don’t want Russia to succeed. ​​“Their one and only goal is to hold back the development of Russia,” Carlson said on Monday, while also suggesting that Ukraine was effectively a client state: “a colony with a puppet regime.”

Carlson further characterized Ukrainians as warmongers, desperate to fulfill a blood feud with Putin that will jeopardize American lives—a particularly spurious claim given that Russia has unambiguously been the aggressor and is currently bombing sites all over the country. All of these, as Insider pointed out earlier this week, are the exact same points Moscow is using to sell the invasion as a necessity—indeed, Carlson’s segments have already shown up in Russian propaganda.

Carlson really hit his stride on Tuesday, during one of his a typically stern-faced monologues. “It may be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, what is this really about?” he asked, rhetorically. “Why do I hate Putin so much?” he continued. “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” To Carlson’s thinking, Putin’s cruelties can be dismissed as other people’s problems—or even assets: If Putin is against civil rights, social justice, and democracy, that makes him, broadly speaking, an ally.

Downplaying Putin’s wanton aggression is certainly a challenge, considering it is presently coursing across our screens. There’s no guarantee that Putin will stop with Ukraine, either: Further aggression toward the Baltics, in particular, but also in other parts of Europe and Central Asia remain the concerns of those not lost to far-right fantasia. Ukraine’s flawed democracy is on the verge of becoming a whole lot less democratic; the potential of wider war on the European continent is suddenly a pressing concern. But who cares? The only thing that matters is stopping the woke left; helping the people of Ukraine contributes nothing to that cause.

It’s an astonishingly naïve argument. It’s callous, as well; with a despicable Trumpian turn. The distinctions between America and Russia have been discarded; as has the legacy of the Cold War fight for a free Europe. The suffering of the people of Ukraine—and their actual wishes—are being erased from the conversation. This profoundly cynical display sums up the right’s approach to nearly every issue right now: Morality, decency, peace—none of these things matter. Ukraine is merely another cudgel with which to beat Joe Biden and the left. It’s something else entirely; certainly not “conservatism.”