Get out of here, Louis Proyect. You’re a blight on sentient discourse.

Trusting in Erdogan in any way, shape or form was not “magnanimity”; it was GULLIBILITY and rank STUPIDITY. From the start of Putin’s ridiculous so-called “rapprochement” with the Erdogan regime, it was obvious to even a moderately intelligent and informed casual observer, that Erdogan would backstab Russia the first chance that he got.

“Why Putin can’t figure this out is beyond me. Instead of letting it simmer and putrify, he should have cleaned up the eastern Ukraine mess long ago”

Putin is a weakling – a milquetoast, timid, pusillanimous, grown-up choirboy kind of man, who usually tends to fold under strong pressure. (Of course, this is the exact opposite of how the professional liars of the Western MSM present him as – “the new Hitler” etc. -, which is one way that you know it’s true). He was a big improvement over the likes of Yeltsin, Gorbachev and their ilk; but that’s really not saying much. He did many good things for Russia, especially during his first years in power, which were mostly no-brainers, really, that any minimally patriotic and non-traitorous leader would have done. But today he and his closest team (Lavrov etc.) are kind of out of their depth and mainly just trying to hold the line, with decreasing effectiveness.

Well he sure seemed to be fooled (or, shall we say, “temporarily entranced”[!]) by Erdogan’s fake, so-called “pivot away from the U.S. toward Russia’s Eurasian axis” during the last couple of months. So much so, in fact, that he may have helped Erdogan survive the coup attempt by giving him early warning of the planes taking off to bomb his holiday residence. Plus, he rushed to forgive in a nanosecond all of Erdogan’s transgressions against both Russia and Russia’s ally Syria, initiating a silly “honeymoon” type rapprochement with the Erdogan regime which enabled Erdogan to consolidate his position and invade Northern Syria (for starters), in exchange for…what, exactly? Basically NOTHING, other than hot air and a few vague noncommittal semi-conciliatory words from Erdogan and some of his honchos.

What a bunch of nonsense… I am not “expecting” a pivot from Erdogan; in fact I think such an expectation was and is unrealistic and stupid (and immoral besides). Neither is this foolish expectation “a figment of my imagination”; this is what several Russian government figures, including Putin himself, either said or implied on numerous occasions during the past couple of months. It has also been getting trumpeted as a sort of “grand chess move” or “master stroke of diplomacy” by the online Russian press and blindly Putin-worshipping commenters. This idiotic expectation is also what led Putin to suddenly in the blink of an eye forgive all of the Erdogan regime’s transgressions and turn on the spigot of economic benefits flowing from Russia to Turkey once again.

“Helping Erdogan survive a coup is a brilliant move on Putin’s part, since the alternative would be far worse”

A dumber statement than this, would be hard to think of. Helping a jihadi-supporting, psychopathic Islamofascist tyrant with neo-Ottoman pretensions whose regime is an enemy of Russia by its very nature and has brazenly shot down a Russian jet and killed and helped kill Russian pilots and servicemen and backed terrorism against Russians in the Northern Caucasus and Ukraine and is the principal backer of armies of extremists invading Russia’s ally Syria and has now finally started to directly invade Syria himself survive a coup, is a “brilliant move”??? What “alternative” would be “far worse”? Are you really this imbecilic??

“And Turks entered Syria after extensive consultations with the Iranians, so we don’t really know what give-and-take took place behind the scenes”

A meaningless speculative statement, which shows nothing except your own baseless hope that Erdogan must have “gotten the Iranian OK” to enter Syria, so there must be something “positive” lying behind it somewhere (no matter that this invasion is done in direct support of the jihadis ravaging Syria, and constitutes a direct attack on Syria, its government, and the Syrian Kurdish population).

You really are a mushhead!

“Russia historically does not sell out allies”

You must be kidding… That might have been true once maybe, in the Russia of yore. But in the last 30 years, the instances of Russia selling out, doublecrossing or refusing to lift a finger to help an ally under attack have been literally piling up.

They are not invading to “occupy jihadi enclaves”; they are invading to destroy the Kurdish forces who were fighting (and beating) the jihadis, kill Kurds, squat on Syrian territory as a step in an aggressive expansionist drive, and start a wider operation to overthrow the Syrian government. Those “jihadi enclaves” are part of the sovereign territory of Syria – not some rightful independent statelets.

By this same stupid logic taken to its full conclusion, Erdogan should be allowed to invade and occupy wherever he wants because then there will be “accountability”. In fact, why not let him take all of Syria, then (for starters), since it will result in greater “accountability”?

Only idiots or those who are naive and clueless give any plausibility to any “deniability” of anything by the Erdogan regime.

“They will sit on the crazies…until things quieten down. The Syrian government’s authority…will be restored much more easily in the rest of the country…for the first time in years there’s a clear prospect of a victorious peace.”

These over-the-top optimistic statements represent your hopes or wishes of what should happen, rather than a realistic assessment of what is actually happening or is most likely to occur. What if these sanguine expectations of yours turn out to be false and misplaced – do you wonder what then?

Are you aware that you are applauding the first stages in the neo-Ottoman invasion of a neighboring country by the Erdogan regime, as something “good”?

Oh I see… Appeal to the authority of the “betters”! Your unwarranted over-the-top optimistic statement of the Erdogan regime’s incursion into Syria must be correct, since “the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Hezbollah, have all either not protested at all, or done so in the most cursory and formulaic fashion”! Actually the Syrian government DID protest with quite strong words, but nobody listened to them – as nobody has listened to the more than 600 UN protests and resolutions that they have tabled in the past 5 years against the invasion of their sovereign nation by foreign-backed jihadis. But don’t let that distract you from your optimistic reverie. As for the protesting or non-protesting of the deluded, weak, “partner”-begging, Erdogan-courting Putin-Lavrov team – well I think the less I get into that, the better…!

Off the top of my head, all in the last 30 years (though I normally don’t have the time or inclination for recent history lessons on this blog’s Comments section, which should not be needed anyway since you should have informed yourself of these things beforehand):

1. The Afghan socialist government, which had been fighting a brutal bloody war alongside them for a decade against U.S./Pakistani/Saudi-backed Islamic mujahideen (they even refused to give personal asylum to the last allied Afghan head of state, Najibullah, when the Taliban were taking Kabul, causing the man to be dragged to death in the street by Taliban savages)
2. The East European allied communist governments, protected from NATO up till then by the alliance with the Russians and the Warsaw Pact – all in one fell swoop
3. Iraq – Saddam Hussein (twice)
4. Serbia – Milosevic (twice)
5. Libya – Qaddafi
6. Syria – Semi-sellout (lack of adequate support, prolonging the agony) so far, 2011 to present; but appears to be heading in the sellout direction

These are just the major, state-level ones – there are a whole additional bunch of local, sub-national or trans-national level sell-outs, too. Granted, many of these could more accurately be termed “let-downs” than “sell-outs”, but the result was the same.

“Except for the Yeltsin period…whom has Russia betrayed in the last 30 years?”

Read my list above, again; and take into account their dates, if you are capable of doing that. The Yeltsin period was only the ’90s. (Although yes, Yeltsin was by far the worst in this regard, of course…)

“Gaddafi abandoned Russia and was sucking up to the West”

No, it was the other way around. Gaddafi felt that he had to suck up to the West to a certain degree out of self-preservation – especially in the 1990s, i.e. the “Yeltsin time”, and the early-to-mid 2000s – since Russia had cut off most of its allies because RUSSIA was sucking up to the West, and was not likely to come to his aid in any kind of confrontation.

“Serbia dumped Russia, sold Milosevic to NATO, and is still trying to worm its way into NATO’s graces”

Basically the same thing as Gaddafi and Libya, above… All this occurred AFTER Russia had already betrayed and abandoned Serbia TWICE in the 1990s under Yeltsin, standing by and doing nothing except some cluck-clucking as Serbia was attacked and bombed ruthlessly by the U.S./NATO.

“It is not clear how the battle started on the micro level…”

As always, we have a paucity of factual reporting and an abundance of Internet speculation and assertions; but what I am guessing is that it probably started with some local Kurdish commanders being bribed or tricked into thinking that it was a “good idea” to attack the Syrian government forces by the U.S. operatives and agents on the ground there.

These people must suffer personal consequences for all their lies, crimes and aggressions. The punishment must be at the PERSONAL level. Otherwise this whole bullcrap will never end.

“how far down the food chain does these people who must suffer personal consequences go?”

I don’t know, man… It’s a question of preference, I guess (plus the exact details, of course). But such a discussion is academic at the present moment. First, we gotta get to the point where ANY of them (even a single one) is suffering any personal consequence at ALL!

The “Russian Muslims” have been Turko-Mongoloid, North-Central Asiatics, though… Very different in almost every way from Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims.

My “point” is just what I wrote. Do you have reading comprehension problems? I was emphasizing that the Muslims (or, rather, people of historical Muslim background) in Russia are different racially, socio-culturally and historically from Muslims in other regions – which was a critical nuance that seemed to be glossed over in the comment I was responding to.

“Far more effort goes into discrediting truth than into discrediting lies.”

Golden!

Which of Erdogan’s propaganda desks (formerly called republic of Turkey government departments) are you working at? Or are you merely a **non-Turkish** Erdoganista lowlife?

It takes a stupid and shameless inversion of the truth to talk about someone like Cockburn, a Western liberal-lefty who is always trying to put down and slyly undermine the Assad government in his articles, as having Assad as his “master”, merely because he says a few less-than-complimentary things about Turkish involvement with ISIS in this article – but then, you characters are not known for your logic, integrity, decency, or respect for truth and facts.

And who exactly are “Assad’s heterodox monsters”, idiot?

“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it…”

Funny how she doesn’t mention “Russophobic”, “Slavophobic” and “secular Muslim-phobic”, which she herself certainly is…!

Only a mendacious idiot would call UAE a “First World country” (HINT: being “First World” involves a LOT more than just “having money”).

Greece’s woes result mainly from having made the bad choice of putting their whole national economic and political fate and wellbeing in the hands of the EU, and from the way that the EU has treated them. Greece is certainly NOT below a place like UAE by ANY measure of civilization and culture except that of “current financial strength”.

“One of the little known facts about Israel is that non European Jews ( mainly from North Africa and Middle East) form 60% of its Jewish population…”

But they ARE Jews, racially and religiously – RIGHT? And Israel does NOT allow masses of non-Jewish Middle Easterners, Africans etc. to immigrate, settle, and population-replace – RIGHT?

EPIC ARGUMENT FAIL, you white and European-hating tendentious Zio-cuck!

That may have been the original definition when the term was first coined. However, over the decades – and especially since the end of the USSR/Warsaw Pact – it has, essentially, come to mean something like “a highly advanced, economically, techno-scientifically, socio-culturally developed and creative nation or society, with a more-or-less democratic form of government and civilized laws and norms”. This – admittedly generalized and somewhat vague – definition, of course, emphatically does NOT fit places like UAE, Saudi Arabia etc., no matter how much current financial strength they might possess, which is solely dependent on black gold extraction and sale.

“Why didn’t the Jews kick out all of the Arabs out of Israel?… Israel is not even as homogeneous as most European nations, let alone as homogeneous as Japan and China”

You are deliberately evading the point in a disingenuous way, like a typical dishonest Anglo-Zionist propagandist. The point is: The Arabs in Israel were ALREADY inhabitants in the area that became Israel (or some of them immigrated from IMMEDIATELY ADJOINING Arab areas, where they had been living for thousands of years, SIMULTANEOUSLY with Zionist Jew immigration right before the founding of Israel), when Israel was established just 68 years ago. This is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from importing millions and millions of Middle Eastern Muslims and Africans from thousands of miles away, as Europe-hating Anglo-Zionist psychopaths want European countries to be doing.

It REALLY rankles your Anglo-Zio envy that “most European nations, Japan and China” – who are all living in what has been their ancestral homelands for MILLENNIA – are more homogeneous than the recent artificial construct called “Israel”, doesn’t it? NOBODY can be allowed to be in a better or more advantageous situation than Israel in anything – if they happen to be so, then they MUST be pulled down to Israel’s level, or worse.

Sooner or later, SOMETHING will have to be done against the Western MSM of today, and the people who comprise it. These people bear direct responsibility for the imposition West-wide and worldwide of a great many bad, evil things, via deliberate misinformation and propaganda.

This is one of the MAIN issues of our age.

It was the U.S. that ruined Afghanistan, with its unqualified support of the most retrograde, backward tribal-Islamist elements of that country, the Afghan mujahideen, throughout the Cold War and especially during the Afghan War of the 1980s. The Afghan socialists, whom the USSR backed, would have secularized and socially modernized Afghanistan – if left alone free from outside interference, that is… Butt – NOOO: The U.S. just HAD to go in and support and romanticize the medieval tribal Islamist savages of Afghanistan as “noble anti-communist freedom-fighters” – and funnel jihadis like Bin Laden from all over the Middle East to help them in their “holy war”, in collusion with those bastion-of-civilization U.S. allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

It’s interesting and disgusting, how you unreconstructed U.S. chauvinist-exceptionalist types do a shape-shift/bait-and-switch in the blink of an eye and manage to turn around and put the blame for undeniable U.S. sins on “the other side”, always… You guys need to be exterminated like bugs.

He is also a Zio-con worshipping, neocon fool.

The majority of the American, Western, and even most of the European public, are like mindless dogs, conditioned in a Pavlovian manner by the presstitute Western media with truth suppression and inversion to accept and support Washington’s criminal policies and aggressions. Despite all the hopes being placed in them for years now, so-called “alternative media”, the Internet, non-MSM websites, etc. are not powerful enough to alter this fact – and many of them are themselves compromised or on shaky foundations. It is a near-Orwellian situation overall – and no change for the better is likely until and unless the presstitutes who make up this Orwellian “Ministry of Regime-Delivered Truth” start paying a PAINFUL PERSONAL PRICE for their warmongering against hapless nations, hoodwinking of the general public, willful omissions and distortions of the truth, and deliberate spreading of propaganda untruths in service of the U.S. regime’s goals.

Meaningless bridge-selling neocon blather. “…when it comes to economic policy in Russia, free-market liberals is the only game in town”. Yeah, right, SUUURE – the same “free-market liberals” who turned Russia into a de-industrialized, de-technologized, de-socialized semi-Third World economy dependent on fire-sale of state assets, financial speculation, rent-seeking and raw material extraction.

Dumb, obvious neocon hack!

Russians removing a sleazy corrupt politician from power IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY, is a reason for you to call them “communist scum”. Cold War bottom-feeders like you need to CROAK already. Piece of slime.

Yeah, like you neocon shitheads are really worried about “Islamic states” and Islamism. If Russia is an “Islamic state now”, then it means you should love Russia, you stupid blockhead, since there’s hardly an Islamic extremist regime anywhere that your lowlife neocon leaders waste any time before starting to suck off and conspire against independent secular nationalist governments with, from the vile camel jockeys of Saudia to Erdogandog who actually IS turning Turkey into a “fucking Islamic state”.

Yell all you want in impotent rage, you ain’t gonna change nothin’, douchebag third-rate troll. You guys’ days are numbered; and hopefully someday we’ll all be dancing and singing on your graves.

Putin isn’t “afraid” of Kadyrov, nitwit. Kadyrov is a loyal regional leader who has been doing a lot to purge Chechnya and the surrounding areas of separatists and Saudi and Western-supported Wahhabi terrorists, and who is an ASSET to Russia. His Islamism is probably at least partially a ruse to placate the conservative Islamic majority population of his own Chechnyan region – but even if it isn’t, the important thing is that he is NOT ANTI-RUSSIAN, NOT SEPARATIST, NOT A JIHADI, and FIGHTS TERRORISTS. A loyal Russian citizen of Chechen Muslim extraction like Kadyrov, is worth more to the country than all the shiftless treasonous Fifth Columnist Atlanticist Slavic and Jewish faux-liberals, oligarchs, etc. put together.

Do you idiotic rank-and-file neocon trolls get special training somewhere, on how to disingenuously misinterpret and misrepresent things?

I was already aware of this hasbara project, of course; but thanks for the link anyway… However, I think – though I could be wrong – that most of these neocon trolls who post lying smear propaganda about Putin and Russia on this website and others are not direct Israeli propagandists, but rather U.S. neocon types (and their Ukie, Balt, etc. acolytes).

Great commonsense analysis by Roberts. Hope that as time passes, more people can start to wake up from their brainwashed zombie comas and see these basic truths of our time.

The larger part of what passes for “mainstream media” in the West today literally needs to be closed down; and many of the individuals who comprise it and have turned it into what it is need to be jailed, or at the very least permanently removed from any important media functions and marginalized (and, in some of the most egregious cases, hanging from a gallows). These people are psychopathic warmongers and cheerleaders of unprovoked naked aggression; mendacious lying propagandists and truth-inverters; and Orwellian-style indoctrinators and thought police – all rolled into one. The present-day Western “mainstream media” which they staff and maintain is a globally-acting insidious network of false-narrative construction and false-consciousness formation in service of nefarious motives and agendas. They are wicked scum, whom the planet would be much better off without.

Another great column by Paul Craig Roberts. May you live and continue to write for a long time to come yet, PCR!

From the Wikipedia biography of The Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron:

“Baron was born in Tampa, Florida to Jewish immigrants from Israel…”

That piece of information right there, tells you all you really need to know. There’s not much need to analyze any further for why things are the way that they currently are.

Fake newsters (most of whom are unreconstructed extremist Cold War ideologues posing as “newspeople”, and their younger-generation acolytes) need to suffer PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES for what they do – PAINFUL and PERSONAL consequences. So do the criminal “think tanksters” who stand behind and are in many cases interchangeable with them.

Until this condition is achieved, nothing much is likely to change for the better.

“The mainstream media, which holds the commanding heights of transmitting information to the public, will just continue to misrepresent everything.”

The “mainstream media” in the West today should be smashed. The lying propagandists that comprise most of the “journalists” therein, need to be prosecuted and punished. It should be a criminal offense to knowingly construct fake narratives in service to somebody’s warmongering or political/financial agenda, and try to pass them off as “news” to the unsuspecting public; to omit, distort, misrepresent events, issues and people. The ONLY task of real “journalism” (other than clearly-labeled opinion pieces) is to inform the public of what is really transpiring through truthful reporting of facts. Anything else is basically deliberate deception of the public and a crime – and should be treated as such.

Until this is achieved, not much can change for the better on the information/media front.

GREAT comment! I agree 100%.

This mainstream media of today’s West MUST be held to account. It MUST be transformed thoroughly – or failing that, it must be ELIMINATED and a wholly new media structure constructed in its place.

Great, succinct statement of today’s basic reality. Bravo again Mr. Roberts!

“Not since the coup attempt. Now they’re friends.’

NO. The Putin-Lavrov team THINK (i.e., ARE DELUDING THEMSELVES) that they are friends. There’s a huge difference.

A country like today’s Turkey, ruled by a tyrannical Islamist regime whose ideological pillars are aggressive Neo-Ottomanism and Muslim Brotherhood ideology, and brimming with Russia-hating jihadis, jihadi sympathizers, rabid anti-Slav/anti-Europe Turkish ultra-nationalists etc., cannot POSSIBLY become a friend or ally of Russia. The ideologies, mentalities and interests are diametrically opposed. The Erdogan regime is the direct sponsor of jihadis fighting in Syria against Russians and their Syrian allies, for Chrissakes! Geographically, without the Erdogan regime’s support, the U.S., Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Evil Pro-Jihad Coalition could do very little to aid their jihadi proxy-buddies in Syria against the Assad government.

The Putin-Lavrov team’s pipedream of a Grand Eurasian Axis including Erdogan’s Turkey is just that – a silly dream.

“I see more head-covered women per capita in modern London than I saw in Beirut in 1983′

“Modern London”, like most of “modern North-Northwestern Europe”, is going down the drain – FAST. Unless there is some sort of a radical course correction, SOON, these places will look VERY different in, say, 40-50 years, from what they have looked like THROUGHOUT THEIR ENTIRE HISTORY – racially, socially, culturally, and physically (in terms of the general appearance of the towns and public spaces, their inhabitants, buildings and architecture etc.). Oh, sure, TODAY they still appear as “rich, advanced, First World societies” – but this is increasingly a superficial facade underneath which deep, degenerative changes are occurring.

The only question now is, how much of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe will manage to escape these destructive socio-demographic-cultural alterations – this civilizational collapse and transformation.

Take your meds, “anonymous” psycho… Who the hell made you sicko jihadi supporters the owner of Syria?

Maybe; but the situation is NOT STABLE, it is getting WORSE at an accelerating pace, like a snowball rolling downhill (i.e. just look at the situation of Germany now vs. a mere 2 YEARS AGO) – and there are not even the beginnings of the concerted massive effort that would be required to reverse this world-historical change for the worse, on the part of either the ruling elites OR most of the native population. In fact it’s the OPPOSITE: most of them are either still in denial, burying their heads in the sand; OR actively supporting the suicidal course of their own societies due to various reasons (hope of capitalist economic gain, misguided “humanitarianism”, various deluded degenerate liberal-socialist philosophies); OR simply too scared and without the stomach to do anything about the problem.

Also – the Muslim immivasionist/settlers, although forming perhaps the worst part of the problem, are far from being the WHOLE problem.

“I wonder if MSM know what they’re doing when they play with fire like this. Is it just being reckless? Or are there elements in MSM who really want to trigger some antifa nutjob into carrying out something dangerous?”

Most of today’s Western MSM consists of maniacal ideologues, warmongers, psychopathic Russophobes, spin doctors, lying propagandists, spineless careerist corpo-rats, neocon/globalist/CIA/MIC/Gulf Arab toadies, implanted political/intelligence operatives, Anglo-Zionist supremacists, degenerate liberals, and the like. What they are NOT (except for a very few here and there), is honest journalists with integrity who consider it their topmost duty to inform the public truthfully about events and issues. Virtually NOTHING can be put past some of them.

The Western MSM as it is, is one of the MAIN PROBLEMS in the world today. It needs to be cleaned up and reformed from top to bottom. Failing that, almost all of it should simply be SHUTTERED.

““just look at the situation in Germany now”. I have. It’s stable.”

I guess the truck attack on the ***Christmas market*** in Berlin yesterday that killed 12 and wounded 50 was another manifestation of “stability”, eh, idiot?

Anyway, any “looking” done by YOU doesn’t count, since you’re a mendacious biased blockhead.

Putin should start knocking off some of the jihadi-supporting-and-directing U.S./British/Turkish/Saudi/Israeli terror masterminds and their operatives on an individual basis, via covert ops, proxies, unexpected attacks, and staged execution/assassinations – just like THEY are doing to Russians. Besides being the most fitting retaliation and revenge, that would really TERRIFY and incapacitate these scum, who are used to the idea they can do whatever they want with impunity and with no fear of consequences.

“The US was (barely) able to endure a Cold War with a bunch of people who like to drink bath lotion.”

Ruusians don’t “like to drink bath lotion”, you moronic bigot.

The problem with both Germany and Japan is that they have been supine U.S. vassal states since the end of World War II, under the thumb or massive influence of the U.S. politically, militarily, economically, socially and culturally. Neither one is truly sovereign or free.

Typo correction: “RUSSIANS don’t ‘like to drink bath lotion’, you MORONIC BIGOT.”

He didn’t “stereotype Russians as alcoholics” – what he wrote was: “…a bunch of people who LIKE TO DRINK BATH LOTION”. “Being an alcoholic” and “LIKING to drink BATH LOTION” are two completely different and unrealted things – those people who died in Irkutsk didn’t DELIBERATELY drink bath lotion; it was mixed into what they thought was regular alcohol by some criminals. Apparently, both you and the bigot “Jack D.” are too dumb to comprehend this.

Anyway, even if it really HAD been “stereotyping as alcoholics” in his stupid post, it would not have made it right – stereotyping an entire nation or society in a derogatory way based on the behavior of SOME of its members is almost always fallacious and wrong. By the same logic, Americans could be stereotyped as “a bunch of narco-crazed druggies”, considering the levels of narcotic addiction and related deaths, crimes etc. in the U.S. every year.

Your ***reliable*** source for all this?

Plus, even if all this is true, it doesn’t change anything in regard to what I said about stereotyping an entire nation/society based on what some trashy low-class idiots within that society do. Just think of all the ways that Americans could be described from the outside, for example, copying your bigoted and insulting approach: “nation of drug-pushers”, “society of cocaine-snorters”, “people who like to turn themselves into zombies with meth and bath salts”, “AIDS virus load-lovers”, etc. etc. At least these poor sods who got poisoned in Irkutsk were trying to imbibe the regular, “normal” stimulant ethyl alcohol – not something totally unnatural, monstrous, dehumanizing and demonic such as methamphetamine, bath salts, designer drugs, or the like. It’s your ATTITUDE that is wrong.

To say nothing of the fact – always ignored by you right-wing Cold War bigots – that all social ills in the former USSR, from poverty to alcoholism, increased to the point of major problems AFTER the dissolution of the USSR, under the conditions of socioeconomic collapse brought about by neoliberal economic policies and cucks like Yeltsin and the rest of the oligarch/liberal clique.

Very perceptive and intelligent… well done!

Isn’t this guy (Kissinger) ever going to croak? He’s 93 already!

But on the other hand – croaking peacefully, without having had to answer for any of his crimes, is way too good for one such as him…

“Do Celebrities Die More Often Around Christmas? Or does it just seem that way? It could be true for various reasons, but my guess would be that it’s just an effect of the news drought around this time of year.”

No – PUTIN must of done it!

The upright, honest journalists at the Washington Post and the New York Times told me so!

“Soviet society believed in random terror, the Gulag and mass murder”

When will you idiots stop writing crap like this?

Unfortunately and sadly, very true…

Kudos to Mr. Petras – one of the few remaining respectable current affairs commentators in the English language – for this very well-written essay. May you remain sane, balanced and truthful, and prosper, sir!

“…far from ‘creating a more authoritarian state’, Turkey looks like it finally liberated itself…”

You are a misinformed ignorant fool, and a joke.

Don’t ask me to expound on “why”, because it is a total waste of time and I won’t.

“…it looks like the pro-western military junta, that was ruling the country, is gone now”

What “pro-western military junta”, idiot? Erdogan’s party has been in power in Turkey since 2002. He first rose to power with the help of massive behind-the-scenes support and arm-twisting from U.S. neocons, the Gulf Wahhabis, Israel, and the EU. The people who made the coup attempt last summer were a small coterie of desperate secular army officers, not a “ruling military junta” (obviously if they had been a “ruling junta” they wouldn’t be “attempting a coup” – but even this elementary logic escapes your incompetent brain!). Their motivation was in all likelihood secular nationalist-Kemalist, rather than “pro-Western” – but we don’t have any reliable information about them or what they were thinking, or even WHO THEY WERE EXACTLY, because there is a NEWS BLACKOUT IN TURKEY SINCE JULY, with the only “information” allowed out being the propaganda missives of the Erdogan regime and their lapdog media.

Moreover the Erdogan regime is by no means anti-U.S. (except in a cultural/civilizational sense, just like the U.S.’ Gulf Wahhabi allies). It shares most of the same regional geopolitical objectives and policies with the U.S.: anti-Russianism, anti-Chinaism, support for the Middle East jihadis and the overthrow of Assad in Syria, the spread of militant Islamism into Eurasia/Caucasus to harm Russia and China, support for Ukro-Nazis etc., etc., etc. – it’s just that it is coming from a somewhat different motivational place (aggressive Islamo-nationalism and neo-Ottomanism) than where the U.S./Anglo-Zionist policymakers are coming from (globalist Anglo-Zio exceptionalist imperialism). In effect the Erdogan regime, despite all its “independentist” bluster, is still a geopolitical proxy and collaborator of the Anglo-Zio empire, albeit one with a kooky motivating ideology/ethos of its own. The best proof of this: Since the failed July coup attempt, NOTHING HAS REALLY CHANGED in the collaboration of Erdogan’s regime with the U.S. and its minions in important geopolitical issues (in particular the Syrian war). It has neither been kicked out of, nor made any moves to leave, the aggressive anti-Russian military alliance of NATO.

You’re a misinformed fool with superficial understanding of many vital things, who should do a lot more learning before opining on certain topics (despite your occasional flashes of perception in others).

“Gulen could represent a good balance between secularism and Islam….Erdogan…has to go, so Turkey can restore itself to what Ataturk made of it, a secular country.”

Turkey cannot be restored to being “a secular country” under the likes of Gulen, who is an Islamist of a similar mold to Erdogan. In fact, Erdogan and Gulen were good buddies until just a few years ago; and had been cooperating for at least a quarter of a century before that, as fellow cadres of the same broad anti-secular, Islamist movement, to destroy the remains of the secular order installed in Turkey by the founder of modern Turkey, Ataturk. The falling out between them is SOLELY due to the question of who will have the formal reins of power, whose “organization” will fill the government positions with its own people and control the machinery of state, the military and security forces, etc.

“People should know the Vietnamese kicked Genghis Khan’s ass too.”

Vietnamese did not “kick Genghis Khan’s ass”, idiot. Genghis Khan never fought anywhere near Vietnam in his lifetime. Read some history first, before spilling rubbish on the Internet just because “you can”!

That’s not the point. The point is, ignorant ahistorical crap being spread/dumped on the Internet, just because somebody happens to be in possession of a PC and keyboard.

All this, is not “Genghis Khan’s ass being kicked by the Vietnamese”, as the ignorant commenter wrote. This stuff that you cut-and-pasted here from Wikipedia, was taking place DECADES after the death, not only of Genghis Khan, but also of all of his top commanders and generals. If this was “what he had in mind”, then he should have written what was “in his mind” properly; instead of propagating untruthful, grossly inaccurate, ahistorical nonsense such as “People should know the Vietnamese kicked Genghis Khan’s ass too.”

In addition, the “Mongols” described here in these cut-and-paste excerpts were actually the soldiers and commanders of the thoroughly Sinicized, late 13th-century Yuan Mongol dynasty who ruled China – a far cry from the true steppe Mongol warriors of the era of Genghis Khan, who fought and conquered under Genghis Khan. A lot of them had probably not even spent too much time in Mongolia proper, but rather been born and grown up in Yuan China, among Chinese. I would even go so far as to venture a guess that the majority of the soldiers of the Yuan “Mongol” armies which tried to invade Vietnam in the late 1200s consisted, not of actual Mongols, but conscripts and auxiliaries from the subject Han Chinese population.

Besides – the primary historical sources from which the knowledge of the attempted Mongol invasions of Vietnam in the 13th century are drawn, were all written by either Chinese or Vietnamese scribes of the era (that is, ADVERSARIES of the Mongols) – since the true Mongols were a famously ***unliterary*** people who left little or no written records themselves. The point here being: Late 13th-century Vietnamese undoubtedly DID manage to repel an attempted invasion by a Mongol dynastic kingdom – an important historical success which cannot be denied; and kudos to them for it! But it should be kept in mind that the accounts of the battles and the “defeats”, the numbers of the fighters and casualties, etc., etc., are all likely to have been exaggerated and spun in a major way.

DW (Deutsche Welle) is one of the very worst, most poisonous, of the “mainstream media” outlets in the West – and has been so for decades.

Exactly! Toxic stupidity, petty nastiness, and utter immorality, all combined into one.

“The authors will avoid consequences and will very quickly shift into…the usual escapist nonsense that failed ideologues always use….And they will be back. Whether in ‘a year or two’ as Kerry just said at Davos, or in 2020, 2024, they will be back. This mental state is incurable.”

That’s exactly the reason why ***they*** need to be neutralized and eliminated – not allowed to constantly keep hatching more and more evil mischief…

“150 masked protesters at Cal Berkeley, precisely 0.0039 percent of the 38,000 student body was all it took to shut down free speech at the University of California, Berkeley.”

150 of 38,000 students is NOT “0.0039 percent”. It is 0.39 percent; or “0.0039 OF the student body”.

Well – learn to hit back, then! Don’t be a subjugated populace of wimpy, submissive, loser serfs.

You, sir, are singularly stupid and obtuse… (Either that, or a deliberate propagandist trying to weaken the Russian state through disingenuous propaganda).

You forgot Qatar, Kuwait, and Erdogan.

So you “wouldn’t mind” if Muslim terrorists “blew to smithereens” a major landmark of a major European city, merely because you don’t like how it looks architecturally???

Are you crazy, stupid, or just plain evil?

Another one of Paul Craig Roberts’ great articles… Sadly, judging from the grave errors that they have been making, it doesn’t seem likely that the weak, pusillanimous, inferiority complex-laden Putin government will be able to appreciate or follow the commonsense logic presented in this article.

You are a reprehensible knave, and a perfect example of what is wrong with the West today.

Yeah, whatever… Deconstructing layer by layer all the idiocies in what you wrote would take so long, and require so much written explanation of what should be obvious commonsense truisms, that ad hominemming you as a fool is pretty much the only option in a blog comments section. Sorry, but I really don’t have the patience for that right now. Call me a lazy SOB if you want.

The war in Syria could’ve been over (or almost over) long ago, if it wasn’t for Putin’s pusillanimity in forcing a halt to offensive military operations and calling idiotic ceasefires (in effect, breathers for the enemy which soon turned into “we-cease-they-fire”s) whenever the Syrian-Russian forces came close to smashing and wiping out the jihadis.

“I’ll call you a fat ugly internet troll”

Since you have absolutely NO idea what I actually look like in real life and whether I am “fat” or “ugly” or not, that statement would fit very well with your other moronic statements about the desirability of already very sparsely-populated Russia’s population DECLINING BY A THIRD to 100,000,000 just so that you can see the edge of the woods more easily from your front porch; and further confirm your subpar “intellect”.

Hahhah, great answer to this neocon/CIA/Euro-Russophobe/whatever troll… CONGRATS!

Russians should be staying in Russia and populating and developing their own country, anyway – not looking to emigrate to Sweden, Canada, etc. It’s obvious that Western Europe and North America are both anti-Russian AND going down the drain socially, culturally and demographically. Plus Russia needs the population.

Great post! Agree wholeheartedly!

“When Africa’s population explodes and we are subjected to unending video and images of African children dying of starvation, the guilt won’t need to be historical….I’m not sure how we psychically prepare our children for this.”

The thing to do is NOT, to try to “psychically prepare your children” for that. The thing to do, is to PREEMPTIVELY PREPARE for that inevitable population explosion by fighting and neutralizing those who will attempt to lay the guilt on you and your children via those “unending video and images of African children dying of starvation” and the accompanying stupid bleeding-heart propaganda – NOW!

“Which Mickey Mouse history did you study?”

He studied the revisionist, “it’s-true-because-I-assert-so”, make-up-as-you-go version of history, of course – the same as the rest of the Hitler-adoring, WWII-revanchist North American neo-Nazi commentariat on this website (who are falsely called “White Nationalists” when in fact it would be more accurate to call them “neo-Hitlerian propagandist ideologues”).

“…the US media the principal threat that Americans face. The US media is the handmaiden of war, the police state, lies, and evil….”

Virtually all of today’s Western MSM needs to be either shut down or completely restructured top-to-bottom; and the especially egregious ones from among the hordes of lying propagandist presstitute psychopaths in it need to be personally punished for their willful criminal misrepresentations. It’s as simple and stark as that.

This neo-Ottoman-sultan-wannabe psycho should be spat upon and ostracized by anyone with any decency anywhere in the world – especially in Europe. Instead his regime is still the U.S. and EU’s “NATO ally” and “friend and partner” against Russia and Syria. How pathetic and disgusting!

“And of course there’s the problem what to do with Turkey’s fifth columnists in Europe if/when things get really ugly.”

Just kick them out, plain and simple – and preferably, begin doing that, little by little, BEFORE things start to get “really ugly”. It should have been done long ago! And don’t worry overmuch about the optics and the unavoidable yowls of protest.

Superb article. May all the mendacious warmongering MSM presstitutes in the West choke to death on their own bile; and may we live to see it!

Precisely.

“I find Swedish psychology very hard to understand…I’ll never be able to untangle this”

Not so complicated, actually… The following basic but crucial defects go a long way towards explaining the profound irrationality and stupidity of current-day Swedish psychology (and the similar psychology of Euro-liberals in other nations, too):

– IGNORANCE (of European and world history, and of the way societies and cultures really function)
– The resulting NAIVETE and NARROW-MINDED DOGMATIC CONFORMISM to the prevailing false wisdom and delusional misconceptions
– To top it off, ARROGANT SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS and MORALISTIC NARCISSISM

Well, what can I say? Pathetic beyond description.

Great article; fills in highly salient issues usually omitted from discourse by the cretinous MSM.

Excellent piece. But of 300,000,000+ Americans, how many read what Dr. Roberts (and others like him) write and explicate so succinctly and elegantly; and how many understand or agree with the facts and logic therein?

Another refreshingly honest column by Paul Craig Roberts, in the midst of the cacophonous disinformation and propaganda-filled wasteland that is today’s “news and commentary information-space”. Well done, sir – please try to ensure that these writings of yours are gathered and preserved for posterity too!

“Once I expressed a similar thought about Russia. Quite expectedly I was called a Russophobe. I have no idea why people are so obsessed with raw numbers, like numbers is all that only matters…..So they would rather import people with an absolutely alien race and culture than accept that the population may decline but, as a positive side effect, will still be able to remain racially or culturally stable.”

Russia needs NATURAL population growth (i.e., population growth of the CURRENT NATIVE RUSSIAN POPULATION) – NOT growth by “importing people with an absolutely alien race and culture”. That should be self-explanatory to anyone except an obtuse moron. You claimed that it would be necessary and beneficial for already very sparsely-populated Russia to LOSE one-third of its population and DECLINE to a population of 100,000,000 (with you, yourself, NOT being included in that decline, of course, for some reason….!) It is DEMENTED IDIOCY to think that a desolate, depopulated Russia of only 100,000,000 people distributed over 18,000,000 square km. would have a healthy society or economy, or would be able to protect her borders and territory from the mounting pressures (whether military or “peaceful” migratory) of enemy powers and racial-religious aliens. Russia has many serious ENEMIES who want to destroy, subjugate or break up the Russian state and society, and then move in to take control of Russian territory and resources, if you hadn’t realized – first and foremost, the voracious, Russia-hating U.S. globo-imperialist elites. And for most of Russia’s foes, the low fertility rates and declining population of post-Soviet Russia is a major sign of WEAKNESS AND DECAY, cause for CONTEMPTUOUS GLOATING, and incentive for AGGRESSION – witness, for example, the celebratory crowing of the Russophobic neocon scum “unit472” earlier on this comment thread.

Does this make things clearer for your slow and egotistical brain??

Another great article, congratulations. Most dogmatic “free-market-and-free-trade-über-alles” ideologues are nothing more than ignorant demagogues.

“Combating terror involves practicing terror — including, since 2002, an expanding campaign of targeted assassinations by unmanned drones. ”

Dower forgot to add the increasingly prevalent and dominant practice (now more and more out in the open, not even denied anymore, and actually beginning to be outright DEFENDED in the Western MSM) of using jihadi terrorist armies as proxies to spread death, devastation and destabilization in targeted sovereign countries and regions – a practice FAR more egregiously criminal and destructive than pinprick drone assassinations.

Otherwise, a very good essay.

Superb piece. Thankfully there is someone like Paul Craig Roberts, writing the naked and ugly truth over and over again.

You’re a wilfully obtuse, dishonest and nasty piece of work; and possibly autistic besides. You’re also like a kind of poster boy for everything that’s bad and mentally twisted about most of the Russian “opposition” today. Not worth answering in detail this dreck of falsehoods, distortions, exaggerations and silly grade-school logic that you posted here. Yeah, that’s right, you deranged cuck; go ahead and depopulate Russia by another one-third because you’re mad at the oligarchs and the current quality of public housing, and then see what happens next – good luck dealing with the social and economic crash, armed invasions, “alien race & religion” migrations, population replacement and etc., etc. after that.

I’m done debating with your silly self.

Try to refute any of his points, if you can, instead of denigrating by attacking his background. I notice that you didn’t even try to address any of what he said. So if an “Iranian government employee” says that 2+2=4, you’re gonna argue that no, it isn’t, because he’s an Iranian government employee? This guy is obviously an Iranian communist, and his writing reflects his own independent views, not those of the Iranian regime. The fact that he is a correspondent for Iranian Press TV is neither here nor there – everyone needs paid employment somewhere to make a living (and he lives and works in Europe, not in Iran). This actually shows that there is MORE room for ideologically independent journalism on an Iranian government-owned media channel than in the Western corporate MSM owned by the likes of David Rockefeller and controlled by the CIA, which speaks with a “single voice” in all important ideological, political and geopolitical matters.

And if this was a journalist on Qatari government-owned Al Jazeera or some Saudi or Pakistani channel singing the praises of neoliberal capitalism and globalism, you would be equally dismissive…right? (!)

Cold War “anti-commie” shitheads like you need to go ahead and CROAK already. You’re just parasites at this point.

Where you employed at, the CATO Institute or something? All this is just a repetition of the same tired old U.S. neoliberal right-wing tropes aimed at the Venezuelan Bolivarian leadership for ages; and you sound like a trained propagandist/info warrior. Venezuela was doing fine in terms of economic development under Chavez (DESPITE all the U.S. efforts in collusion with the local rich comprador elites to sabotage his regime, and an attempted coup) until the 2008 global financial crash, which was caused by U.S. finance capitalists, NOT Chavez. Even after that they managed OK – so much so that, at the time of Chavez’ death in 2012, nearly all halfway-objective international economic assessments of Venezuela spoke in generally sanguine terms about his period in power. Under Chavez Venezuela’s main socio-economic indicators (health, education, income inequality etc.) showed huge improvements; large masses of the population were lifted out of poverty. But the Venezuelan economy was always brittle, being overreliant on oil exports and having underdeveloped agricultural and industrial sectors – problems that LONG PREDATED the Chavez Bolivarian regime. The Venezuelan economy hit the rocks post-Chavez when, in 2014-2015, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia in collusion deliberately engineered the oil price crash to harm Russia, Iran and Venezuela (which, ironically, helped China, that other great declared “enemy” of the U.S. globo-imperialist elites).

Also, Chavez’ successor, Maduro, has veered to the RIGHT economically, tried to “compromise” with the country’s U.S.-collaborating, regime-sabotaging rich comprador bourgeois class, and carried out badly mismanaged monetary policies.

“…the steady decline of a once vibrant country since Chavez took power…Venezuela’s oil industry infrastructure began decaying immediately after Chavez….Before Chavez, Venezuela produced such agricultural surpluses that all its population had abundant and cheap food… Agricultural surpluses were great enough that food exports were a significant source of foreign income…”

Barefaced bullshit-bollocks. In 1998 when Chavez took power, Venezuela IMPORTED 70% of its food (the figure was 90% in 1980); 21% of the population were chronically malnourished (MALNOURISHED, not just “undernourished); and huge chunks of the country’s people were living in poverty. I guess Venezuela could be said to be “vibrant” (!) for you if you were a member of the small rich coddled comprador elite/landowner class – otherwise, not so much. At the end of the Chavez period, the percentage of Venezuelan food imports was NOT higher than when he assumed power (and considerably lower, depending on whose figures you believe), DESPITE population growth, increased consumption resulting from poverty alleviation, and ceaseless U.S. efforts to sanction, economically undermine and destroy his regime in collusion with the local “anti-Chavist” rich opposition elites.

All the proof is available at the fingertips of anyone who is interested in actual truth – which, of course, does not include basement-dwelling retarded neo-Nazi snark artists like you.

I think the real sad thing is that your biological father neglected to use a condom ***that*** time; as a result of which a tiny part of the planet’s oxygen is being wasted on your useless lump.