Today’s guest post is by James Chen. Please feel free to give your thoughts on the article in the comments section below. – Natylie

By James Chen

In the most important speech of his short, but significant life of public service, President John F. Kennedy explained about “the genuine peace”:

“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

I like to point out two not-so-subtle essences of the meaning of genuine peace, which are frequently missed or ignored by some childish political pundits and radical “peace lovers.” First, genuine peace cannot to be achieved by an indiscriminate pacifists’ approach. Secondly, genuine peace should not be obtained through endless Machiavellian shenanigans, such as the adage that my enemy’s enemy is always considered a friend.

The indiscriminate pacifists’ approach can only make more wars necessary. When The League of Nations chose to acquiesce to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Northern and Eastern China, permission was in fact granted to the Japanese Empire to choose its next target, the Soviet Union or the United States. Again, when Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, a disastrous war in Europe was invited. No imperial aggressor has ever been dissuaded or deterred by goodwill alone in human history.

The doctrine of making one’s enemy’s enemy a friend will inevitably lead to wars with our emboldened “allies” who are fundamentally our enemies. Henry Kissinger, who persuaded President Richard Nixon to play the “China card” against the Soviet Union, only found himself, at the last stage of his life, struggling to urge a new cold war with imperial China, which had already infiltrated every fabric of the United States in the past half century. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who devised the “Mujahideen card” for President Jimmy Carter, would always be branded as the prime culprit whose ill-minded scheme ultimately led to the bombing of the World Trade Center and an endless war against Islamic terrorism. Making friends with someone who does not share the same values does not make him a true friend, but a true enemy much harder to deal with, due to the technology, weapons and money that is provided.

In order to understand why 75 years after the end of WWII, we are still far away from realizing the dream of genuine peace which the whole world suffered so much to achieve as 70 million lives were lost, we have to go back to the historical moment when the most deadly confrontation of human beings was about to end. It is well known that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a great vision to achieve world peace which he sought to implement by eradicating the long-standing practice of imperialism and by developing a rapport with the leader of the second most powerful country of the world at that moment. The chance was never better in human history. His abrupt death disrupted this dream as his successor, President Harry S. Truman, did not have Roosevelt’s understanding of the nuances of the international arena or the Soviet Union’s security concerns, much less his diplomatic skills. Most unfortunately for the world, Truman did not have that deep aspiration for genuine peace.

The consequences have been quite severe. Not only did the world miss one of the greatest opportunities to advance human civilization with a quantum leap, but also the U.S. took an erroneous path to engage in a prolonged and dangerous cold war with the Soviet Union. At the same time, the British Empire was allowed to survive and continue to play a manipulative role on the world stage. After all, two of the most ambitious and barbaric medieval empires, the Chinese and the Ottoman, were also revived as a result of the Machiavellian game. During the process, the American Republic has been degenerating into an empire, controlled by the deep state of establishment, disguised under the mask of a permanent revolving election door of two-party dictatorship. Today, although the Soviet Union has been dissolved for nearly thirty years, we are probably even farther away from achieving the goal of genuine peace than we were 75 years ago, while world peace is constantly threatened by the ambitions of four contemporary empires: the American, the British, the Chinese, and the Ottoman.

With no intention to write a book-length article, I would only point out here two ominous manifestations of each of the four empires as follows:

The American Empire

1. The United States government orchestrated a permanent military organization, NATO, only four years after the end of WWII. The military organization was created in 1949 against the Soviet Union as a loophole to by-pass the UN Charter, with a claim to secure a lasting peace in Europe, based on common values of individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. The interesting thing is that it continues to expand nearly thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Many of its member states are in fact rated as flawed democracies, and four of its member states – Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Turkey – are rated as hybrid regimes by the most recent Democratic Index. The records of NATO breaching the UN Charter – invading and bombing sovereign countries, sponsoring terrorism, and conducting genocides – are numerous.
2. The military forces of the United States invaded Vietnam and intended to suppress the self-determination of the Vietnamese people in the 1960s-70s, causing millions of deaths in that country. And the ripple effect of that intervention resulted in human catastrophe in surrounding countries, such as Cambodia and Laos.

The British Empire

1. The United Kingdom persuaded the United States to join the 1953 Iranian coup d’état carried out by the Iranian military, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup d’état, resulting in the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in favor of the monarchical rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in August of 1953. It is not necessary to list the consequences of the coup in this article.
2. The United Kingdom was the first country to join the United States in the second Iraq War, which was orchestrated by the neoconservatives of the Bush II administration to expand the American-Anglo dominance of the world, resulting in total destabilization of the region and the spread of Islamic terrorism.

The Chinese Empire

1.  Ever since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China has been continuing its imperial expansion without cessation, epitomized by the annexation of Tibet in 1950 and suppression of the Tibetan rebellion in 1959; invasion of India and occupation of Aksai Chin in 1962; invasion of Vietnam in 1979; continuous aggression against Taiwan – threatening invasion, massacres and annexation, causing multiple Taiwan strait crises in 1954, 1958, 1996, and further; militarizing international waters of the South China Sea by constructing military bases on uninhabitable archipelagos in violation of international law.
2. Since the normalization of relations between U.S. and China, the Chinese government has been trying to weaken the United States through sabotage, infiltration, spying, subjugation, and coercion. At the same time, it has been influencing and bribing many American politicians, academics, and businesspeople to serve its interests. One of the most pertinent examples of the Chinese interference in the American political and business arena is related to the current Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden. Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, a lawyer and investment banker, until recently was a director at Bohai Harvest RST, known as BHR, formed with $1 billion in Chinese government funding shortly after then-Vice President Biden visited China in December 2013, according to the investigative report. BHR co-purchased Henniges Automotive with Chinese military contractor AVIC, which had been identified as a front for China’s military and had been sanctioned before the Obama administration approved the Biden-connected sale.

The ultimate goal of the Chinese government is to replace the United States as the most powerful country on Earth, including their own ideology of exceptionalism.  Their goal is to realize the ambition reflected in their name for their country, “the Central Empire,” which is based on the myth of a single dominant “race” of Han-Chinese.

The Ottoman Empire

1. Thirty thousand Turkish troops are currently occupying one third of the Republic of Cyprus since 1974, after a bloody invasion. This occupation of a foreign territory of a sovereign state is the only such occupation confirmed and recognized by the UN Security Council, with condemnation and resolutions currently issued on the subject.  This is in addition to other indisputable invasions and occupations perpetrated by the Turkish military forces in other sovereign countries, including Greece, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
2. The Turkish government continues to conduct genocide against the Kurdish people inside and outside its borders, both physically and culturally for nearly 100 years, sometimes with help from the United States through military and economic aid programs. The Turkish government also continues to deny the Armenian, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek genocides which were the archetypal examples for all the genocides committed in the twentieth century and beyond. Today, it continues efforts to eradicate acknowledgment of those victimized ethnic groups under the pretense of national security concerns, which is supported by typical acquiesce from the United States and the United Kingdom, two so-called western democracies which do not officially recognize the Armenian genocide.

Understanding the pathophysiology of this four-empire disease of the world, I would like to jump directly into the solution of it. The principles we should bear in mind are:

1. The government of the United States should lower the threshold for organizing a new party that is free of control by the military-industrial complex, banks, oil companies, etc.
2. Our government should start to break down the few media-conglomerates and social media companies to allow truly free discussion by American citizens;
3. Our government should change the direction of our foreign policy towards respecting true democracy, self-determination, and sovereignty;
4. Our government should stop supporting theocracies disguised as democracies;
5. Our government should make allies by shared values, not necessarily short-term interests;
6. Our government should start to dissolve, or at least reform, all the permanent military organizations which the United States is currently participating in;
7. Our government should avoid playing into the hands of globalist fascism, which advocates forming a single global government with etiology of neo-liberalism;
8. Our government should seek foreign policy advice from outside of establishment think tanks, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, etc.

To be more specific, we should start to move in the following five directions without hesitation:

1. Disengage from any relationships with the Chinese and Ottoman empires;
2. Form true alliances against the Chinese and Ottoman empires;
3. Sever the so-called US-UK special relationship and encourage the dissolution of the British Empire;
4. Consolidate cooperation with Australia, EU, Japan and India;
5. Rebuild trust with Russia.

I have no doubt that this approach is the only approach that can not only serve the founding principles of this country, but also can deliver genuine peace to the world by the end of the twenty-first century.

James J. Chen has had a life-long interest in history, politics, and the humanities. He has begun writing on these topics, with a particular emphasis on the the U.S.’s role in the evolution of the modern world.  He lives and practices medicine in the San Francisco Bay Area. His website address is: https://jamesjchen.wixsite.com/save-the-country.

Note: I’m finishing up a project this week and an in-depth article should be published in the near future. Hence, the fewer posts.

In the meantime, below is a video of a new housing project that has been built in Yekaterinburg in the Urals area of Russia. With our media constantly characterizing Russia as simply a corrupt and dour hell-hole, it is important to see examples of what life is really like throughout the country.

I found this one particularly interesting since I plan to return to Russia in 2021 and Yekaterinburg is on my list of cities to visit.

In a recent interview with Rossiya TV, Vladimir Putin discussed several issues, including the current state of the Russian economy and the Covid pandemic. However, I have excerpted below the portion dealing with what is presently happening in Belarus. – Natylie

Sergei Brilyov: Mr President, it is not only the purely economic things that affect the economy (for example, the oil prices returned to $46 as we predicted) but also political factors. Belarus is, certainly, a political factor.

Vladimir Putin: Of course.

Sergei Brilyov: We have seen numerous reports on your telephone conversations with European leaders. But these reports are usually just scanty press releases from the Kremlin Press Service. In fact, you have not yet publicly shared your view of the situation in detail. What do you think of the developments in Belarus?

Vladimir Putin: You know, I think that we have shown much more restraint and neutrality with respect to the events in Belarus than many other countries, both European and American ones, such as the United States.

In my opinion, we have indeed been covering the developments in Belarus quite objectively, from every angle, showing both sides. We believe that it is up to the Belarusian society and people themselves to deal with this. Although, certainly, we care about what is happening there.

This nation is very close to us and perhaps is the closest, both in terms of ethnic proximity, the language, the culture, the spiritual as well as other aspects. We have dozens or probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of direct family ties with Belarus and close industrial cooperation. Suffice it to say that, for example, Belarusian products account for more than 90 percent of the total agricultural imports on the Russian market.

Sergei Brilyov: You mean the Belarusian products imported to our country?

Vladimir Putin: Belarusian exports. If we look at other industries – for example, agricultural equipment manufacturing – the figures are similar. Therefore, of course, we care about what is happening there. But it is still up to the Belarusians to deal with this situation.

We most certainly hope that all the parties will have enough common sense to reach a solution in a peaceful way, without running to extremes. Of course, if the people take to the streets, it cannot be ignored. Everybody must listen to them and respond. By the way, the President of Belarus said that he is willing to consider conducting a constitutional reform, adopting a new Constitution, holding new parliamentary and presidential elections based on the new Constitution. But the effective Constitution must not be breached. Did you note that the Constitutional Court of Belarus issued a ruling, according to which it is absolutely unacceptable to establish supra-constitutional bodies which are not envisaged by the country’s basic law and which are trying to take over power. It is hard to disagree with this ruling.

Sergei Brilyov: I looked at what they are writing about Belarus abroad, and often it is not about ideology but simply about facts. A lot of foreign articles about the events in Belarus are accompanied by an explanation what Belarus is and where it is located. This is because as distinct from Russian citizens, many people there know little about it. And, of course, in Russia we remember the events not only after the election but also before it, in part, about the 33 guests at the Byelorusochka hotel and the Russian citizens that were detained.

Mr President, who do you think got into whose trap?

Vladimir Putin: Well, now it is obvious. This was an operation by secret services. The people you mentioned were used without their knowledge in order to move them to Belarus. They received perfectly legal assignments. They were told that they must go to third countries, to Latin America and the Middle East, for absolutely legal work. But in fact they were dragged off to Belarus and presented as a potential attack force in order to destabilise the situation during the election campaign. This had nothing to do with reality.

Let me repeat that these people were going to work in a third country. They were simply lured there, dragged across the border. By the way, our border guards did not let them out and they could not move in anywhere. But de facto they were brought in on fake documents.

Sergei Brilyov: Ukrainian secret services?

Vladimir Putin: This was an operation of Ukrainian secret services in cooperation with their US colleagues. Now this is known for sure. Some participants in this event or observers, well-informed people do not even conceal this now.

Sergei Brilyov: Mr President, I think I have been lucky in my career as a journalist. I had three detailed interviews with Alexander Lukashenko but you know him much better, of course. In this context, I would like to quote what Mr Lukashenko said after one of his telephone conversations with you.

Vladimir Putin: Go ahead.

Sergei Brilyov: He said that when it comes to the military component, we have a treaty with the Russian Federation in the framework of the Union State and the CSTO, that is, a Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and these aspects seem to be covered by that Treaty. Somewhat earlier he said you agreed to provide assistance to Minsk at his first request.

What is meant by “these aspects”?

Vladimir Putin: There is no need to hush up anything.

Indeed, the Union Treaty, that is, the Treaty on the Union State, and the Collective Security Treaty (CSTO) include articles saying that all member states of these organisations, including the Union State, which consists of two states only – Russia and Belarus, are obliged to help each other protect their sovereignty, external borders and stability. This is exactly what it says.

In this connection, we have certain obligations towards Belarus, and this is how Mr Lukashenko has formulated his question. He said that he would like us to provide assistance to him if this should become necessary. I replied that Russia would honour all its obligations.

Mr Lukashenko has asked me to create a reserve group of law enforcement personnel, and I have done this. But we have also agreed that this group would not be used unless the situation becomes uncontrollable, when extremist elements – I would like to say this once again – when the extremist elements, using political slogans as a cover, overstep the mark and start plundering the country, burning vehicles, houses, banks, trying to seize administration buildings, and so on.

During our conversation with Mr Lukashenko, we came to the conclusion that now it is not necessary, and I hope that it will never be necessary to use this reserve, which is why we are not using it.

I would like to say once again that we proceed from the belief that all the current problems in Belarus will be settled peacefully, and if any violations are permitted by either side – the state authorities and the law enforcement personnel, or the protesters – if they exceed the framework of the law, the law will respond to this accordingly. The law must be equal for everyone. But speaking objectively, I believe that the Belarusian law enforcement agencies are exercising commendable self-control despite everything. Just take a look at what is happening in some other countries.

Sergei Brilyov: Yes, but the first two days were awful for many people.

Vladimir Putin: You know what I think about this. Was it not awful when people died in some European countries nearly every day?

Sergei Brilyov: This is why Lukashenko rejected Macron’s mediation, offering instead to help him deal with the yellow vest protests.

Vladimir Putin: Is it not awful when a defenceless person is shot in the back and there are his three children in his car?

Sergei Brilyov: Yes, it is awful.

Vladimir Putin: Have those who are putting the blame on Belarus and the Belarusian authorities, President Lukashenko, have these people condemned these acts? I have not heard anything about this. Why such discrimination?

This makes me think that the issue is not the current events in Belarus, but that some forces would like to see something different happening there. They would like to influence these processes and to bring about the solutions that would suit their political interests.

Therefore, I would like to say once again that the general situation [in Belarus] is improving, by and large. And I hope that all the problems – and there are indeed problems, because otherwise the people would not have taken to the streets – that all these problems will be settled peacefully within the framework of the Constitution and the law.

Sergei Brilyov: Thank you, Mr President.

Read the full interview here.

By Gordon Hahn, August 23, 2020

As previously thought, Aleksandr Lukashenko’s harsh rule in Belarus is likely finished (www.facebook.com/gordon.hahn1/posts/10223340676086689). A few scattered thoughts on the dynamics taking shape around the Belarus crisis; one that threatens both the ‘stability’ and peace of Europe, Eurasia, and the world.

BELARUS

1. The situation is likely to deteriorate slowly over time.

2. Aleksandr Lukashenko is an unsteady element, who is likely to become more desperate and trigger-happy the longer the protests persist. His overreactions will provoke greater resistance. In this way, Belarus 2020 is not necessarily Russia 2021 or 2024. Putin is a careful, balancing, soft authoritarian. Where Putin nudges and prods with incentives and disincentives, Lukashenko shoves and batters to intimidate.

3. The regime thus far has split only on the edges, with the state bureaucracy and security forces still remaining loyal. However, Lukashenko’s popular support base is slowly disintegrating, as the protests by factory workers and others indicate. Over time, regime unity is also likely to deteriorate.

4. Lukashenko is using a ‘besIeged fortress’ strategy now to reinforce his support base in state and society, warning of possible intervention by NATO forces. His defense minister has raised the specter of a NATO ‘humanitarian intervention’ model in order to conduct an air campaign against Minsk as Washington and Brussels did in Serbia (www.rbc.ru/politics/23/08/2020/5f41b8479a79471b497ceef8?from=from_main_3&fbclid=IwAR2bppfrQ3XQEkXuakn6zh5xlszi6xTV4QH9EAFKy06XD0KYChEzo-mmkpE). The Serbian campaign, NATO expansion, and color revolution policies have had a profound effect on the politics of several pro-Russian Slavic and post-Soviet states in addition to those of Russia herself. The threat of NATO expansion and humanitarian interventions can be something in which some politicians and opinion makers sincerely believe and/or a bogey man deployed to create a rally around the flag effect and to discredit domestic opposition.

5. The risk of violence on the part of the opposition, which would likely spark a ruthless and bloody crackdown far greater than that which we have seen hitherto, grows the longer the protests continue. Some leaders will become frustrated with peaceful demonstrations, and Belarusian nationalists – while fewer in proportion than in Ukraine or Russia – will be increasingly inclined to turn to violence. In this case, the Maidan example is unfortunately germane.

RUSSIA

1. Putin is cautious in general. In this crisis he will be exceedingly so. At this point, he appears to be hedging his bets, making no threatening sounds towards the West and maintaining some separation from Lukashenko’s listing ship.

Continue reading here.