Money Flow Trading Method along with Risk Management

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bo...message-stocks

The Bond Market's Bearish Message For Stocks
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b.../picture-5.jpg

BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, NOV 05, 2023 - 11:00 AM

Authored by Jesse Felder via TheFelderReport.com,

There’s a growing disconnect between the prices of stocks and bonds.

"It seems bonds are adjusting to a post-QE world but for some reason equities haven't. If you had told me that rates were gonna be where the are now on Jan. 1 and earnings would be flat and the S&P would be up 12-13%, that's not part of my process." https://t.co/IkAAQkkgBK
— Jesse Felder (@jessefelder) November 1, 2023
Bonds have begun to reflect the reality of a “post-QE world” while stocks have yet to do so.

"The historical relationship between bond yields and the S&P 500 P/E multiple suggests that the recent disconnect can be corrected in one of two ways — either the equity market has further downside or yields will move lower." https://t.co/AKvLOrUJ1x pic.twitter.com/5kELvTpJn0
— Jesse Felder (@jessefelder) October 31, 2023
Moreover, the growing “liquidity hole” suggests bonds may not yet be done pricing it in.

'If the T-bill rate stays at 5% or higher, to get a risk premium in bonds you need a bond yield of 5.5% or higher. And given the liquidity hole, demand will need to come from private sector investors, who will require a risk premium relative to cash.' https://t.co/PtBw3eW5AX
— Jesse Felder (@jessefelder) October 31, 2023
Meanwhile, the message being sent by the yield curve is not, by any means, bullish for the broad stock market.

'The arrows in the graph below show the occasions where the spread between the 3-month T-Bill yield and the 10-year T-Bond yield was inverted, and it either became un-inverted, or the slope of the curve steepened by at least 100 basis points.' https://t.co/0T80AgQKTL pic.twitter.com/zi9kHKOBNO
— Jesse Felder (@jessefelder) October 30, 2023
And the forward guidance out of the corporate sector apparently confirms this view.

'At just over the half-way mark of the reporting period, "weak demand" is among the top trending phrases on earnings calls. If the pace of mentions holds for the next few weeks, it would be the most on record, according to data going back to 2000.' https://t.co/3jQDCthcH4 pic.twitter.com/sg3a6hVxrj
— Jesse Felder (@jessefelder) November 3, 2023

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https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-...rk-market-melt

Why The Market Melted Up Despite The Carnage In Gaza
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=BTziRyiS

BY PORTFOLIO ARMOR
SATURDAY, NOV 04, 2023 - 7:39
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=noPO_JFj

Gaza Shows The World Is Less Risky Than We Thought
A couple of weeks ago, we suggested risk-averse investors consider our Hedged Portfolio Method in the event the Israel-Hamas war spreads (War Clouds Call For Bulletproof Investing).
That turned out to be a good suggestion, as our aggressive hedged portfolios continued to outperform the market during this week's melt-up...

Hedged portfolio created by Portfolio Armor on May 4th, tracked as of Friday's close.

But at the risk of talking down our book, we have to admit that concerns about the Israel-Hamas war spreading now appear overblown. Not only that, but the war in Gaza might expedite an end to the war in the Ukraine. Let's consider why.

The "Axis Of Resistance" Doesn't Want The Smoke
Israel's response to Hamas's massacres on October 7th has excited observers on both the far right and the far left with the prospect of an "Axis Of Resistance" (Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, plus other parties, depending on the pundit) taking advantage of Israel getting bogged down in Gaza to destroy the Jewish State. Here's Pepe Escobar, for example ("Iran-Russia Set A Western Trap In Palestine"):
Iran is able to block the Strait of Hormuz in a flash. For starters, that would be some sort of poetic justice retribution for Israel aiming to gobble up, illegally, all the multibillion-dollar natural gas discovered offshore Gaza: this is, incidentally, one of the absolutely key reasons for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Yet the real deal will be to bring down the Wall Street-engineered $618 trillion derivative structure, as confirmed for years by analysts at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, as well as independent Persian Gulf energy traders. [...]
Ali Fadavi, IRGC’s deputy commander-in-chief, cut to the chase: “We have technologies in the military field that no one knows about, and the Americans will know about them when we use them.”

Cue to Iranian hypersonic Fattah missiles – cousins to the Khinzal and the DF-27 – traveling at Mach 15, and able to reach any target in Israel in 400 seconds.

And yet, Iran has made no attempt to block the Strait of Hormuz, and has launched no missiles at Israel, and crude oil prices languish around $80 per barrel.
Or take Kevin Barrett ("Gaza: Where Is Hezbollah?"):
As the world waits for Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah’s critically important speech tomorrow, Challenger whistleblower Richard Cook forwarded this message from the Axis of Resistance with the preface:
Check out this incredibly important statement by a leader of the Resistance Axis.

As I read commentaries by Western authors it is staggering to consider the general level of ignorance of those who believe that all the West needs to do is convene a “coalition” of the great powers, revive the “two-state solution,” or prevail on Israel to go-slow and take-it-easy in order to root out the Hamas “terrorists” and “win the war.” None of these commentators ever thinks to go directly to the Palestinians on the ground or to other members of the Resistance and listen to what they are saying. These people have the Anglo-American-Zionist empire directly in their sights and are not afraid.

It turns out the leader of the Axis of Resistance was afraid to give his big speech in person.

While it's true that a neocon war on Iran would be costly for the U.S. and Israel, it would be disastrous for Iran, and the Iranians know that. So they, and the rest of the Axis of Resistance, will likely content themselves with bluster and some Hezbollah skirmishes on Israel's northern border, while Hamas continues to get reduced in Gaza. Despite their tough talk, they don't appear willing to take serious risks on behalf of the Palestinians of Gaza.

This past week suggested that Israel can invade Gaza and bomb the hell out of it, and its major adversaries like Iran won't join the fight.
The War In Gaza Weakens Ukraine

Fears of the Russia-Ukraine War sparking World War III were based on the prospect that Ukrainian forces might threaten to take Crimea, and Russia, unable to defend Crimea conventionally, might resort to nuclear weapons. So anything that weakens Ukraine and increases the chances of Russia winning lowers the prospect of World War III. The Israel-Hamas war does that, in a few ways:

1. Every piece of ammunition the U.S. sends to Israel is one it can't send to Ukraine.
2. The Israeli military is now running adds in Ukraine recruiting soldiers. Every Ukrainian soldier who goes to Israel is one fewer that Zelensky can throw against Russia.
3. The Israel-Hamas war has knocked the Ukraine war off of the front page, which makes it harder for Zelensky to successfully beg for more aid. Also, given the high civilian casualties in Gaza, Israel makes Russia look restrained, which hurts Zelensky's attempts to demonize Russia to gain more sympathy and aid.
4. Western officials and media groups appear to have lost interest in the Ukraine War and are now saying the Ukrainians can't win and should negotiate.

So, to sum up: if scenes of devastation in Gaza haven't sparked regional war yet, they probably won't. And the Israel-Hamas war has likely shortened the Ukraine war.
Another reason for markets to rally into the end of the year. If you're worried they won't, you can use our website to hedge, or you can tail us on some of our bearish trades in our trading Substack/occasional email list, which you can subscribe to below.

If You Want To Stay In Touch
You can scan for optimal hedges for individual securities, find our current top ten names, and create hedged portfolios on our website. You can also follow Portfolio Armor on Twitter here, or become a free subscriber to our trading Substack using the link below (we're using that for our occasional emails now).

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge, and are not selected, edited or screened by Zero Hedge editors.

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There's Nothing "Woke" About Supporting Hamas
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=GLmZhbIM

BY QUOTH THE RAVEN

SATURDAY, NOV 04, 2023 - 10:36
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

I didn’t write much last week because I wanted my piece on Monday about the Israel-Palestine conflict to resonate as much as a guy with a small blog can make it.

What I found out last week was that even I am not immune to the political polarization taking place in the world right now (who would have thought?!).

As I noted on my Twitter account this morning, I had quite a few “unsubscribes” after releasing my article last week, simply called “I Pray To God This Isn’t World War III”.
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=9gyVu1uj

Among other “controversial” takes like praying for world peace, the article simply asks people to think critically and with nuance about the developing situation both in the Middle East and how it is playing out in Western nations.

I already have several interesting pieces queued for next week, but wanted to offer my readers a chance to give last week’s piece a shot if they haven’t yet. It is free to read.

I’ll also say that in addition to the unsubscribes, I did get several very nice comments, both on the article and on the side, via e-mail, etc. I want to thank everybody that reached out.
I hope you all have a wonderful, beautiful fall weekend — and genuinely, thank you, for the continued support of Fringe Finance.
—Chris

For those who are not yet subscribers, you can take 50% off a subscription for life by using the coupon below: Get 50% off forever

Latest posts from the blog:

1. Should Scientists Be Allowed To Tell The Truth?
2. I Pray To God This Isn't World War III
3. Time To Think 'Quadrillions', As There's 'Zero Fiscal Restraint' In D.C.
4. The Dangers of a "Cashless" Economy
5. "Monetary Debasement" Is Highly Likely: Larry Lepard
6. Fed Has "No Way Out": 7 Reasons Fed Will Print Trillions
7. This "Unprecedented" Fiscal Doom Loop Is Getting Worse: Larry Lepard
8. Decentralization and Bitcoin
9. No, We Cannot Afford to Fund Yet Another War
10. Global Debt At Record Levels and Rates Are "Going A Lot Higher": Peter Schiff
11. Financial Free Speech
12. Quick Market Update For Subscribers: 10/13/2023
13. The Stock Market Sits On The Edge Of The End Of The World
14. Trading Armageddon: October 2023 Portfolio Review
15. How Myocarditis Became the Silent Scandal of Covid Vaccination
16. The Degradation And Humiliation Of The U.S. Consumer
17. "As I Look Into The Future, I See Anarchy": Harris Kupperman

Fringe Finance archives:

1. Posts from 2023
2. Posts from 2022
3. Posts from 2021

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QTR’s Disclaimer: I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. These positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice. You are on your own.

Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge, and are not selected, edited or screened by Zero Hedge editors.

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It’s Time (and Easy) to be Smarter than Our “Leaders”
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By Matthew Piepenburg
November 5, 2023

Below, we consider just how far America has fallen from its founding vision (and something we can do about it).

Union Matters—Poor Ol’ Jefferson
When sitting down to “channel the people’s will” through his own pen, the author of the American Declaration of Independence, Virginian Thomas Jefferson, had one key principle and theme in mind, namely: Union.

According to University of Virginia scholars, Garry Gallagher and John Nau, this concept of Union was premised upon the ideals (and “experiment”) of: 1) equality (despite, of course, can-kicking the slavery issue…); 2) compromise and 3) a fundamental disdain for any form of coercion (or “capture”) by a centralized body (or bodies) within an otherwise fragile republic based upon a federalist structure.

Here, of course, is not the place to unpack or debate the myriad concepts of a republic, federalism, or even constitutional democracy.

However, one issue of economic relevance worth raising today is the core and defining fear shared by America’s founding fathers, namely the fear that critical notions of equality and our three branches of government could one day be captured/coerced by bad actors and hence destroy the experiment of striving/evolving toward equality and union, however imperfect its growing pains.

Captured by a Private Bank
Which brings us to our central bank, whose power over the price (interest rate controls) and supply (balance sheet size) of the world reserve currency, has effectively and constructively become a fourth branch of government.

This centralizing central bank has not only been the direct and empirical cause of historical wealth inequality in America, but has now fully “captured” (i.e., taken centralized control of) the American economy in general and the price control of global bond and currency markets in particular.

The entire world, most of which is directly or indirectly pegged to the price and supply of the USD, literally sits on the edge of its seat to see what the FOMC will (or will not do) with the price and supply of a now weaponized and entirely “captured” USD.

In other words, Jefferson, whose admirable memorial stands just a few blocks from the Treasury Department and an easy walk from the impressive Eccles Building, would be shaking his head in despair if he were alive today.

Or stated more simply, America has sunken, irrevocably it seems, from its original and enlightened ideals of equality.
After all, when a post-08 central bank creates a zero-rate-driven and QE 1-4+ equity bubble, 90% of whose riches were enjoyed by only the top 10% of its population, we see just how “unequal” such coercive institutions can be…

Needless to say, no one in DC, and certainly not Powell, will confess that such centralization of power (and “free” markets) by unelected private bankers is a mark of feudalism rather than capitalism, and a carefully veiled symbol of authoritarianism hiding in “Federal” clothing.

[The Federal Reserve, I’ll remind again, is neither federal nor a reserve, nor even constitutional, despite its address on Constitution Ave…]

No Profiles in Courage
Nor are our lobbied politicians, who collectively know less about history, economics or basic math than just about any college freshman, asking themselves “what they can do for their country” …

Instead, they have been doing a heck of a lot of thinking about how to brand themselves for re-election and maintaining their power.

Toward this end, these “profiles in zero courage” (although Santos will likely claim he also has a PhD in applied math from MIT) have been making promises their budgets can’t pay for.
Thereafter, they blindly fill this deficit “gap” with trillions of annual IOUs (i.e., USTs) per year which are then paid for with inflationary money clicked out of thin air by the IT wizards at the Fed.

Farce After Farce After Farce
Of course, it is such magical money, and not COVID, Putin, global warming or little green men from Mars, which explains our farcically under-reported (i.e., openly dishonest) inflation rate, which if measured by the same CPI scale Volcker used, would place US inflation at well above 11% today, and not the open lie of headline 3.7%.

Such actual rather than “official” inflation means that every single IOU issued by Uncle Sam is a negative-yielding bond, and hence by definition, puts them technically and already in default.

Others Are Catching On
The rest of the world, including the growing BRICS+ nations, knows this, which explains why central banks have been net-sellers of USTs since 2014 and why de-dollarization is not just a concept but a steady reality today.

In short, demand for, as well as trust in, the great “risk free return” of the most important sovereign bond in the world (which is now mathematically “return free risk”) has been tanking while central bank gold-purchasing has been breaking records.
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But as the graph immediately below confirms, this lack of love for US Treasuries has not stopped Uncle Sam from issuing trillions and trillions worth of more such IOUs, creating a perfect disaster (i.e., mismatch) of over-supply and under-demand.
https://goldswitzerland.com/wp-conte...11/image-7.png

This mismatch, as even a high-school econ student knows (but our politicians do not), creates massive downward pressure on the price of those bonds.

And given the fact that bond prices move inversely to bond yields, those yields are now screaming north, which means interest rates, and the cost of debt (for individuals, corporations and even Uncle Sam), are now at record-breaking, bank-breaking and economy-breaking levels.

Meanwhile, the pundits and politico’s will still have you/us debating about hard-landings or soft-landings, despite the open evidence that our economic plane has already crashed…

Just Follow the Debt
Thus, and with simple candor, it’s high time we stop arguing over desert choices on the Titanic’s A-lounge menu and start considering the implications of the debt iceberg off our bow.

Our mental midgets in DC, for example, have placed American public debt at a 120% ratio to its GDP, which mathematically makes growth impossible rather debatable, as such debt ratios are the equivalent of swimming with a cannon ball chained to each foot.
Ultimately, however, the bond market in the USA, which is the key to our nationalized equity markets (which live or die based on bond yields and debt pricing) need to be understood plain and simply.

And I just can’t say this enough: Everything hinges on bonds in general and yields in particular.

When rates/yields are low, things work; when they are high, things break.

This is because cheap debt has been the core of America’s debt-based “growth” model for years, and this alone explains the survival of our respirator-economy and its otherwise bankrupt pension system.

When Too Big to Fail = A Desperate Rescue
Given this plain fact, the US sovereign bond market is indeed, and literally, “too big to fail.”
But given that tax receipts, GDP and foreign interest in Uncle Sam’s IOUs are not nearly enough to “accommodate” this sovereign debt market/bubble, the money needed to “save” it will have to come from somewhere.

And that “somewhere,” in my view, is going to be a money printer, which in turn means an eventual expansion of the money supply and thus an eventual end-game of currency destruction.

Such currency destruction means greater rather than less inflation ahead, with a likely dis-inflationary market crash in the interim.
Again, the rest of the world knows this, which explains why central banks are dumping USTs and stacking physical gold at record levels.

Alternative Views?
The milk-shake theory, however, makes credible counter-arguments to my current view of the US bond and currency forces.
It holds that when and as the world sinks deeper into recession, even that wart-covered USD and unloved UST will become the ironic and superior safe-havens of last resort.

After all, the USD is not about to be replaced by the Rubel, CNY, peso, yen, franc or euro any time soon, or frankly, perhaps any time ever…

I actually agree.

Furthermore, given that “great straw sucking sound” from global derivative and euro-dollar markets which survive off collateralized USTs, the embedded and systemic demand for the USD may very well maintain its relative supremacy for a long while, right?

Nor should we forget the embedded demand for the USD in the form of that oh-so important petro-dollar, which Kissinger made his swan song in the 1970’s.

In sum, there are many sound reasons why one could argue that the USD, in cohorts with the UST, is, and always will be, the best horse in the global glue factory.

But What About History, Math & Tomorrow?
But… and as I’ve argued and written elsewhere, such hubris and faith in the relative superiority of the USD assumes that history doesn’t matter, that math is optional and that tomorrow always looks like yesterday.

The petro-dollar, for example, is no longer a sure thing, as I and others have argued at length elsewhere.
And the belief that the world will just “flow” into USTs when the next storm hits is a belief which ignores the dumping rather than buying of USTs in the most recent market disaster of 2020.

In short, maybe that “flow” has already come and gone?

Other Bad Scenarios
Equally worth considering, of course, is the possibility that DC can save its bond market by just cutting entitlement and military spending by say, 70%, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that…

Or perhaps America can just look forward to a massive crash in the stock market on the tailwind of rising rates to “scare” bloodied investors back into the UST market and thereby “save” Uncle Sam’s IOUs by killing its stock market (as well as capital gain tax income?).

Hmmm.

Or Just Kill the Currency
More likely, and more politically expedient yet more disastrous to the people, will be the destruction of the currency to save the credit markets, a monetary cancer which now defines our debt-soaked “democracy.”
I’ll say this again and again and again: History confirms that every debt-soaked nation kills its currency to save its @$$ by inflating away their debt with debased money.

Thereafter, those same “wizards” then resort to controlling their inflation-exhausted (i.e., angry) citizenry with more centralized controls.

Jefferson & Gold?
In short, and returning to our sad, old friend Jefferson, America is already “captured” by a financial system and an unelected fourth branch of government which has coerced its nation into a corner with no exit.

At least no exit other than a currency trap whose Dollar’s inherent purchasing power, when measured against that barbarous relic, gold, has lost greater than 95% of its relative strength since Nixon welched on America’s golden chaperone back in 71.

Gold, of course, can not prevent the usurpation (i.e., nefarious “capture”) of power which Jefferson so feared would one day destroy the American “union.”

Sadly, and as wise individuals have known and warned for centuries, debt destroys nations. Not just sometimes, but every time.

Nor can gold act as a Talisman against branded rather than visionary politicos, left or right, American or global, from the dark shadows of Davos to the open comedy of DC.

This is why history-wise, math-competent and financially informed investors, burdened by critical-thinking rather than the partisan or “koo-koo,” have always (and will always) protect their own sanity, their own wealth and even their own private “union” of family (which Jefferson defined as the foundation of freedom) with a healthy allocation of that barbarous relic, that so-called “pet rock.”

In other words, just because political opportunists may have taken away the gold standard to buy votes while slowly destroying nations (and national unity) in all too familiar patterns of debt and centralization, this does not prevent us gold “stackers” from being far smarter than our so-called “leaders.”

It’s time, in sum, that we back our own currencies with gold rather than wait for others to do it for us.

Tags: Currency Debasement Debt Debt Implosion Gold Hyperinflation Inflation Money Printing

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As an experienced forex trader and educator, I have helped many people learn how to trade forex successfully and earn a lot of money. My comprehensive approach to trading combines fundamental and technical analysis with risk management strategies to identify profitable trading opportunities.

If you're interested in learning forex trading and earning a lot of money, my 90-day course is the perfect place to start. This course covers everything from the basics of forex trading to advanced strategies for maximizing your profits. Best of all, for a limited time, I'm offering a 50% discount on the course fee.

During the 90-day course, you'll learn how to read and analyze charts, identify trends and patterns, and use technical indicators to make informed trading decisions. You'll also learn how to manage your risk and minimize losses, so that you can maximize your profits.

One of the most important things you'll learn during the course is the psychology of trading. Trading forex can be stressful and emotional, and it's essential to develop a mindset that allows you to stay calm and focused under pressure. I'll teach you proven techniques for managing your emotions and staying disciplined, so that you can make rational, well-informed trading decisions.
In addition to the 90-day course, I also offer a range of other educational resources, including webinars, coaching programs, and one-on-one mentoring. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced trader, my goal is to help you achieve success in forex trading and reach your financial goals.

If you're ready to learn forex trading from an experienced professional and start earning a lot of money, sign up for my 90-day course today. With the 50% discount, you'll get all the knowledge and skills you need to become a successful forex trader at a fraction of the usual cost.

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The Shift to the Middle is Coming

Posted Nov 24, 2023 By Martin Armstrong |

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All the media is so anti-common sense that anyone who dares to take any contrary view is called “FAR RIGHT” ads if they are Nazis. Never in all my years have I ever witnessed the mainstream media so FAR LEFT that they are destroying the very foundation of civilization, and they do not care. The position MUST be their view, and anything to the contrary is evil. This is NOT a free society, nor is this how civilizations are maintained. When you divide the nation in such a manner and impose your will by sheer dictatorship, the end is near.

TIME Magazine characterized the Dutch election as a “FAR RIGHT” victory. They want to exit the EU and retake their sovereignty. They are flooded with immigrants, and crime has soared all because Merkel opened the borders unilaterally. The EU was never asked to vote on this policy – NEVER. But if you dare object, you are the dangerous and evil FAR RIGHT. Friends there will not allow their daughter to walk to the bus station for fear she will be raped.

What the EU has done to the Dutch farmers is insane, and they are so braindead they fail to understand that the planet goes through cycles and reducing food production as we head into solar minimum risks food shortages and rising disease as well as starvation. But if you oppose that, you are now the evil FAR RIGHT. As they told the people, and they agreed, the Netherlands “has been seriously weakened due the ongoing asylum tsunami and mass immigration.” They also pledged to stop sending aid to Ukraine. Their country is being transformed into an Islamic State, and they called for a ban on the Koran and for shutting down mosques. France is generally projected to be an Islamic nation within 40 years. Our computer shows that can happen as soon as 2032, thanks to an 8:1 birth rate in favor of Muslims. But if you want to retain Europe as a Christian continent, you are the dangerous evil FAR RIGHT.

Video Player
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The violence has already begun, from attempts to burn down Christian churches in Southern Europe to killing a 16-year-old boy, stabbing him to death, and injuring 17 others. The assailants declared, “We are here to stab white people’ before the rampage, according to a report. ” Mobs in Eastern Pakistan target Christian churches. In Jerusalem, extremist Jews were chanting, “Death to Arabs … Death to Christians.” Then, in Europe, there has been a surge in Quran burning in response to the influx of Muslims. We are looking at the beginning of a religious war brewing everywhere. This contributes to our Civil Unrest Model, which turned up here in 2023.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/w...s-11-20-23.png

CNN also called Javier Milei the “FAR RIGHT” who won Argentina’s presidential elections. They reported that was “wrenching his country to the right with a bombastic anti-establishment campaign” and said that he was comparable to Donald Trump. They admitted that this was against the backdrop of one of the “world’s highest inflation rates.”
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In Bavaria, the press also reported that “FAR-RIGHT” Afd won back in June. So unless you are for lockdowns, the war against Russia, high inflation, and lowering of our living standards, then you are one of those loathful, FAR-RIGHT dangerous people who must be eradicated and suppressed.

Anyone who wants to return just to normal life is now disgusting FAR-RIGHT. You have to support World War III, high taxes, end of lifestyle for climate change, and if you do not tell your son in 1st grade that maybe he is really a girl then you are guilty of child abuse, and your children should be taken from you by force.
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We will be issuing this special report in December.

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Yet JFK continued throughout his 1960 presidential campaign raising his voice against colonialism throughout the world and for free and independent African nations. Such views were anathema to the foreign policy establishment, including the CIA and the burgeoning military industrial complex that President Eisenhower belatedly warned against in his Farewell Address, delivered nine months after approving the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in March 1960; this juxtaposition revealed the hold the Pentagon and CIA had and has on sitting presidents, as the pressure for war became structurally systemized.

Patrice Lumumba
Image on the right: Patrice Lumumba (Source: Bob Feldman 68)
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One of Africa’s anti-colonial and nationalist leaders was the charismatic Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. In June, 1960, he had become the first democratically elected leader of the Congo, a country savagely raped and plundered for more than half a century by Belgium’s King Leopold II for himself and multinational mining companies. Kennedy’s support for African independence was well-known and especially feared by the CIA, who, together with Brussels, considered Lumumba, and Kennedy for supporting him, as threats to their interests in the region.

So, three days before JFK’s inauguration, together with the Belgian government, the CIA had Lumumba brutally assassinated after torturing and beating him. According to Robert Johnson, a note taker at a National Security Council meeting in August 1960, Lumumba’s assassination had been approved by President Eisenhower when he gave Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA, the approval to “eliminate” Lumumba. Johnson disclosed that in a 1975 interview that was discovered in 2000.[iii]
On January 26, 1961, when Dulles briefed the new president on the Congo, he did not tell JFK that they already had Lumumba assassinated nine days before. This was meant to keep Kennedy on tenterhooks to teach him a lesson. On February 13, 1961, Kennedy received a phone call from his UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson informing him of Lumumba’s death. There is a photograph by White House photographer Jacques Lowe of the horror-stricken president sitting in the oval office answering that call that is harrowing to view. It was an unmistakable portent of things to come, a warning for the president.

Dag Hammarskjöld, Indonesia, and Sukarno
One of Kennedy’s crucial allies in his efforts to support third-world independence was United Nations’ Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Hammarskjöld had been deeply involved in peacekeeping in the Congo as well as efforts to resolve disputes in Indonesia, both important countries central to JFK’s concerns. Hammarskjöld was killed on September 18, 1961 while on a peacekeeping mission to the Congo. Substantial evidence exists that he was assassinated and that the CIA and Allen Dulles were involved. Kennedy was devastated to lose such an important ally.[iv]

Kennedy’s strategy involved befriending Indonesia as a Cold War ally as a crucial aspect of his Southeast Asian policy of dealing with Laos and Vietnam and finding peaceful resolutions to other smoldering Cold War conflicts. Hammarskjöld was also central to these efforts. The CIA, led by Dulles, strongly opposed Kennedy’s strategy in Indonesia. In fact, Dulles and the CIA had been involved in treacherous maneuverings in resource rich Indonesia for decades. President Kennedy supported the Indonesian President Sukarno, while Dulles opposed him since he stood for Indonesian independence.

Just two days before Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring. The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy’s efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with non-military economic and development aid. His goal was to end conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assist the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.

Of course, JFK never made it to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America’s side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles and the CIA. And, Kennedy’s proposed withdrawal of American military advisers from Vietnam, which, in part, was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s murder and within a short time hundreds of thousand American combat troops were sent to Vietnam. In Indonesia, Sukarno would be forced out and replaced by General Suharto, who would rule with an iron fist for the next 30 years. Soon, both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon.[v]

The Bay of Pigs
In mid-April 1961, less than three months into his presidency, a trap was set for President Kennedy by the CIA and its director, Allen Dulles, who knew of Kennedy’s reluctance to invade Cuba. They assumed the new president would be forced by circumstances at the last minute to send in U.S. Navy and Marine forces to back the invasion that they had planned. The CIA and generals wanted to oust Fidel Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. This had started under President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. Kennedy refused to go along with sending in American troops and the invasion was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy.

But it was all a sham. Classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned the date of the invasion more than a week in advance and had informed Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, but—and here is a startling fact that should make people’s hair stand on end—the CIA never told the President. The CIA knew the invasion was probably doomed before the fact but went ahead with it anyway.

Why? So, they could blame JFK for the failure afterwards.
Kennedy later said to his friends Dave Powell and Ken O’Donnell, “They were sure I’d give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the [Navy’s aircraft carrier] Essex. They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”[vi]

This treachery set the stage for events to come. Sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (who, as in a bad joke, was later named to the Warren Commission investigating JFK’s assassination) and his assistant, General Charles Cabell (whose brother, Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed.) It was later discovered that Earle Cabell was a CIA asset.[vii]

JFK said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Not sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a government whose power was growing exponentially.[viii]

Kennedy Responds After the Bay of Pigs Treachery
The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, now even more suspicious of the military-intelligence people around him, and in opposition to nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in U.S. foreign policy.
In 1961, despite the Joint Chiefs’ demand to put combat troops into Laos – advising 140,000 by the end of April – Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”[ix] The president knew that Laos and Vietnam were linked issues, and since Laos came first on his agenda, he was determined to push for a neutral Laos.

Also in 1961, he refused to accede to the insistence of his top generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in a dispute with the Soviet Union over Berlin and Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with his top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.”[x]

In March 1962, the CIA, in the person of legendary operative, Edward Lansdale, and with the approval of every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented the president with a pretext for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Code-named Operation Northwoods, the false-flag plancalled for innocent people to be shot in the U.S., boats carrying Cuban refugees to be sunkand a terrorism campaign to be launched in Miami, Washington D.C., and other places, all to be blamed on the Castro government so that the public would be outraged and call for an invasion of Cuba.[xi]
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See this.

Kennedy was appalled and rejected this pressure to manipulate him into agreeing to terrorist attacks on Americans that could later be used against him. He already knew that his life was in danger and that the CIA and military were tightening a noose around his neck. But he refused to yield.

As early as June 26, 1961, in a White House meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s spokesperson, Mikhail Kharlamov, and Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, when asked by Kharlamov why he wasn’t moving faster to advance relations between the two countries, JFK said “You don’t understand this country. If I move too fast on U.S.-Soviet relations, I’ll either be thrown into an insane asylum, or be killed.”[xii]

JFK refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The Soviets had placed offensive nuclear missiles and more than 30,000 support troops in Cuba to prevent another U.S.-led invasion. American aerial photography had detected the missiles. This was understandably unacceptable to the U.S. government.

While being urged by the Joint Chiefs and his trusted advisors to order a preemptive nuclear strike on Cuba, JFK knew that a diplomatic solution was the only way out as he wouldn’t accept the death of hundreds of millions of people that would likely follow a series of nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union. Only his brother, Robert, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stood with him in opposing the use of nuclear weapons. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon and Rand Corporation analyst, reported a coup atmosphere in the Pentagon as Kennedy chose to settle rather than attack.[xiii] In the end, after thirteen incredibly tense daysof brinksmanship, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev miraculously found a way to resolve the crisis and prevent the use of those weapons.
Afterwards, JFK told his friend John Kenneth Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.”[xiv]

The Fateful Year 1963
In June, 1963, JFK gave an historic speech at American University in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” and movement toward “general and complete disarmament.”[xv]

A few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev.[xvi]
In October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from Vietnam by the end of the year and complete withdrawal by the end of 1965.[xvii]
All this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev via Saturday Evening Post editor and anti-nuclear weapon advocate, Norman Cousins, Soviet agent Georgi Bolshakov,[xviii] and Pope John XXIII,[xix] as well as with Cuba’s Prime Minister Fidel Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel. Of course, secret was not secret when the CIA was involved.

Kennedy, deeply disturbed by the near nuclear catastrophe of the Cuban missile crisis, was determined to open back channel communications to make sure such a near miss never happened again. He knew fault lay on both sides, and that one slipup or miscommunication could initiate a nuclear holocaust. He was determined, therefore, to try to open lines of communications with his enemies.

Jean Daniel was going to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro, but before he did he interviewed Kennedy on October 24, 1963. Kennedy, knowing Daniel would tell Castro what he said, asked Daniel if Castro realizes that “through his fault the world was on the verge of nuclear war in October 1962….or even if he cares about it.” But he also added, to soften the message:
I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.[xx]

Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to the CIA and top Pentagon generals. These clear refusals to go to war with Cuba, to emphasize peace and negotiated solutions to conflicts rather than war, to order the withdrawal of all military personnel from Vietnam, to call for an end to the Cold War, and his willingness to engage in private, back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as an enemy of the national security state. They were on a collision course.

The Assassination on November 22, 1963
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After going through the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis and many other military cliffhangers, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peacemaker. He came to regard the generals who advised him as devaluing human life and hell-bent on launching nuclear wars. And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions, he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’état against him.

The night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.”[xxi]
And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned his execution from multiple locations to assure its success.

Who Killed Him?
If the only things you read, watched, or listened to since 1963 were the mainstream corporate media (MSM), you would be convinced that the official explanation for JFK’s assassination, the Warren Commission, was correct in essentials. You would be wrong, because those corporate media have for all these years served as mouthpieces for the government, most notably the CIA that infiltrated and controlled them long ago under a secret program called Operation Mockingbird.[xxii] In 1977, celebrated Watergate journalist, Carl Bernstein, published a 25,000-word cover story for Rolling Stone, “The CIA and the Media,” in which he published the names of many journalists and media, such as The New York Times, CBS, Time, Newsweek, etc., who worked hand in glove with the CIA for decades. Ironically, or as part of “a limited hangout” (spy talk for admitting some truths while concealing deeper ones), this article can be found at the CIA’s own website.

Total control of information requires media complicity, and with the JFK assassination, and in all matters they consider important, the CIA and the MSM are unified.[xxiii] Such control extends to literature, arts, and popular culture as well as news. Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively documents this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters,[xxiv] and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, with particular emphasis on the complicity of the CIA and the famous literary journal The Paris Review. Such revelations are retrospective, of course, but only the most naïve would conclude such operations are a thing of the past.

The Warren Commission claimed that the president was shot by an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, firing three bullets from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository as Kennedy’s car was already two hundred and fifty feet past and driving away from him. But this is patently false for many reasons, including the bizarre claim that one of these bullets, later termed “the magic bullet,” passed through Kennedy’s body and zigzagged up and down, left and right, striking Texas Governor John Connolly who was sitting in the front seat and causing seven wounds in all, only to be found later in pristine condition on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital.[xxv] And, any lone assassin looking out the 6th floor window would have taken the perfect shot as the limousine approached within forty feet of the TSBD on Houston St.

The absurdity of the government’s claim, a ballistic fairytale, was the key to its assertion that Oswald killed Kennedy. It was visually shattered and rendered ridiculous by the famous Zapruder film that clearly shows the president being shot from the front right, and, as the right front of his head explodes, he is violently thrown back and to his left as Jacqueline Kennedy climbs on to the car’s trunk to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull and brain.
This video evidence is clear and simple proof of a conspiracy.[xxvi]

Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?
But there is another way to examine it.
Image on the right: Lee Harvey Oswald (Source: TheFreeThoughtProject.com)
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If Lee Harvey Oswald, the man The Warren Commission said killed JFK, was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a lone-nut” assassin or not an assassin at all. There is a wealth of evidence to show how, from the very start, Oswald was moved around the globe by the CIA like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters by Jack Ruby two days later.
James W. Douglass, in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, the most important book on the matter, asks this question:
Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?
This is a key question.

After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s U-2 spy plane Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret, a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission) and being trained in the Russian language, Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union.[xxvii] After denouncing the U.S., rejecting his American citizenship, working at a Soviet factory in Minsk, and taking a Russian wife—during which time Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union—he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey, by Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-Communist with extensive intelligence connections recommended by the State Department.[xxviii]

Oswald passed through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to Fort Worth, Texas where, at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a photography and graphic arts company that worked on top secret maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba.

Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt. In 1977, on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ investigator, Gaeton Fonzi, de Mohrenschildt allegedly committed suicide.

Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April, 1963 where he got a job at the Reily Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reily. The Reily Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Naval Intelligence offices and a stone’s throw from the office of Guy Banister, a former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago Bureau, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, supplyingweapons, money, and training to anti-Castro paramilitaries. Oswald then went to work with Banister and the CIA paramilitaries.

From this time up until the assassination, Oswald engaged in all sorts of contradictory activities, one day portraying himself as pro-Castro, the next day as anti-Castro, many of these theatrical performances being directed from Banister’s office. It was as though Oswald, on the orders of his puppet masters, was enacting multiple and antithetical roles in order to confound anyone intent on deciphering the purposes behind his actions and to set him up as a future “assassin” or “patsy.”

James Douglass persuasively argues that Oswald “seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI,” as a provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960-64, in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”[xxix]

When Oswald moved to New Orleans in April, 1963, de Mohrenschildt exited the picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a $285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which he never did, but for which he was paid.[xxx]

Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the scene on cue. Ruth had been introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September, 1963, Ruth Paine drove from her sister’s house in Virginia to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to Dallas to live with her, where Lee also stayed on weekends. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently arranged a job for Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Book Depository, where he began work on October 16, 1963.

Ruth, along with Marina Oswald, was the Warren Commission’s critically important witness against Oswald. Allen Dulles, despite his earlier firing by JFK, got appointed to a key position on the Warren Commission. He questioned the Paines in front of it, studiously avoiding any revealing questions, especially ones that could disclose his personal connections to the Paines. For Michel Paine’s mother, therefore Ruth’s mother-in-law, Ruth Paine Forbes Young, was a close friend of his old mistress, Mary Bancroft, who worked as a spy with Dulles during WW II. Bancroft and he had been invited guests at Ruth Paine Forbes Young’s private island off Cape Cod.

Ruth and Michael Paine had extensive intelligence connections. Thirty years after the assassination, a document was declassified showing Ruth Paine’s sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for International Development (notorious for CIA front activities) contract and filed reports that went to the CIA. Her husband Michael’s step-father, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell Helicopter, a major military supplier for the Vietnam War, and Michael’s job there gave him a security clearance.

From late September through November 22nd, various “Oswalds” were later reported to have simultaneously been seen from Mexico City to Dallas. Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theater, the real one taken out the front door and an impostor out the back.

As Douglass says:
“There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the Warren Report could use or even explain.”[xxxi]

Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ concerning Oswald’s alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He later called this CIA ploy, “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico . . . their (CIA’s) double-dealing,” something that he couldn’t forget. [xxxii]

It was apparent to anyone paying close attention that a very intricate and deadly game was being played at high levels in the shadows.
We know Oswald was blamed for the President’s murder. But if one fairly follows the trail of the crime, it becomes blatantly obvious that government forces were at work. Douglass and others have amassed layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so.

Who Had the Power to Withdraw the President’s Security?
To answer this essential question is to finger the conspirators and to expose, in Vincent Salandria’s words, “the false mystery concealing state crimes.”[xxxiii]

Neither Oswald, the mafia nor anti-Castro Cubans could have withdrawn most of the security that day. Sheriff Bill Decker ordered all his deputies “to take no part whatsoever in the security of that [presidential] motorcade.”[xxxiv] Police Chief Jesse Curry did the same for Dallas police protection for the president in Dealey Plaza. Both “Chief Curry and Sheriff Decker gave their orders withdrawing security from the president in obedience to orders they had themselves received from the Secret Service.” The Secret Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car where they had been on previous presidential motorcades as well as the day before in Houston and removed agents from the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire.

The Secret Service admitted there were no Secret Service agents on the ground in Dealey Plaza to protect Kennedy. But we know from extensive witness testimony that, during and after the assassination, there were people in Dealey Plaza impersonating Secret Service agents who stopped policeman and the public from moving through the area on the Grassy Knoll where some of the shots appeared to come from. The Secret Service approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18) where the car, driven by Secret Service agent William Greer, moved at a snail’s pace and came almost to a halt before the final head shot, clear and blatant security violations. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded this, not some conspiracy theorist.[xxxv]

Who could have squelched the testimony of the many doctors and medical personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story?
Who could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on November 2 is a story little known but extraordinary in its implications.)

The list of all the people who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up clearly point to forces within the government, not rogue actors without institutional support.

The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would not be deeply moved and affected by his book, JFK and the Unspeakable.
But there is more from him and other researchers who have cut the Gordian knot of this false mystery with a few brief strokes.

Oswald, The Preordained Patsy
Three examples will suffice to show that Lee Harvey Oswald, working as part of a U.S. Intelligence operation, was set up to take the blame for the assassination of President Kennedy, and that when he said in police custody that he was “a patsy,” he was speaking truthfully. These examples make it clear that Oswald was deceived by his intelligence handlers and had been chosen without his knowledge, long before the murder, to take the blame as a lone, crazed killer.

First, Kennedy was shot at 12:30 P.M. CT. According to the Warren Report, at 12:45 P.M. a police report was issued for a suspect that perfectly fit Oswald’s description. This was based on the testimony of Howard Brennan, who said he was standing across from the Book Depository and saw a standing white man, about 5’10” and slender, fire a rifle at the president’s car from the sixth-floor window. This was blatantly false because photographs taken moments after the shooting show the window open only partially at the bottom about fourteen inches, and it would have been impossible for a standing assassin to be seen “resting against the left windowsill,” (the windowsill was a foot from the floor), as Brennan is alleged to have said. He would have therefore had to have been shooting through the glass. The description of the suspect was clearly fabricated in advance to match Oswald’s.

Then between 1:06 and 1:15 P.M. in the quiet residential Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Police Officer J.D. Tippit was shot and killed. Supposedly based on Brennan’s description broadcast over police radio, Tippit had stopped a man fitting the description and this man pulled a gun and shot the officer. Meanwhile, Oswald had returned to his rooming house where his landlady said he left at 1:03 P.M., went outside, and was standing at a northbound bus stop. The Tippet murder took place nine-tenths of a mile away to the south where a witness, Mrs. Higgins, said she heard a gunshot at 1:06 P.M., ran outside, saw Tippit lying in the street and a man running away with a handgun whom she said was not Oswald.

Oswald is reported to have entered the Texas Theater minutes before the Tippit murder. The concession stand operator, Warren Burroughs has said he sold him popcorn at 1:15 P.M., which is the time the Warren Report claims Tippit was killed. At 1:50 P.M., Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the Texas Theater and taken out the front door where a crowd and many police cars awaited him, while a few minutes later a second Oswald is secretly taken out the back door of the movie theater. (To read this story of the second Oswald and his movement by the CIA out of Dallas on a military aircraft on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, documented in great detail by James W. Douglass, is an eye-opener.)

The official narrative of Oswald and the Tippit murder begs credulity, but it serves to “show” that Oswald was a killer.[xxxvi]
Despite his denials, Oswald, set up for Kennedy’s murder based on a prepackaged description, is arraigned for Tippit’s murder at 7:10 PM. It was not until the next day that he was charged for Kennedy’s.

The Message to Air Force One
Secondly, while Oswald is being questioned about Tippit’s murder in the afternoon hours after his arrest, Air Force One has left Dallas for Washington with the newly sworn-in president Lyndon Johnson and the presidential party. Back in D.C., the White House Situation Room is under the personal and direct control of Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, a man with close CIA ties who had opposed JFK on many matters, including the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy’s order to withdraw from Vietnam.[xxxvii]

As reported by Theodore White, in The Making of the President 1964, Johnson and the others were informed by the Bundy controlled Situation Room that “there was no conspiracy, learned of the identity of Oswald and his arrest …”[xxxviii]
Vincent Salandria, one of the earliest and most astute critics of the Warren Commission, put it this way in his book, False Mystery:[xxxix]

This [announcement from the Situation Room to Air Force One in flight back to Washington, D.C] was the very first announcement of Oswald as the lone assassin. In Dallas, Oswald was not even charged with assassinating the President until 1:30 A.M. the next morning. The plane landed at 5:59 P.M. on the 22nd. At that time the District Attorney of Dallas, Henry Wade, was stating that “preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting … the electric chair is too good for the killers.” Can there be any doubt that for any government taken by surprise by the assassination — and legitimately seeking the truth concerning it — less than six hours after the time of the assassination was too soon to know there was no conspiracy? This announcement was the first which designated Oswald as the lone assassin….

I propose the thesis that McGeorge Bundy, when that announcement was issued from his Situation Room, had reason to know that the true meaning of such a message when conveyed to the Presidential party on Air Force One [and to a separate plane with the entire cabinet that had turned around and was headed back over the Pacific Ocean] was not the ostensible message which was being communicated. Rather, I submit that Bundy … was really conveying to the Presidential party the thought that Oswald was being designated the lone assassin before any evidence against him was ascertainable. As a central coordinator of intelligence services, Bundy in transmitting such a message through the Situation Room was really telling the Presidential party that an unholy marriage had taken place between the U.S. Governmental intelligence services and the lone-assassin doctrine. Was he not telling the Presidential party peremptorily, ‘Now, hear this! Oswald is the assassin, the sole assassin. Evidence is not available yet. Evidence will be obtained, or in lieu thereof evidence will be created. This is a crucial matter of state that cannot await evidence. The new rulers have spoken. You, there, Mr. New President, and therefore dispatchable stuff, and you the underlings of a deposed President, heed the message well.’ Was not Bundy’s Situation Room serving an Orwellian double-think function?[xl]

Oswald’s Prepackaged Life Story
Finally, Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty adds a third example of the CIA conspiracy for those who need more evidence that the government has lied from the start about the assassination.

Prouty was Chief of Special Operations in the Pentagon before and during the Kennedy years. He was the liaison between the Joint Chiefs and the CIA, working closely with Director Allen Dulles and others in supporting the clandestine operations of the CIA under military cover. He had been sent out of the country to the South Pole by the aforementioned CIA operative Edward Lansdale (Operation Northwoods) before the Kennedy assassination and was returning on November 22, 1963. On a stopover in Christchurch, New Zealand, he heard a radio report that the president had been killed but knew no details. He was having breakfast with a U.S Congressman at 7:30 AM on November 23, New Zealand time. A short time later, at approximately 4:30 PM Dallas time, November 22, he bought the Christchurch Star 23 November 1963 newspaper and read it together with the Congressman.

The newspaper reports from the scene said that Kennedy had been killed by bursts of automatic weapons fire, not a single shot rifle, firing three separate shots in 6.8 seconds, as was later claimed for Oswald. But the thing that really startled him was that at a time when Oswald had just been arrested and had not even been charged for the murder of Officer Tippit, there was elaborate background information on Oswald, his time in Russia, his association with Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, etc. “It’s almost like a book written five years later,” said Prouty. “Furthermore, there’s a picture of Oswald, well-dressed in a business suit, whereas, when he was picked up on the streets of Dallas after the President’s death, he had on some t-shirt or something…

“Who had written that scenario? Who wrote that script…So much news was already written ahead of time of the murder to say that Oswald killed the President and that he did it with three shots…Somebody had decided Oswald was going to be the patsy…Where did they get it, before the police had charged him with the crime? Not so much ‘where,’ as ‘why’Oswald?”[xli]
Prouty, an experienced military man working for the CIA in the Pentagon, accused the military-intelligence “High Cabal” of killing President Kennedy in an elaborate and sophisticated plot and blaming it on Oswald, whom they had begun setting up years in advance.

The evidence for a government plot to plan, assassinate, cover-up, and choose a patsy in the murder of President John Kennedy is overwhelming.[xlii]

Five years after JFK’s assassination, we would learn, to our chagrin and his glory, that the president’s younger brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, equally brave and unintimidated, would take a bullet to the back of his head in 1968 as he was on his way to the presidency and the pursuit of his brother’s killers. The same cowards struck again.
Their successors still run the country and must be stopped.

Epilogue by James W. Douglass
“John F. Kennedy was raised from the death of wealth, power, and privilege. The son of a millionaire ambassador, he was born, raised, and educated to rule the system. When he was elected President, Kennedy’s heritage of power corresponded to his position as head of the greatest national security state in history. But Kennedy, like Lazarus, was raised from the death of that system. In spite of all odds, he became a peacemaker and, thus, a traitor to the system….

“Why? What raised Kennedy from the dead? Why did John Kennedy choose life in the midst of death and by continuing to choose life thus condemn himself to death? I have puzzled over that question while studying the various biographies of Kennedy. May I suggest one source of grace for his resurrection as a peacemaker? In reading his story, one is struck by his devotion to his children. There is no mistaking the depth of love he had for Caroline and John, and the overwhelming pain he and Jacqueline experienced at the death of their son Patrick. Robert Kennedy in his book Thirteen Days has described how his brother saw the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of the future of his children and all children. I believe John Kennedy was at least partially raised from the dead of the national security state by the life of his children. The heroic peacemaking of his final months, with his acceptance of its likely cost in his own death, was, I suspect, partly a result of the universal life he saw in and through them. I think he believed profoundly the words that he gave in his American University address as his foundation for rejecting the Cold War: ‘Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.’”[xliii]

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Notes
[i] History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, E. Martin Schotz, Kurtz, Ulmer, & DeLucia Book Publishers, 1996.
[ii] JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters, James W. Douglass, Orbis Books, 2008[1][2], p. 8 & p.212.
Destiny Betrayed, James DiEugenio, 2nd Edition, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, pp. 17-33.
The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot, Harper Collins, 2015, pp. 375–389.
MORI DocID: 1451843 p. 464, p. 473 of “The CIA’s Family Jewels,” 16 May 1973, The National Security Archives.
[iv] Investigation into the condition and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjold and of members of the party accompanying him (United Nations General Assembly document,) Judge Mohamed Chande Othman, September 5, 2017, p. 49 and 50, Dag Hammarskjöld Plane Crash Recent Developments, UN Association, Westminster Branch UK.
[v] Edward Curtin interviews Greg Poulgrain on The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesian Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles, Global Research, July 22, 2016.
Chapter 2 – JFK, Dulles and Hammarskjöld of The Incubus of Intervention.
Greg Poulgrain, JFK vs Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, Simon & Schuster, 2020.
[vi] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., American Values, Harper Collins, 2018, p. 117.
[vii] Dallas Mayor During JFK Assassination Was CIA Asset, Who.What.Why, August 2, 2017.
[viii] Peter Kornbluh confirmed this in a phone conversation with the author in May 2000. See The ULTRASENSITIVE Bay of PigsNewly Released Portions of Taylor Commission Report Provide Critical New Details on Operation Zapata, National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 29, May 3, 2000.
[ix] Averell Harriman interviewed in Charles Stevenson, The End Of Nowhere; American Policy Toward Laos Since 1954 , 1972, p. 154.
[x] Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, Simon & Schuster, 1994, p. 222.
[xi] Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962, FOIA documents at National Security Archive.
[xii] Pierre Salinger, P.S.: A Memoir, St. Martin’s Press, 1995, p. 253.
[xiii] Talbot, op. cit., p. 453.
[xiv] John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times, Houghton Mifflin, 1981, p. 388.
[xv] American University Commencement Address, President Kennedy, June 10, 1963.
[xvi] President Kennedy Radio and TV Address to the American People on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, July 26, 1963.
Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water, signed at Moscow August 5, 1963, entered into force October 10, 1963.
[xvii] See James K. Galbraith, “Exit Strategy,” Boston Review, October/November 2003.
[xviii] Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy, Doubleday & Co., 1966, p.198.
[xix] See Norman Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev – An Asterisk to the History of a Hopeful Year, 1962-1963, W.W. Norton & Co., 1972.
[xx] Jean Daniel, “Unofficial Envoy – An Historic Report from Two Capitals,” The New Republic, December 14, 1963.
[xxi] Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye;” Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Little Brown, 1972, p.25.
[xxii] See Operation Mockingbird, the only FOIA-released-by-CIA documents at The Black Vault.
Carl Bernstein, “THE CIA AND THE MEDIA – How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
[xxiii] James F. Tracy, “The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know,” Global Research/ratical.org, 2018.
[xxiv] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters, New Press. 1999.
See Also: James Petras, “The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited,” Monthly Review, November 1999.
[xxv] See Vincent J. Salandria, “The Warren Report?“ Liberation, March 1965.
[xxvi] Zapruder Film in slow motion (1:33).
[xxvii] Gerald D. McKnight, Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, Univ. Of Kansas Press, 2005, review by Jim DiEugenio.
[xxviii] Douglass, op. cit., p. 46.
[xxix] See James and Elsie Wilcott: CIA Profile in Courage, excerpt from JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 144-148, 421-422.
[xxx] Douglass, op. cit., p. 47-48.
[xxxi] See Oswald’s Doubles: How Multiple Lookalikes Were Used to Craft One Lone Scapegoat, excerpt from JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 286-303, 350-355, 464-470, 481-483.
[xxxii] Douglass, op. cit., p. 81.
[xxxiii] Vincent Salandria, The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes, presentation at the Coalition on Political Assassinations, November 20, 1998.
[xxxiv] Dallas Deputy Sheriff Roger Dean Craig, When They Kill A President, 1971.
[xxxv] Douglass, op. cit., pp. 270-277 and endnote 75 of James Douglass’ 2009 COPA Keynote Address.
Secret Service Final Survey Report for the November 21, 1963, visit by President Kennedy to Houston, cited in
Appendix to Hearings before the HSCA, vol. 11, p.529.
[xxxvi] Douglass, op. cit., pp. 287-304.
DiEugenio, op. cit., pp. 391-2.
[xxxvii] Talbot, op.cit., pp. 407-8. & NSAM 263 (document 194), Foreign Relations of the United States, Vietnam v. IV, Aug-Dec’63.
[xxxviii] Theodore White, The Making of the President, 1964, Atheneum, 1965, p. 33.
See also , Let Us Begin Anew: An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency, Gerald S. Strober, Debra Strober, Perennial, 1993, pp. 450-451.
[xxxix] False Mystery, Essays on the JFK Assassination by Vincent Salandria, rat haus reality press, 2017
[xl] Bundy Continued to Shape Hawkish Policies, in Vincent J. Salandria, “The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: A Model of Explanation,” Computers and Automation, December 1971, pp. 32-40.
[xli] David T. Ratcliffe, Understanding Special Operations: 1989 Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty, rat haus reality press, 1999, pp. 214-215.
[xlii] See The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection at The National Archives.


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Escobar: Gaza - A Pause Before The Storm | ZeroHedge

Escobar: Gaza - A Pause Before The Storm
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BY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, NOV 25, 2023 - 12:00 AM

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

The US and its allies will continue backing Israel's war on Gaza after a brief truce. But as the case for 'genocide' grows stronger, the new multipolar powers will have to confront the old hegemons and their Rules-Based Chaos.
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While the world cries “Israeli genocide,” the Biden White House is gushing over the upcoming Gaza truce it helped broker, as though it's actually “on the verge” of its “biggest diplomatic victory.”

Behind the self-congratulatory narratives, the US administration is not remotely “wary about Netanyahu’s endgame,” it fully endorses it - genocide included - as agreed at the White House less than three weeks before Al-Aqsa Flood, in a 20 September meeting between Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe “The Mummy” Biden’s handlers.

The US/Qatar-brokered “truce,” which is supposed to go into effect this week, is not a ceasefire. It is a PR move to soften Israel's genocide and boost its morale by securing the release of a few dozen captives. Moreover, the record shows that Israel never respects ceasefires.

Predictably, what really worries the US administration is the “unintended consequence” of the truce, which will “allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.”

Real journalists have been working in Gaza 24/7 since October 7 – dozens of whom have been killed by the Israeli military machine in what Reporters Sans Frontieres calls “one of the deadliest tolls in a century.”

These journalists have spared no effort to go all the way to “illuminate the devastation,” a euphemism for the ongoing genocide, shown in all its gruesome detail for the entire world to see.

Even the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), itself relentlessly attacked by Israel, revealed - somewhat meekly - that this has been “the largest displacement since 1948,” an "exodus" of the Palestinian population, with the younger generation “forced to live through traumas of ancestors or parents.”

As for public opinion all across the Global South/Global Majority, it “turned” long ago on Zionist extremism. But now the Global Minority - populations of the collective west - are watching raptly, horrified, and bitter that in just six weeks, social media has exposed them to what mainstream media hid for decades. There will be no turning back now that this penny has dropped.

A former Apartheid state leads the way
The South African government has paved the path, globally, for the proper reaction to an unfolding genocide: parliament voted to shutter the Israeli embassy, expel the Israeli ambassador, and cut diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv. South Africans do know a thing or two about apartheid.

They, like other critics of Israel, better be extra wary moving forward. Anything can be expected: an outbreak of foreign intel-conducted “terra terra terra” false flags, artificially induced weather calamities, fake “human rights abuse” charges, the collapse of the national currency, the rand, instances of lawfare, assorted Atlanticist apoplexy, sabotage of energy infrastructure. And more.

Several nations should have by now invoked the Genocide Convention - given that Israeli politicians and officials have been bragging, on the record, about razing Gaza and besieging, starving, killing, and mass-transferring its Palestinian population. No geopolitical actor has dared thus far.

South Africa, for its part, had the courage to go where few Muslim and Arab states have ventured. As matters stand, when it comes to much of the Arab world - particularly the US client states - they are still in Rhetorical Swamp territory.

The Qatar-brokered “truce” came at precisely the right time for Washington. It stole the spotlight from the delegation of Islamic/Arab foreign ministers touring selected capitals to promote their plan for a complete Gaza ceasefire in Gaza - plus negotiations for an independent Palestinian state.

This Gaza Contact Group, uniting Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Palestine, made their first stop in Beijing, meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and then on to Moscow, meeting with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. That was definitely an instance of BRICS 11 already in action – even before they started business on January 1st, 2024, under the Russian presidency.

The meeting with Lavrov in Moscow was held simultaneously with an extraordinary online BRICS session on Palestine, called by the current South African presidency. Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, whose country leads the region's Axis of Resistance and refuses any relations with Israel, supported the South African initiatives and called for BRICS member states to use every political and economic tool available to pressure Tel Aviv.

It was also important to hear from Chinese President Xi Jinping himself that “there can be no security in the Middle East without a just solution to the question of Palestine.”

Xi stressed once again the need for “a two-state solution,” the “restoration of the legitimate national rights of Palestine,” and “the establishment of an independent state of Palestine." This should all start via an international conference.

None of this is enough at this stage - not this temporary truce, not the promise of a future negotiation. The US administration, itself struggling with an unexpected global backlash, at best, arm-wrestled Tel Aviv to enact a short “pause” in the genocide. This means the carnage continues after a few days.

Had this truce been an actual “ceasefire,” in which all hostilities came to a halt and Israel's war machine disengaged from the Gaza Strip entirely, the next-day options would still be pretty dismal. Realpolitik practitioner John Mearsheimer already cut to the chase: a negotiated solution for Israel-Palestine is impossible.

It takes a cursory glance at the current map to graphically demonstrate how the two-state solution – advocated by everyone from China-Russia to much of the Arab world – is dead. A collection of isolated Bantustans can never coalesce as a state.

Let’s grab all their gas
There has been thundering noise all across the spectrum that with the advent of the petroyuan getting closer and closer, the Americans badly need Eastern Mediterranean energy bought and sold in US dollars – including the vast gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.

Enter the US administration's energy security advisor, deployed to Israel to “discuss potential economic revitalization plans for Gaza centered around undeveloped offshore natural gas fields:" what a lovely euphemism.

But while Gaza's gas is indeed a crucial vector, Gaza, the territory, is a nuisance. What really matters for Tel Aviv is to confiscate all Palestinian gas reserves and allot them to future preferential clients: the EU.

Enter the India-Middle East Corridor(IMEC) - actually the EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-Emirates-India Corridor - conceived by Washington as the perfect vehicle for Israel to become an energy crossroads power. It fancifully imagines a US-Israel energy partnership trading in US dollars – simultaneously replacing Russian energy to the EU and halting a possible export increase of Iran's energy to Europe.

We return to the 21st century's main chessboard here: the Hegemon vs. BRICS.
Beijing has had steady relations with Tel Aviv so far, with lavish investment in Israeli high-tech industries and infrastructure. But Israel's pounding of Gaza may change that picture: no real Sovereign can hedge when it comes to real genocide.

In parallel, whatever the Hegemon may come up with in its various hybrid and hot war scenarios against the BRICS, China, and its multi-trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), that will not alter Beijing’s rational and strategically formulated trajectory.

This analysis by Eric Li is all one needs to know about what lies ahead. Beijing has mapped out all relevant tech roads to follow in successive five-year plans, all the way to 2035. Under this framework, BRI should be considered a sort of geoeconomics UN without the G7. If you’re outside of BRI – and that concerns, to a large extent, old comprador systems and elites - you’re self-isolating from the Global South/Global Majority.

So what remains of this “pause” in Gaza? By next week, the western-backed cowards will restart their genocide against women and children, and they will not stop for a good long while. The Palestinian resistance and the 800,000 Palestinian civilians still living in northern Gaza - now surrounded on all sides by Israeli troops and armored vehicles - are proving that they are willing and able to bear the burden of fighting the Israeli oppressor, not only for Palestine but for everyone, everywhere, with a conscience.

Despite such a terrible price to be paid in blood, there will eventually be a reward: the slow but sure evisceration of the imperial construct in West Asia.

No mainstream media narrative, no PR move to soften the genocide, no containment of “public opinion turning on Israel” can ever cover the serial war crimes perpetrated by Israel and its allies in Gaza. Perhaps this is just what the Doctor – metaphysical and otherwise - ordered for mankind: an imperative global tragedy, to be witnessed by all, that will also transform us all.

Some facts about Israel's history are12:

1. Israel is the only country in the world that has the same name, is located in the same land and speaks the same language as it did 3,000 years ago.
2. Most of the Jews were forced by the Romans into the Diaspora (exile) after the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E.
3. Israel is the only country to have revived a dead language and made it the national language.
4. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Israel was 54 degrees Celsius (129.2 Fahrenheit) in 1942 at Kibbutz Tirat Zvi in the northern Jordan Valley.

Israel - Facts, History & Conflicts | HISTORY

Israel

BY: HISTORY.COM EDITORS

UPDATED: OCTOBER 10, 2023 | ORIGINAL: JUNE 30, 2017

https://assets.editorial.aetnd.com/u...y=75&auto=webp
DEA / C. SAPPA/GETTY IMAGES

Table of Contents

1. Early History of Israel
2. King David and King Solomon
3. The Balfour Declaration
4. Conflict Between Jews and Arabs
5. The Zionism Movement
6. Israeli Independence
7. Arab-Israeli War
8. Arab-Israeli Conflict
9. Israel Today
10. The Two-State Solution
11. Sources:

Israel is small country in the Middle East, about the size of New Jersey, located on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and bordered by Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The nation of Israel—with a population of more than 9 million people, most of them Jewish—has many important archaeological and religious sites considered sacred by Jews, Muslims and Christians alike, and a complex history with periods of peace and conflict.

Early History of Israel
Much of what scholars know about Israel’s ancient history comes from the Hebrew Bible. According to the text, Israel’s origins can be traced back to Abraham, who is considered the father of both Judaism (through his son Isaac) and Islam (through his son Ishmael).

Abraham’s descendants were thought to be enslaved by the Egyptians for hundreds of years before settling in Canaan, which is approximately the region of modern-day Israel.

The word Israel comes from Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, who was renamed “Israel” by the Hebrew God in the Bible.

King David and King Solomon
King David ruled the region around 1000 B.C. His son, who became King Solomon, is credited with building the first holy temple in ancient Jerusalem. In about 931 B.C., the area was divided into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south.

Around 722 B.C., the Assyrians invaded and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel. In 568 B.C., the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the first temple, which was replaced by a second temple in about 516 B.C.

For the next several centuries, the land of modern-day Israel was conquered and ruled by various groups, including the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Fatimids, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Egyptians, Mamelukes, Islamists and others.

The Balfour Declaration
From 1517 to 1917, what is today Israel, along with much of the Middle East, was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
But World War I dramatically altered the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East. In 1917, at the height of the war, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour submitted a letter of intent supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The British government hoped that the formal declaration—known thereafter as the Balfour Declaration—would encourage support for the Allies in World War I.

When World War I ended in 1918 with an Allied victory, the 400-year Ottoman Empire rule ended, and Great Britain took control over what became known as Palestine (modern-day Israel, Palestine and Jordan).

The Balfour Declaration and the British mandate over Palestine were approved by the League of Nations in 1922. Arabs vehemently opposed the Balfour Declaration, concerned that a Jewish homeland would mean the subjugation of Arab Palestinians.

The British controlled Palestine until Israel, in the years following the end of World War II, became an independent state in 1947.

Conflict Between Jews and Arabs
Throughout Israel’s long history, tensions between Jews and Arab Muslims have existed. The complex hostility between the two groups dates all the way back to ancient times when they both populated the area and deemed it holy.

Both Jews and Muslims consider the city of Jerusalem sacred. It contains the Temple Mount, which includes the holy sites al-Aqsa Mosque, the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock and more.

Much of the conflict in recent years has centered around who is occupying the following areas:

1. Gaza Strip: A piece of land located between Egypt and modern-day Israel.
2. Golan Heights: A rocky plateau between Syria and modern-day Israel.
3. West Bank: A territory that divides part of modern-day Israel and Jordan.

The Zionism Movement
In the late 19th and early 20th century, an organized religious and political movement known as Zionism emerged among Jews.

Zionists wanted to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Massive numbers of Jews immigrated to the ancient holy land and built settlements. Between 1882 and 1903, about 35,000 Jews relocated to Palestine. Another 40,000 settled in the area between 1904 and 1914.

Many Jews living in Europe and elsewhere, fearing persecution during the Nazi reign, found refuge in Palestine and embraced Zionism. After the Holocaust and World War II ended, members of the Zionist movement primarily focused on creating an independent Jewish state.

Arabs in Palestine resisted the Zionism movement, and tensions between the two groups continue. An Arab nationalist movement developed as a result.

Israeli Independence
The United Nations approved a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state in 1947, but the Arabs rejected it.
In May 1948, Israel was officially declared an independent state with David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, as the prime minister.

While this historic event seemed to be a victory for Jews, it also marked the beginning of more violence with the Arabs.

1948 Arab-Israeli War
Following the announcement of an independent Israel, five Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—immediately invaded the region in what became known as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Civil war broke out throughout all of Israel, but a cease-fire agreement was reached in 1949. As part of the temporary armistice agreement, the West Bank became part of Jordan, and the Gaza Strip became Egyptian territory.

Arab-Israeli Conflict
Numerous wars and acts of violence between Arabs and Jews have ensued since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Some of these include:

1. Suez Crisis: Relations between Israel and Egypt were rocky in the years following the 1948 war. In 1956, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser overtook and nationalized the Suez Canal, the important shipping waterway that connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. With the help of British and French forces, Israel attacked the Sinai Peninsula and retook the Suez Canal.
2. Six-Day War: In what started as a surprise attack, Israel in 1967 defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria in six days. After this brief war, Israel took control of the Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and Golan Heights. These areas were considered “occupied” by Israel.
3. Yom Kippur War: Hoping to catch the Israeli army off guard, in 1973 Egypt and Syria launched air strikes against Israel on the Holy Day of Yom Kippur. The fighting went on for two weeks, until the UN adopted a resolution to stop the war. Syria hoped to recapture the Golan Heights during this battle but was unsuccessful. In 1981, Israel annexed the Golan Heights, but Syria continued to claim it as territory.
4. Lebanon War: In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and ejected the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This group, which started in 1964 and declared all Arab citizens living in Palestine up to 1947 to be called “Palestinians,” focused on creating a Palestinian state within Israel.
5. First Palestinian Intifada: Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank led to a 1987 Palestinian uprising and hundreds of deaths. A peace process, known as the Oslo Peace Accords, ended the Intifada (a Arabic word meaning “shaking off”). After this, the Palestinian Authority formed and took over some territories in Israel. In 1997, the Israeli army withdrew from parts of the West Bank.
6. Second Palestinian Intifada: Palestinians launched suicide bombs and other attacks on Israelis in 2000. The resulting violence lasted for years, until a cease-fire was reached. Israel announced a plan to remove all troops and Jewish settlements from the Gaza strip by the end of 2005.
7. Second Lebanon War: Israel went to war with Hezbollah—a Shiite Islamic militant group in Lebanon—in 2006. A UN-negotiated ceasefire ended the conflict a couple of months after it started.
8. Hamas Wars: Israel has been involved in repeated violence with Hamas, a Sunni Islamist militant group that assumed Palestinian power in 2006. Some of the more significant conflicts took place beginning in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2023.

Israel Today
Clashes between Israelis and Palestinians are still commonplace. Key territories of land are divided, but some are claimed by both groups. For instance, they both cite Jerusalem as their capital.

Both groups blame each other for terror attacks that kill civilians. While Israel doesn’t officially recognize Palestine as a state, more than 135 UN member nations do.

In October 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally declared war on Hamas following a surprise deadly assault launched from Gaza by Hamas militants.

The Two-State Solution
Several countries have pushed for more peace agreements in recent years. Many have suggested a two-state solution but acknowledge that Israelis and Palestinians are unlikely to settle on borders.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has supported the two-state solution but has felt pressure to change his stance. Netanyahu has also been accused of encouraging Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas while still backing a two-state solution.

The United States is one of Israel’s closest allies. In a visit to Israel in May 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump urged Netanyahu to embrace peace agreements with Palestinians. And in May 2018, the U.S. Embassy relocated to from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Palestinians perceived as signal of American support for Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Palestinians responded with protests at the Gaza-Israel border, which were met with Israeli force resulting in the deaths of dozens of protesters.

Sources:
History of Ancient Israel: Oxford Research Encyclopedias.
Creation of Israel, 1948: Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State.
The Arab-Israeli War of 1948: Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State.
History of Israel: Key events: BBC.
Israel: The World Factbook: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Immigration to Israel: The Second Aliyah (1904 – 1914): Jewish Virtual Library.
Trump Comes to Israel Citing a Palestinian Deal as Crucial: The New York Times.
Palestine: Growing Recognition: Al Jazeera.
Mandatory Palestine: What It Was and Why It Matters: TIME.
BY: HISTORY.COM EDITORS

HISTORY.com works with a wide range of writers and editors to create accurate and informative content. All articles are regularly reviewed and updated by the HISTORY.com team. Articles with the “HISTORY.com Editors” byline have been written or edited by the HISTORY.com editors, including Amanda Onion, Missy Sullivan, Matt Mullen and Christian Zapata.

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Date Accessed
November 25, 2023
Publisher
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Last Updated
October 10, 2023

Original Published Date
June 30, 2017

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As an experienced forex trader and educator, I have helped many people learn how to trade forex successfully and earn a lot of money. My comprehensive approach to trading combines fundamental and technical analysis with risk management strategies to identify profitable trading opportunities.

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Amongst the trading tribe do things that can identify and prove that you are different from the crowd - A real , serious and professional trader.

Don't just proclaim that you are a trader.

Trader does not mean that the sole objective is to make money. The moment you come with money making as the sole and only objective , you are out of the game anyways and part of the larger crowd which is unsuccessful

Do things which can identify you as a professional trader - learn the process, understand and follow risk management and position sizing. Be disciplined and understand that trading is a long haul.


Each day around 8:30 AM to 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time, I determine whether we have RISK ON or RISK OFF.

There is no indicator that can do this just as no technical indicator can effectively predict what will happen moment to moment as one MAJOR fundamental fact whether GEOPOLITICAL or FINANCIAL or now SUPPLY CHAIN or some New Covid 19 variant can cause the markets to go down 1000 points as the Dow 30 has been doing recently and will continue to do.

That is why my Unique Method of Forex trading developed during 2003 when I started trading Forex and later on during 2012 when I added to my business model and started teaching my unique 100% proven method of Money Flow trading.

It is no longer possible to trade without a STOP LOSS PERIOD.

Having a STOP LOSS of fewer than 100 PIPS is not a good strategy. That leads me to explain why most of the 95% of all Retail Forex Traders lose. They trade with small amounts of money and SCALP which makes it almost impossible to make profits over a period of one year because of the VIOLENT NATURE of the swings in the Asset Classes caused by world changing events.

Each Forex Trade that you do should not risk more than 2% of your trading Capital and that is based on trading Capital of $50,000 US Dollars INITIALLY learning on a $50,000 US Funds Demo account just as I did for a period of three years before I made my first Real Funds Trade.

PLEASE GO WITH THE MONEY FLOW

Let us review what we teach and why it works if YOU WORK.

Without your WORK then you are just wasting your time and probably your money.

There is no such thing as Political Correctness here because we are here to teach and share our knowledge.


SO.... going back to our winning FORMULA for FOREX SUCCESS.

20% of the SUCCESS is yourself the Forex Trader.

20% of the SUCCESS is your EDGE which we teach you and that is Money Flow Trading.

20% of the SUCCESS is control of your RISK (Your hard earned money) Our UNIQUE RISK MANAGEMENT allows you to trade without worry, fear and greed. Of course we want to make sure that you have the right qualities to be a winning Forex Trader so our course is for a period of three months, so we can teach you the right trading methods and we can see your results and make adjustments without your FEAR OF LOSS of Real Money.


20% of the SUCCESS is using and understanding the USE of Technical Indicators which include not only the common ones. It includes the understanding of Supply and Demand. Support and Resistance and the use of Pivot Points which you can see each day on our daily charts that cover ALL our Trade Plans which we also help you develop and explain WHY. These are our Winning Trade Plans that we review every three months or earlier if circumstances in the markets require that.

20% of the SUCCESS is the FUNDAMENTALS, which are much more than Data Releases each day around the world. It includes reports and articles extremely well researched as you can clearly see from this article that explains why the TREND in the Equity Markets especially in North America is DOWN. By understanding the difference between PERCEPTIONS (MARKETS) and REALITY, you then have a good handle on REALITY before the MASSES do and you are not surprised when events eventually unfold.

When successful traders aren't trading, they are researching, developing, and innovating. When unsuccessful traders aren't trading, they're staring at screens and forcing trades. There is nothing better for trading psychology than being at the cutting edge of a growing business.

What makes a trader successful is discipline: doing the right thing with fidelity. What keeps a trader successful is innovation: doing new things and turning them into disciplines.

Thursday, September 25, 2014
A Preview of Trading Psychology 2.0: From Best Practices to Best Processes
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One of the great disappointments I encounter when I read writings on the topic of trading psychology is that they invariably touch upon the same themes: discipline, controlling emotions, etc. Having worked with traders and portfolio managers for over a decade now, there is so much more to the psychology of trading than "sticking to your process" that I decided I had to write a book about what I was experiencing but wasn't reading. The title reflects that interest: Trading Psychology 2.0: From Best Practices to Best Processes.

I think Ted Hayes hit on something important in his recent interview. He pointed out that the personality traits relevant to success among early career traders are different from those that generate success for experienced ones. Perhaps so much writing concerns discipline and emotional control, because those are the dominant concerns of the new traders who buy the books, haunt the websites, and seek the help.

At several of the firms where I work, no one even gets an interview unless they have years of experience managing significant capital with a solid track record of profitability and risk management. So by the time those traders join the firm, discipline and emotional control are not screaming priorities. Instead, they deal with other challenges. In Trading Psychology 2.0, I refer to these challenges by A-B-C:


* Adapting to changing markets
* Building on strengths
* Creating creativity

In adapting to different markets by leveraging their strengths and generating new ideas, successful market participants are not so different from successful businesses in fast-changing industries, such as technology or social media. When markets change from year to year, stasis is a formula for failure. The successful trader, like the successful tech firm, must constantly innovate. Moreover, once traders generate those innovations, they must turn best practices--what they do that is successful--and turn them into robust, best processes.

I think this is very, very important: What makes a trader successful is discipline: doing the right thing with fidelity. What keeps a trader successful is innovation: doing new things and turning them into disciplines. Conscientiousness makes for success, but it is openness that makes for adaptation. Trading psychology as a field has done a fine job of articulating the importance of discipline. My hope is that the new book will broaden the discussion to include a research-informed look at mastering change and innovation.

In order to be able to help you better it is VERY IMPORTANT that you share your thoughts and your QUESTIONS.


For further information please send me an email to [email protected]

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David Stockman: How American Neocons Wrecked The Middle East And Ukraine

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BY TYLER DURDEN

SATURDAY, DEC 02, 2023 - 08:10 AM
Authored by David Stockman via AntiWar.com,

This is part 2 of “Why There Is Still No Peace on Earth: Washington’s Folly From The Persian Gulf to Ukraine.” Read part 1.

THE FIRST GULF WAR – A CATASTROPHIC ERROR
Confronted with the greatest opportunity for global peace in nearly a century, George H. W. Bush did not hesitate: Upon the advice of his retainers, he immediately elected the path of war in the Persian Gulf.

This endeavor was hatched by Henry Kissinger’s economically illiterate protégés at the National Security Council and Bush’s Texas oilman secretary of state, James Baker. They falsely claimed that the will-o’-the-wisp of “oil security” was at stake and that 500,000 American troops needed to be planted in the sands of Arabia.
That was a catastrophic error, and not only because the presence of “crusader” boots on the purportedly sacred soil of Arabia offended the CIA-recruited and trained mujahedin of Afghanistan, who had become unemployed when the Soviet Union collapsed.

The CNN-glorified war games in the Gulf during early 1991 also further empowered another group of unemployed crusaders. Namely, the neocon national-security fanatics who had misled Ronald Reagan into a massive military buildup to thwart what they claimed to be the ascendant Soviet Union bent on nuclear-war-winning capabilities and global conquest.

Needless to say, by the 1980s the gray men of the Kremlin were as evil as ever, but they were also quite rational and did not embrace a nuclear war winning strategy in any way, shape or form. That was just a pack of neocon lies, which, in any event, led to a massive defense build-up that had virtually nothing to do with containing the ballyhooed Soviet strategic nuclear threat. As it happened, the latter was being handled well enough by the already built, in-place and paid for strategic nuclear triad – forces which well pre-dated the Reagan build-up.

So when the defense budget rose by a staggering $170 billion, from $134 billion in 1980 to $304 billion in 1989, only a tiny fraction of the increase was applied to upgrading the strategic nuclear deterrent. Instead, this unprecedented 130% peacetime rise (+50% in inflation-adjusted dollars) went overwhelmingly to the building of a globe-spanning conventional forces armada that was utterly unneeded for America’s homeland security in a world with or without the Soviet Union.

Accordingly, everything on land, sea and air was upgraded and expanded. This included the 600-ship Navy and 12 carrier battle groups; massive upgrades of the fleet of M1 tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles; and endless procurement of cruise missiles, fixed-wing planes, rotary aircraft, air-and sea-lift capacity, surveillance and electronic warfare capacity and a black budget so large as to dwarf anything that had gone before.

In a word, the misguided Reagan defense build-up enabled the invasions and occupations that commenced almost instantly after the Soviet demise. That is to say, the neocon defense build-up of the 1980s fathered the “Forever Wars” of the 1990s and beyond.

The folly and deceit of the purportedly anti-Soviet defense build-up was evident enough at the time because by the mid-1980s the Evil Empire was already unraveling at the seams economically. The reason was simply that communism and rigidly centralized command-and-control economics don’t work—as became abundantly clear to the entire world via the spectacle of Boris Yeltsin, vodka flask in hand, facing down the Red Army in 1991.

Like the proverbial last straw on the camel’s back, in the end the mighty Soviet Union was taken down by one of its own drunken apparatchiks.
That is to say, the entire neocon narrative of an ascendant, bent on world conquest Soviet Union was made a mockery. That alone should have sent the neocons into the permanent disrepute and obscurity they so richly deserved.

But Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and rest of the neocon gang surrounding Bush the Elder managed to deftly pull a “bait and switch” maneuver of no mean extent. Suddenly, it wasn’t about the Soviet Union at all, but the alleged lesson from Washington’s Pyrrhic victory in Kuwait that “regime change” among the assorted tyrannies of the Middle East was in America’s national interest.

More fatally, the neocons now insisted that the first Gulf War proved regime change could be achieved through a sweeping interventionist menu of coalition diplomacy, security assistance, arms shipments, covert action and open military attack and occupation via the spanking new conventional forces armada that the Reagan Administration had bequeathed.

What the neocon doctrine of regime-change actually did, of course, was to foster the Frankenstein that ultimately became ISIS. In fact, the only real terrorists in the world who have threatened normal civilian life in the West during the last three decades were the rogue offspring of Imperial Washington’s post-1990 machinations in the Middle East.

The CIA-trained and CIA-armed mujahedin of Afghanistan mutated into al-Qaeda not because bin Laden suddenly had a religious epiphany that his Washington benefactors were actually the Great Satan owing to America’s freedom and liberty.

His murderous crusade was inspired by the Wahhabi fundamentalism loose in Saudi Arabia. This benighted religious fanaticism became agitated to a fever pitch by Imperial Washington’s violent plunge into Persian Gulf political and religious quarrels, the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, and the decade-long barrage of sanctions, embargoes, no-fly zones, covert actions and open hostility against the Sunni regime in Baghdad after 1991.

Yes, bin Laden would have amputated Saddam’s secularist head if Washington hadn’t done it first, but that’s just the point. The attempt at regime change in March 2003 was one of the most foolish acts of state in American history.

Indeed, Bush the Younger’s neocon advisers had no clue about the sectarian animosities and historical grievances that Hussein had bottled up by parsing the oil loot and wielding the sword under the banner of Baathist nationalism. But “shock and awe” blew the lid and the de-Baathification campaign unleashed the furies.
Indeed, no sooner had George Bush pranced around on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln declaring “mission accomplished” than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant and small-time specialist in hostage taking and poisons, emerged as a flamboyant agitator in the now-dispossessed Sunni heartland of Iraq.

The founder of ISIS succeeded in Fallujah and Anbar province just like the long list of other terrorist leaders Washington claims to have exterminated. That is, Zarqawi gained his following and notoriety among the region’s population of deprived, brutalized and humiliated young men by dint of being more brutal than their occupiers.
Indeed, even as Washington was crowing about its eventual liquidation of Zarqawi, the remnants of the Baathist regime and the hundreds of thousands of demobilized republican guards were coalescing into al-Qaeda in Iraq, and their future leaders were being incubated in a monstrous nearby detention center called Camp Bucca that contained more than 26,000 prisoners.

As one former U.S. Army officer, Mitchell Gray, later described it,
“You never see hatred like you saw on the faces of these detainees,” Gray remembers of his 2008 tour. “When I say they hated us, I mean they looked like they would have killed us in a heartbeat if given the chance. I turned to the warrant officer I was with and I said, ‘If they could, they would rip our heads off and drink our blood.

What Gray didn’t know – but might have expected – was that he was not merely looking at the United States’ former enemies, but its future ones as well. According to intelligence experts and Department of Defense records, the vast majority of the leadership of what is today known as ISIS, including its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, did time at Camp Bucca.

And not only did the US feed, clothe and house these jihadists, it also played a vital, if unwitting, role in facilitating their transformation into the most formidable terrorist force in modern history.

What Gray didn’t know – but might have expected – was that he was not merely looking at the United States’ former enemies, but its future ones as well. According to intelligence experts and Department of Defense records, the vast majority of the leadership of what is today known as ISIS, including its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, did time at Camp Bucca.

And not only did the US feed, clothe and house these jihadists, it also played a vital, if unwitting, role in facilitating their transformation into the most formidable terrorist force in modern history.

Early in Bucca’s existence, the most extreme inmates were congregated in Compound 6. There were not enough Americans guards to safely enter the compound – and, in any event, the guards didn’t speak Arabic. So the detainees were left alone to preach to one another and share deadly vocational advice . . .

Bucca also housed Haji Bakr, a former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s air-defense force. Bakr was no religious zealot. He was just a guy who lost his job when the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi military and instituted de-Baathification, a policy of banning Saddam’s past supporters from government work.
According to documents recently obtained by German newspaper Der Spiegel, Bakr was the real mastermind behind ISIS’ organizational structure and also mapped out the strategies that fueled its early successes. Bakr, who died in fighting in 2014, was incarcerated at Bucca from 2006-’ 08, along with a dozen or more of ISIS’ top lieutenants.”

The point is, regime change and nation building can never be accomplished by the lethal violence of 21st-century armed forces; and they were an especially preposterous assignment in the context of a land rent with 13 century-old religious fissures and animosities.
In fact, the wobbly, synthetic state of Iraq was doomed the minute Cheney and his bloody gang decided to liberate it from the brutal but serviceable and secular tyranny of Saddam’s Baathist regime. That’s because the process of elections and majority rule necessarily imposed by Washington was guaranteed to elect a government beholden to Iraq’s Shiite majority.

After decades of mistreatment and Saddam’s brutal suppression of their 1991 uprising, did the latter have revenge on their minds and in their communal DNA? Did the Kurds have dreams of an independent Kurdistan spilling into Turkey and Syria that had been denied their 30-million-strong tribe way back at Versailles and ever since?

Yes, they did. So the $25 billion spent on training and equipping the putative armed forces of post-liberation Iraq was bound to end up in the hands of sectarian militias, not a national army.

In fact, when the Shiite commanders fled Sunni-dominated Mosul in June 2014 they transformed the ISIS uprising against the government in Baghdad into a vicious fledgling state in one fell swoop. But it wasn’t by beheadings and fiery jihadist sermons that it quickly enslaved dozens of towns and several million people in western Iraq and the Euphrates Valley of Syria.

THE ISLAMIC STATE WAS WASHINGTON’S VERY OWN FRANKENSTEIN
To the contrary, its instruments of terror and occupation were the best weapons that the American taxpayers could buy. That included 2,300 Humvees and tens of thousands of automatic weapons, as well as vast stores of ammunition, trucks, rockets, artillery pieces and even tanks and helicopters.
And that wasn’t the half of it. The Islamic State also filled the power vacuum in Syria created by its so-called civil war. But in truth that was another exercise in Washington-inspired and Washington-financed regime change undertaken in connivance with Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

The princes of the Petro-states were surely not interested in expelling the tyranny next door. Instead, the rebellion was about removing Iran’s Alawite/Shiite ally from power in Damascus and laying the gas pipelines to Europe – which Assad had vetoed – across the upper Euphrates Valley.
In any event, due to Washington’s regime change policy in Syria, ISIS soon had even more troves of American weapons. Some of them were supplied to Sunni radicals by way of Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

More came up the so-called “ratline” from Qaddafi’s former arsenals in Benghazi through Turkey. And still more came through Jordan from the “moderate” opposition trained there by the CIA, which more often than not sold them or defected to the other side.
That the Islamic State was Washington’s Frankenstein monster, therefore, became evident from the moment it rushed upon the scene in mid-2014. But even then, the Washington War Party could not resist adding fuel to the fire, whooping up another round of Islamophobia among the American public and forcing the Obama White House into a futile bombing campaign for the third time in a quarter century.

But the short-lived Islamic State was never a real threat to America’s homeland security.
The dusty, broken, impoverished towns and villages along the margins of the Euphrates River and in the bombed-out precincts of Anbar province did not attract thousands of wannabe jihadists from the failed states of the Middle East and the alienated Muslim townships of Europe because the caliphate offered prosperity, salvation or any future at all.

What recruited them was outrage at the bombs and drones dropped on Sunni communities by the U.S. Air Force and by the cruise missiles launched from the bowels of the Mediterranean that ripped apart homes, shops, offices and mosques which mostly contained as many innocent civilians as ISIS terrorists.

The truth is, the Islamic State was destined for a short half-life anyway. It had been contained by the Kurds in the North and East and by Turkey with NATO’s second-largest army and air force in the Northwest. And it was further surrounded by the Shiite Crescent in the populated, economically viable regions of lower Syria and Iraq.

Absent Washington’s misbegotten campaign to unseat Assad in Damascus and demonize his confession-based Iranian ally, there would have been nowhere for the murderous fanatics who had pitched a makeshift capital in Raqqa to go. They would have run out of money, recruits, momentum and public acquiescence in their horrific rule in any event.

But with the U.S. Air Force functioning as their recruiting arm and France’s anti-Assad foreign policy helping to foment a final spasm of anarchy in Syria, the gates of hell had been opened wide, unnecessarily.
What has been puked out was not an organized war on Western civilization as former French president Hollande so hysterically proclaimed in response to one of the predictable terrorist episodes of mayhem in Paris.

It was just blow-back carried out by that infinitesimally small contingent of mentally deformed young men who can be persuaded to strap on a suicide belt.
In any event, bombing did not defeat ISIS; it just temporarily made more of them.
Ironically, what did extinguish the Islamic State was the Assad military, the Russian air force invited into Syria by its official government and the ground forces of its Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard allies. It was they who settled an ancient quarrel Sunni/Shiite that had never been any of America’s business anyway.

But Imperial Washington was so caught up in its myths, lies and hegemonic stupidity that it could not see the obvious. Accordingly, 31 years after the Cold War ended and several years after Syria and friends extinguished the Islamic State, Washington has learned no lessons.

The American Imperium still stalks the planet for new monsters to destroy – presently in the precincts of Russian-speaking eastern and southern Ukraine that are utterly irrelevant to America’s peace and security.

Next On Deck – The Ukraine Disaster
The present disaster in Ukraine incepted with the Washington-sponsored Maidan coup of February 2014. Among other things it was a “revenge intervention” designed to punish Russia for being so bold as to thwart the neocon regime change adventure in Syria; and especially to haze Putin for persuading Assad to give up his chemical weapons, thereby removing any pretext for Washington military intervention.

As it happened, the Russian-friendly president of Ukraine at the time, Vicktor Yanukovych, had at the last minute in late 2013 ditched a long-pending EU affiliation agreement and IMF stabilization plan in favor of a more attractive deal with Moscow. Under the so-called rule of law, that reversal would hardly seem outside the realm of sovereign prerogative.

But not by the lights of Washington, red-hot from being check-mated in Syria. Accordingly, the neocon operatives in the Obama national security apparatus, spear-headed by the horrid Victoria Nuland, insisted that the Russian deal not be allowed to stand and that Ukraine’s accession to NATO should be fast-tracked.
So doing, they demonstrated an immense ignorance about the 800-year history of the various territories which had been cobbled together in the artificial state of Ukraine, and the long-history of these pieces and parts as vassals and appendages of both Greater Russia and various eastern European kingdoms and empires that had marched back and forth across the pages of history.

In a word, they dove into a rabbit hole that has made Washington’s misadventures in the middle east small potatoes by comparison. But the War Party would not be stopped, believing that its vast conventional military armada and the reach of its global economic sanctions could bring Putin to heel, as well.

In this context, however, it can be truly said that occasionally a few words are worth a thousand pictures–at least when it comes to Ukraine. Here’s one of them:
The Ukrainian leader said that his country hadn’t been willing to cede territory from the beginning. “Had we been willing to give up our territory, there would have been no war,” Zelensky said.

He got that right!

So the question recurs. Why is it worth Washington’s sweeping Sanctions War on Russia, which is destroying the dollar-based global trading and payments system and triggering a worldwide inflationary calamity, to defend every inch of a sketchy map located on Russia’s doorstep? And that’s to say nothing of risking nuclear war!

Indeed, as we elaborate below, the present Ukrainian territorial map exists only due to the handiwork of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev. Here is how and when these brutal tyrants attached each piece of today’s Ukrainian map (in purple, light blue and red, respectively) to the territories acquired or seized by the Russian Czars over 1654-1917 (yellow).
https://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-con...01/ukraine.png

Nor should any mystery linger as to where these pieces and parts came from. When the creators of the Soviet Empire carved out a convenient administrative entity during the early 1920s that they were pleased to call the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic they were shuffling around blocks of territory and peoples that had mostly been ruled by Czarist Russia during its final centuries.

In fact, prior to the commie takeover of Russia, no country that even faintly resembled today’s Ukrainian borders had ever existed.

To the contrary, much of the territories which comprise present day Ukraine have been been joined at the hip with mother Russia for most of the last three centuries: During Imperial times that was via old-fashioned vassal protection and sponsorship and during the brutal rule of the Soviet communists between 1922-1991 it was via totalitarian command.

But remove the dastardly work of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev during the latter interval, and nothing like today’s map would exist, nor would Washington be starting a global economic war and triggering soaring energy, food and commodity prices. That’s because the four territories recently “annexed” by Russia would already have been integral parts of Russia!

For want of doubt here are sequential maps that tell the story and which make mincemeat of the Washington sanctity of borders malarkey. In fact, the approximate territory of the four annexed regions – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – plus Crimea are evident in the yellow area of this 220-years ago map (@1800).

Collectively, they were known as Novorossiya or “New Russia” and had been acquired by Russian rulers, including Catherine the Great between 1734 and 1791.https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ovoros_gov.jpg

As is evident from the year-markings in red on the map, the Russian Empire had gradually gained control over the area, signing peace treaties with the Cossack Hetmanate (1734) and with the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of the various Russo-Turkish Wars of the 18th century.

Pursuant to this expansion drive – which included massive Russian investment and the in-migration of large Russian populations to the region – Russia established the Novorossiysk Governaorate in 1764. The latter was originally to be named after the Empress Catherine, but she decreed that it should be called “New Russia” instead.

Completing the assemblage of New Russia, Catherine forcefully liquidated the Zaporizhian Sich (present day Zaporizhzhia) in 1775 and annexed its territory to Novorossiya, thus eliminating the independent rule of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Later in 1783 she also acquired Crimea from the Turks, which was also added to Novorossiya.

During this formative period, the infamous shadow ruler under Catherine, Prince Grigori Potempkin, directed the sweeping colonization and Russification of the land. Effectively, the Russian Empress had granted him the powers of an absolute ruler over the area from 1774 onward.
The spirit and importance of “New Russia” at this time is aptly captured by the historian Willard Sunderland,
The old steppe was Asian and stateless; the current one was state-determined and claimed for European-Russian civilization. The world of comparison was now even more obviously that of the Western empires. Consequently it was all the more clear that the Russian empire merited its own New Russia to go along with everyone else’s New Spain, New France and New England. The adoption of the name of New Russia was in fact the most powerful statement imaginable of Russia’s national coming of age.

Well, yes, but borders!

In fact, the passage of time solidified the border of Novorossiya even more solidly. One century latter the light yellow area of this 1897 map gave an unmistakable message: To wit, in the late Russian Empire there was no doubt as to the paternity of the lands adjacent to the Azov Sea and the Black Sea—they were now part of the 125 years-old “New Russia”.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...of_Ukraine.png

After the madness of WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution, of course, the borders of much of eastern and central Europe were drastically re-arranged. For instance, at the so-called Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 new countries were fashioned from whole cloth (Czechoslovakia) and long dead countries (Poland) were revived—both upon their own ancient lands as well as those of their former neighbors.

Another of these post-WWI creations was Yugoslavia. The kingdom was formed in December 1918, with Serbia’s royal family, the Karadjordjevics, becoming the monarchs of the new country, which was officially called the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes until 1929 – when it became Yugoslavia. By 1946 it had been incorporated into the Soviet Warsaw Pact, with the borders and constituent parts shown below.

https://cdn.britannica.com/96/50496-...0&h=300&c=crop

Needless to say, all of these circa 1919 creations and borders have long ceased to exist. After a decade of civil wars and civilian slaughter in the 1990s, Yugoslavia has become seven independent nations. And not only that: The apparently non-sacrosanct borders of Yugoslavia were rent asunder by NATO bombs, armaments, economic and political aid and covert operations!

And then having torn up the old maps like a mere “scrap of paper”, NATO made the new national entities its very own, with the majority now actually members of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance – a vestigial organ that was designed to keep the Balkans contained and the Soviet Union throttled, neither of which condition any more even exists.
By the same token, the present-day borders of Poland were moved far to the west at Stalin’s insistence at Yalta. Consequently, the revived nation of “Poland”, which had earlier been created by Woodrow Wilson at Versailles to court the growing Midwestern Polish vote, took on a wholly new map.

That is to say, Poland had been dismembered and deleted from the maps by the European powers in the 1790s; had been revived by Wilson’s ignorant demands at Versailles that moved it deep into historic German territories and provided the political fuel for Hitler’s revanchism; and then drastically rearranged again at Yalta where the cynical Churchill and the malevolent Stalin outmaneuvered the senile Roosevelt.

Thus, the area outlined in dark blue was Wilson’s Poland, but the huge swath in pink was gifted to Stalin by FDR and Churchill at Yalta. At the same time, the brown areas including the free city of Danzig (Gdansk) and the Danzig Corridor to its right were swiped from the remains of Hitler’s Germany and given back to what amounted to Poland 3.0 – and just within the first half of the 20th century!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...45%29_corr.png

The same story holds for Czechoslovakia. Its three constituent nations were hammered together at Versailles from the remnants of the Austrian Empire, but eventually went their separate ways after the rule of communism ended in 1991. Today the Czech State and Slovakia exist peacefully side-by-side, and the world is no worse for the wear after their partition.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...slovakia_I.png

As it happens, however, there is one politically engineered post-WWI map from the region that hasn’t been undone. For reasons known only by the Washington neocons and Warfare State apparatus, the modern borders of Ukraine – hammered together by the writ of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev after 1918 – are apparently the exception to the rule.

Indeed, they are deemed to be so sacrosanct as to justify monkey-hammering the global economy with a destructive Sanctions War, even to the point of risking hot military confrontation between the world’s two major nuclear powers.

Of course, had the above mentioned 20th century communist trio been benefactors of mankind, perhaps their map-making handiwork might have been justified. Under this benign contrafactual, they would have presumably combined peoples of like ethnic, linguistic, religious and politico-cultural history into a cohesive natural polity and state. That is, a nation worth perpetuating, defending and perhaps even dying for.

Alas, the very opposite was true. From 1922 to 1991 modern Ukraine was held together by the monopoly on violence of its brutally totalitarian rulers. And when they temporarily lost control during the military battles of World War II, the administrative entity called Ukraine came apart at the seams.

That is, local Ukrainian nationalists joined Hitler’s Wehrmacht in its depredations against Jews, Poles, Roma and Russians when it first swept through the country from the west on its way to Stalingrad; and then, in turn, the Russian populations from the Donbas and south campaigned with the Red Army during its vengeance-wreaking return from the east after winning the bloody battle that turned the course of WWII.

Not surprisingly, therefore, virtually from the minute it came out from under the communist yoke when the Soviet Union was swept into the dustbin of history in 1991, Ukraine has been engulfed in political and actual civil war. The elections which did occur were essentially 50/50 at the national level but reflected votes of 80/20 within the regions. That is, the Ukrainian nationalist candidates tended to get vote margins of 80% + in the West/Central areas, while Russian-sympathizing candidates got like pluralities in the East/South.

This pattern transpired because once the iron-hand of totalitarian rule ended in 1991, the deep and historically rooted conflict between Ukrainian nationalism, language and politics of the central and western regions of the country and the Russian language and historical religious and political affinities of the Donbas and south came rushing to the surface. So-called democracy barely survived these contests until February 2014 when one of Washington’s “color revolutions” finally “succeeded”. That is to say, the aforementioned Washington fomented and financed nationalist-led coupe d état ended the tenuous post-communist equilibrium.

As to the adverse shock effect of the Maidan coup on Ukrainian governance and external policy with respect to Russia, the maps below tell you all you need to know. The first map is from the 2004 presidential election, which was won by the Ukrainian nationalist candidate, Yushchenko, who predominated in the yellow areas of the map, over the pro-Russian Yanukovych, who swept the blue regions in the east and south.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/milit...4-election.gif

The second map is from the 2010 election, showing the same stark regional split, but this time the pro-Russian candidate, Yanukovych, won.
In the map below, the dark blue parts to the far east (Donbas) indicate an 80% or better vote for Viktor Yanukovych in the 2010 election. By contrast, the dark red areas in the west voted 80% or more for the Ukrainian nationalist, Yulie Tymoshenko. That is to say, the skew in the Ukrainian electorate was so extreme as to make America’s current red state/blue state divide seem hardly noteworthy by comparison.

As it happened, the sum of the pro-Yanukovych skews from the east and south (Donbas and Crimea) added up to 12.48 million votes and 48.95% of the total, while the sum of the extreme red skews in the center and west (the lands of old eastern Galicia and Poland) amounted to 11.59 million votes and 45.47% of the total.

Stated differently, it is hard to imagine an electorate more sharply divided on a regional/ethnic/language basis. Yet it was one which still produced a sufficiently clear victory margin (3.6 percentage points) for Yanukovych – so as to be reluctantly accepted by all parties. That became especially clear when Tymoshenko, who was the incumbent prime minister, withdrew her election challenge a few weeks after the run-off in February 2010.

At that point, of course, Russia had no beef with the Kiev government at all because essentially Yanukovych’s “Regions Party” was based on the pro-Russian parts (blue areas) of the Ukrainian electorate.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...0%D1%85-en.png

During the next several years the economic basket case which was Ukraine attempted to improve its circumstances by running a bake-off of sorts between the European Union and Russia with respect to aid and trade deals.
And well its leaders might have: After the fall of communism, Ukraine had become a cesspool of financial corruption in which a handful of oligarchs had robbed the country blind. By 2014 its real GDP had consequently fallen to $568 billion (2017$), which amounted to a 37% shrinkage from even the threadbare communist economics of 1990.

Accordingly, the supposedly pro-Russian Yanukovych administration initiated in March 2012 the above-mentioned Association Agreement with the European Union that was to provide trade advantages and an IMF aid package.

However, the EU leaders insisted that no agreement could be ratified unless Ukraine addressed concerns over a “stark deterioration of democracy and the rule of law”, including the imprisonment of Yulia Tymoshenko in 2011. In order to address these concerns, in fact, President Yanukovych urged the parliament to adopt laws so that Ukraine would meet the EU’s criteria.

Crash of Ukraine’s Real GDP, 1990-2014
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=OhCr

But it was the parallel $4 billion IMF loan that turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. According to then Prime Minister Mykola Azarov “the extremely harsh conditions” of the IMF loan (presented by the IMF in November 2013) included big budget cuts and a 40% increase in natural gas bills. Those proved to be hills too high to climb for most of the factions within the fractionated Ukraine polity.

Accordingly, the IMF demands became the clinching argument behind the Ukrainian government’s abrupt decision to suspend preparations for signing the Association Agreement with the EU. Instead, Kiev quickly pivoted to a deal with Russia in the fall of 2013, which was willing to offer $15 billion in loans without the harsh IMF pre-conditions. Also, Moscow offered Ukraine a discount on Ukraine’s large gas purchases from Russia.

The rest is history, as it were. As mentioned above, the Washington neocons were not about to accept Kiev’s pivot to Russia come hell or high water.

So they swung into action bringing all the instruments of the Empire – the CIA, the State Department, NED, the NGOs and favored Ukrainian oligarchs – to bear on scuttling the Russian deal and removing Yanukovych from office.

In a later interview with a US journalist, in fact, Ukrainian billionaire oligarch and opposition leader, Petro Poroshenko (who later became president), said quite clearly that the plan was to subvert the nation’s constitution and install an unelected, anti-Russian government that would deep-six the deal with Moscow:
“From the beginning, I was one of the organizers of the Maidan. My television channel – Channel 5 – played a tremendously important role. … On the 11th of December, when we had U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and E.U. diplomat Catherine Ashton in Kyiv, during the night they started to storm the Maidan.”

It should never be forgotten, therefore, that the coup which overthrew the constitutionally elected government in Kiev was a $5 billion all-hands Washington undertaking. It would never have come to fruition as a successful regime change putsch without the heavy hands of the US State Department along with the other above-mentioned arms of the empire.

Needless to say, nullification of a country’s election – backed by the stick of NATO’s military might and the carrot of billions from a Washington/EU/IMF consortium – is big league meddling. Well, except by the clueless hypocrisy of the Washington foreign policy blob.

Indeed, as former president Obama told CNN at the time, Washington was just going about its “indispensable nation” business. It had helpfully encouraged another “flowering of democracy” and to that end it had,
“……brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.”

Brokered a deal my eye!

This was a blatant and inexcusable breach of so-called “international law” because it served the will-to-power objectives of the Washington neocons and kept the now largely obsolete US foreign policy apparatus in the hegemony game – to say nothing of recruiting a new customer for arms sales.

Never mind that Washington’s massive political and financial support for the Maidan uprising on the streets of Kiev, and then nearly instantaneous recognition of the resulting putsch as the official government of the Ukraine, was a frontal assault on the nation’s sovereignty.

The late and detestable Senator John McCain even went to Kiev to show solidarity with the Euromaidan activists. McCain dined with opposition leaders, including members of the ultra-right‐wing Svoboda Party and later appeared on stage in Maidan Square during a mass rally.
There he stood shoulder to shoulder with Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok, who made no secret of his pro-Nazi convictions.
http://i.imgur.com/s0sR7dL.jpg

But McCain’s actions were a model of diplomatic restraint compared to the conduct of Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, who, by your way, was soon back in the same position in the Biden Administration, conducting the same pro-war neocon policies.

As Ukraine’s political crisis deepened, Nuland and her subordinates became more brazen in favoring the anti‐Yanukovych demonstrators. Nuland noted in a speech to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation in December 2013, that she had traveled to Ukraine three times in the weeks following the start of the demonstrations. Visiting the Maidan on December 5, she famously handed out cookies to demonstrators and expressed support for their cause.

Washington’s conduct not only constituted meddling, but it also bordered on puppeteering. At one point, US Ambassador Pyatt mentioned the complex dynamic among the three principal ultra-nationalist opposition leaders, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Oleh Tyahnybok, and Vitali Klitschko
Both Pyatt and Nuland wanted to keep Tyahnybok and Klitschko out of an interim government. In the former case, they worried about his extremist neo-Nazi ties; in the latter, they appeared to want him to wait and make a bid for office on a longer‐term basis (This former boxing champion became the current pugnacious mayor of Kiev).

Nuland thus famously stated that,
“I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary.” She added that what Yatseniuk needed “is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside.”
The two diplomats were also prepared to escalate the already extensive U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s political turbulence by bringing in the Big Guy.
Pyatt stated bluntly that,
“…..we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing [the political transition].”

Nuland clearly had Vice President Joe Biden in mind for that role. Noting that the vice president’s national security adviser was in direct contact with her, Nuland related that she told him,
“…probably tomorrow for an atta‐boy and to get the details to stick. So Biden’s willing.”

That is to say, Victoria Nuland didn’t merely tell some undercover operatives to buy ads on Ukrainian social media, as Russia was accused of doing during the 2016 US election. To the contrary, she actually picked Yanukovych’s successor and the entire cabinet!

And we know this from a hacked phone call between Nuland and the US ambassador in Kiev. In discussing who should lead the Washington-installed government, Nuland made clear who the next prime minister would be and who he should be talking to for advice.
Nuland: I think Yats (Arseniy Yatseniuk) is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. … what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know.

As it turned out, the putsch leaders followed Nuland’s advice to the letter, installing “Yats” as the new prime minister. But it also filled four cabinet posts out of eleven with rabid anti-Russian neo-Nazis.


Indeed, at the heart of the putsch were Ukrainian organizations called Svoboda (national socialist party of Ukraine) and Right Sector. Their national hero was one Stepan Bandera – a collaborator with Hitler who led the liquidation of thousands of Poles, Jews and other minorities as the Nazi Wehrmacht, as previously mentioned, made it way through Ukraine toward Stalingrad in the early 1940s.

In fact, another founder and leader of Svoboda, Andriy Parubiy, was given a portfolio which included the Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces, Law Enforcement, National Security and Intelligence. That the Kremlin was alarmed by these developments and that the Russian-speaking populations of Crimea and the Donbas (the blue areas on the electoral map above) feared an ethnic cleansing led by the new Ukrainian nationalist government in Kiev is hardly surprising.

Indeed, the first legislative act of the new government was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 which made Russian an official language. As one commentator noted, it was a bit as if putschists decided that French and Italian would no longer be official languages in Switzerland.
The Russian language ban caused a storm in the Russian-speaking population. This resulted in fierce repression against the Russian-speaking regions (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) which began in February 2014 and led to a militarization of the situation and some notorious massacres (those in Odessa and Mariupol were the most odious).

By the end of summer 2014, Crimea had return to Mother Russia after an overwhelming plebiscite and the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk became the object of a vicious civil war conducted by Kiev.

As we have amplified elsewhere, Sevastopol in Crimea has been the homeport of the Russian Naval Fleet under czars and commissars alike. After 171 years as an integral part of the Russian Motherland, it only technically became part of Ukraine during a Khrushchev inspired shuffle in 1954.

The fact is, only 10% of the Crimean population is Ukrainian speaking, and it was the coup on the streets of Kiev by extremist anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalists and proto-fascists that caused the Russian speakers in Crimea to panic and Moscow to become alarmed about the status of its historic naval base, for which it still had a lease running to the 2040s.

Thus, during a referendum in March 2014 83% of eligible Crimeans turned out to vote and 97% of those approved cancelling the 1954 edict of the Soviet Presidium that gifted Russian-Crimea to Ukraine. There is absolutely no evidence that the 80% of Crimeans who thus voted to sever their historically short-lived affiliation with Ukraine were threatened or coerced by Moscow.

Indeed, what they actually feared were the edicts against Russian language and culture coming out of Kiev. And exactly the same thing was true of the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking populations of the Donbas.

So in the context of a relentless and pointless NATO expansion to the very borders of the shrunken Russian state, Washington did not merely sponsor and fund the overthrow of Ukraine’s constitutionally elected government in February 2014. But once it had unleashed a devastating civil war, it also relentlessly blocked for eight years running the obvious alternative to the bloodshed that had claimed 14,000 civilian and military casualties, even before the current hot war commenced.

To wit, Ukraine could have been partitioned with autonomy for the Russian-speaking Donbas provinces – or even accession to the Russian state from which these communities had essentially originated.

So the appalling truth of the matter is this: Adding insult to injury after its blatantly foolish and reckless coup in February 2014, Washington now insists that the grandsons and granddaughters of Stalin’s industrial army in the Donbas are to be ruled by the grandsons and granddaughters of Hitler’s collaborators in Kiev, whether they like it or not.

Yet that historic chasm is exactly where the present civil war originated.

And its also why partition of an artificial polity forced together by 20th century communist dictators is the only way out.

THE NATO FACTOR
The current CIA director, William J Burns, actually recognized the eventual crack-up of Ukraine back in 2008, when he served as U.S. ambassador to Russia. After Ukraine’s NATO aspirations were announced at that year’s Bucharest Security Conference, Burns wrote a secret cable (subsequently published by Wikileaks) entitled,
“Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines”.

The missive to Washington contained a stern warning of trouble to come:
Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.


Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

He got that right!

For more than two decades, Washington’s NATO expansion policy has been a dagger aimed at the heart of an inherently divided Ukrainian polity—a division that had been suppressed by 69 years of brutal communist rule, but which broke into the open after the Soviet Union fell in 1991.

So, as Burns predicted, in response to the 2014 putsch, Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas region rose up against the coup government in Kiev, which they denounced as an illegitimate Western puppet regime, riddled with anti-Russian Neo-Nazis.

Independence activists declared the creation of two new autonomous states, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. In turn, the new anti-Russian Ukrainian government in Kiev, with abundant Western military support and weapons, launched a brutal war against these breakaway republics–an assault that went on until the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022.

As Kiev’s assault in the Donbas unfolded, upwards of 14,000 Ukrainians were killed, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced – all before the Russian invasion commenced.

Moreover, the manner in which the two new breakaway republics armed themselves for combat against Kiev’s forces tells you all you need to know about the deep divisions in the Ukrainian polity. These were fissures which were instantly brought to the surface by the Maidan coup.
According to Jacques Baud, a NATO adviser to Ukraine during that period, the breakaway Republic fighters got their arms mainly from defecting Ukrainian units, not Russia!

Folks, when entire military units defect with their arms and fighting wherewithal, you are not dealing with minor differences of opinion among a nation’s population; it’s a sign of deep and likely irreconcilable strife. As Baud has further noted,
In 2014, I (was) at NATO, responsible for the fight against the proliferation of small arms, and we (were) trying to detect Russian arms deliveries to the rebels in order to see if Moscow (was) involved.

The rebels are armed thanks to the defections of Russian-speaking Ukrainian units which cross over to the rebel side. As the Ukrainian failures progressed, the entire tank, artillery or anti-aircraft battalions swelled the ranks of the autonomists. This is what (drove) the Ukrainians to commit to the Minsk Accords.

Just after signing the Minsk 1 Accords in September 2014, however, then Ukrainian President and corrupt oligarch, Petro Poroshenko, launched a vast anti-terrorist operation against the Donbas. But poorly advised by NATO officers, the Ukrainians suffered a crushing defeat at Debaltsevo, which forced them to commit to the Minsk 2 Agreements in February 2015.

As it happened, these Agreements provided for neither the separation nor the independence of the Republics, but their autonomy within the framework of Ukraine. That is, the ultimate status of the republics was to be negotiated between Kiev and the representatives of the republics, for an internal solution to the crisis of Ukraine’s split polity.

But owing to Washington’s writs this was not to be. Instead, the post-coup Kiev government waged a brutal civil war against the Donbas for eight years. This attack was resisted by Russian-speaking Ukrainians who were deathly afraid of being ruled by the neo-Nazi elements which permeated the Kiev government, military and security forces (SBU).

Indeed, even though he had run as the peace candidate, Zelensky put the kibosh on Minsk 2 soon after he was installed in office in 2019. The Minsk agreements, of course, had detailed how Kiev could reintegrate its breakaway regions by offering them a general amnesty, greater autonomy, and representation in the government.

But after having his very life threatened by the Azov militias embedded in Ukraine’s military, Zelensky and other senior officials declared that the Minsk agreements could not be implemented. Instead, they claimed that they could only proceed with their obligations under the agreements after retaking control of the rebel-held areas.

Needless to say, as far as the breakaway republics were concerned, disarmament first and negotiations later was an absurd non-starter. In fact, after the fall of 2019, the Zelensky government made a bee line toward severe intensification of the raging civil war,

To that end, it caused ascension to NATO to be added to its constitution, even as Zelensky issued at executive order vowing to recover Crimea. Yet as we have frequently explained that territory and the site of Russia’s most strategic naval base had never been part of Ukraine until 1954 when Khrushchev gifted it to the brutal communist rulers in Kiev for their help in securing the succession after Stalin’s death.

Moreover, once Zelensky intensified the civil war the idea that Ukraine had anything to do with a functioning democracy lost all meaning. Zelensky’s government soon arrested the leading opposition politicians, shut-down all opposition media by combing multiple TV outlets into a single government propaganda network and, as we saw earlier, initially even outlawed the use of the Russian language.

So long before Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, a bloody civil war raged in the unnatural polity called Ukraine. The latter was inherently not built to last given its deep ethnic divisions and especially the legacy of the aforementioned bloody history during WWII, when the country was bitterly divided between populations loyal to Hitler’s Wehrmacht versus those aligned with Stalin’s Red Army. Like after the American civil war, the animosity lasted for decades.

So again, as Jacques Baud noted, this was a civil war: There were never major Russian troops in the Donbass before February 24, 2022. Even the US intelligence map published by the Washington Post on December 3, 2021 does not show Russian troops in the Donbass.

Indeed, as far back as October 2015, Vasyl Hrytsak, director of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), confessed that only 56 Russian fighters had been observed in the Donbass. It was hardly even comparable to that of the Swiss going to fight in Bosnia during the weekends, in the 1990s, or the French mercenaries who are going to fight in Ukraine today.

The Ukrainian army was then in a deplorable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor, Antoly Matios, said that Ukraine had lost 2,700 men in the Donbass but not from the much larger combat losses. Instead, he referenced losses including 891 from disease, 318 from traffic accidents, 177 from other accidents, 175 from poisoning (alcohol, drugs), 172 from careless handling of weapons, 101 from breaches of safety rules, 228 from murder and 615 from suicide!

In fact, like everything else in Ukraine, the Army has been severely undermined by the corruption of its cadres. According to a UK Home Office report, when reservists were called up in March-April 2014, 70% did not show up for the first session, 80% for the second, 90% for the third and 95% for the fourth.

Thus, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. They were essentially made up of foreign mercenaries. As of 2020, they constituted around 40% of Ukraine’s forces and numbered around 102,000 men according to a in-depth Reuters investigation. That is to say, much of what constituted the Ukrainian military force on the eve of the Russian invasions was armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France.

These militias, stemming from the far-right groups that led the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, are made up of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of that of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division. The latter is the object of nationalist veneration in Ukraine for having liberated Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943.

None of this is a secret, even if it has been banned from the 24/7 news narrative. So the West supports and continues to arm militias that have been guilty of widespread crimes against the civilian populations of the Donbas since 2014, including rape, torture and massacres.

Moreover, the integration of these paramilitary forces into the National Guard was not at all accompanied by a “denazification”, as is frequently claimed. Among the many examples, that of the insignia of the Azov Regiment is edifying:
https://i0.wp.com/scheerpost.com/wp-...80%2C364&ssl=1

Finally, on the eve of the invasion the Kiev government moved to drastically intensify the civil war and its brutal campaign against the breakaway republics. Beginning on February 16th – a week before the invasion – Ukrainian artillery shelling of the civilian populations of the Donbass increased dramatically, as shown by the daily reports of OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) observers.

Naturally, neither the media, nor the European Union, nor NATO, nor any Western government reacted or intervened even verbally.


At the same time, there were also reports of acts of sabotage in the Donbass. On January 18, Donbass fighters intercept saboteurs equipped with Western equipment and speaking Polish seeking to create chemical incidents in Gorlivka.

The Ukrainian artillery bombardments on the populations of Donbass continued to intensify as shown below – so on February 23, the two Republics requested military aid from Russia. And on the 24th, Vladimir Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter which provides for mutual military assistance within the framework of a defensive alliance.


At that point, the Ukrainian civil war became international, and the artificial nation that was not “Built to Last” was ushered into its death throes.https://i0.wp.com/scheerpost.com/wp-...80%2C780&ssl=1

Indeed, the real truth of the matter is that Imperial Washington is now reaping the whirlwind it sowed over decades by massive interference in the internal politics and governance process of countries all over the world – of which the vignette above about the Ukrainian coup and its bloody aftermath is only the latest flock of chickens to come home to roost.

Contrary to the bombast, jingoism, and shrill moralizing flowing from Washington and the mainstream media, America had absolutely no national security interest – even to this day – in the spat between Putin and the coup that unconstitutionally took over Kiev in February 2014. That changed everything and knocked the props out from under Washington’s current sanctimonious attacks on Putin for finally resorting to its own game.

As we said, Ukraine was “Not Built to Last”. Yet notwithstanding all of these damning realities, Zelensky continues to peevishly and arrogantly demand that Washington and the west stand-up an on-ramp to WWIII (e.g. a No-Fly Zone) in order to defend every inch of this artifact of recent history called Ukraine.

After all, if according to the horse’s mouth itself there would have been no war had Ukraine been willing to give up the historic Russian territories of Crimea and the Donbas in the first place, then why isn’t Washington making a bee line toward the negotiating table to offer just that?

If the truth be told, of course, it is not interested in ending the Ukraine War or saving a nation which cannot and should not be saved.


To the contrary, Washington and its fawning media acolytes have become so crazed with anti-Putin hysteria that they will not be satiated until Russia itself is brought down – even if that threatens to bring down the entire dollar-based global trade and payments system on which America’s tenuous prosperity depends.


David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America,TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/...risoning-trump

Rogan: Democrats Have "No Cards To Play" For 2024, Except Imprisoning Trump
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b.../picture-5.jpg

BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, DEC 01, 2023 - 12:55 PM
Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news

Podcast king Joe Rogan noted earlier this week that he believes there is no strategy for 2024 on the part of Democrats, and the only play they have is to imprison Donald Trump.
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=V9bjhRW1

“I think at this point they kind of have to run [Biden] unless he dies,” Rogan asserted, adding “We have one year now, we’re in late November, we have less than one year. What are they going to do? If Biden died tomorrow, what do they do with Kamala Harris? Put her on the moon? What are they going to do, she’s the vice president. If he dies, she becomes the president, which is fucking wild when you hear that lady talk.”

Rogan further noted that throwing someone like California Governor Gavin Newsom in as the nominee in place of Harris would expose how lacking in direction the party has been.

“I think they have no cards and they’re looking at this game and I think they’re depending upon party loyalty and they’re depending upon Trump getting convicted and arrested and imprisoned,” Rogan continued.

“I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I don’t think it is. It just seems like it’s a bunch of trumped-up charges, no pun intended,” he added.

“It does make sense if you want to look at banana republic tactics when you’re imprisoning and trying to convict your political opponents,” Rogan further stated, adding “The problem with that is, even if you think Donald Trump is a crook and should be arrested, this sets a precedent for future presidents.”
“What if someone further right than him steps in? What if a war breaks out? What if things get even crazier? What if nationalism upticks? Then you have someone who is now in power that is far right, like happened all over the world. If that happens and that precedent has been set for prosecuting your political opponents and going after them with trumped-up charges, that is a horrible situation,” Rogan warned.

“That is one of the reasons why we have to stick with the rule of law, the way this country was founded. These principles were set up because they wanted to mitigate corruption at its base level, they wanted to stretch it out so no one could be an authoritarian dictator and run America,” the host concluded.


Hold your bullish horses...
Or just bears being bears....? JPM US equity strategist:
"We expect a more challenging macro backdrop for stocks next year with softening consumer trends at a time when investor positioning and sentiment have mostly reversed. Equities are now richly valued with volatility near the historical low, while geopolitical and political risks remain elevated. We expect lackluster global earnings growth with a downside for equities from current levels. For the S&P 500, we estimate earnings growth of 2-3% next year with EPS of $225 and a Price Target of 4,200 with a downside bias."

This is new
The US 10-year is down since last Friday....and the NASDAQ is also down.

Source: Refinitiv

Nothing is impossible.
SPX has dislocated from US economic surprises. Surprises better start catching up, or...

Source: Refinitiv

Bulls vs Bears - extreme edition
The AAII bull-bear spread has exploded to the upside. We haven't seen such a big jump in the spread in a very long time. We have reversed on much smaller moves of the spread on previous occasions...

Source: Refinitiv

Rotation into secular growth
Lower yields combined with recent dovish Fed commentary have beckoned a rotation out of YTD winners into secular growth names.

Source: GS trading desk

Bond mania
TLT's monthly rate of change needs little commenting.

Source: Refinitiv

What's the dollar trend?
Despite all the excitement, both ways, the DXY is trading without a trend, stuck in a range since last November.

Source: Refinitiv

VVIX squeezing
The VVIX squeeze we outlined last week continues. The gap vs VIX is huge. Last time the VVIX was here, VIX was at 19 ish...

Source: Refinitiv

BofA sees 3 main reasons for volatilities moving higher in 2024
1. Higher-for-longer rates & restrictive policy cause something to break before the Fed is willing to cut
2. Recession finally arrives
3. Optimistic equity volatility finally recouples higher to elevated macro uncertainty & still-stressed rates of volatility

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LAGGARDS LEADING
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...20%2845%29.jpg

Plenty of dispersion to disorient
Outperformance is mainly now concentrated in YTD underperformers. YTD outperformers that are rate-sensitive underperform, despite rates continuing to move lower.

Spicier stuff
As the macro narrative is shifting, we have seen traders reach for the spicier stuff over the past few sessions, leading to profit-taking in mega-cap tech while software has found its groove again. (JPM trading desk)

Rotation into secular growth
Lower yields combined with recent dovish Fed commentary have beckoned a rotation out of YTD winners into secular growth names.

Source: GS trading desk

Beyond the mag 7
We have seen laggards ignite lately. GS on the topic:
1. we have had a 2-year rolling bear market for the S&P 500 ex-top 7, and breadth in the market bottomed when rates peaked.
2. sales per employee in the Russell 2000 (where ppl expect job cuts) have never been higher.
3. many input costs are trending lower y/y, and inflation is downshifting.
4. The margin story for many companies looks especially attractive and the bar is low for the next quarter

Source: Bloomberg

Break up in small caps
Russell has not closed here since around mid-September. The king of mean reversion continues doing what it does best: confusing everyone. You buy Russell when everybody sees the breakdown, and you sell when everybody sees the big breakup (way higher).

Source: Refinitiv

Relative Russell
The eternal loser shows relative signs of life. The IWM/QQQ ratio just broke above the short-term trend line. Imagine a bigger relative trade starts growing...

Source: Refinitiv

Changing Winds in Consumer Cyclicals
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen net buying in certain pockets of Consumer Cyclicals which have previously been an area of concentrated shorts and negative sentiment. HFs have been net buyers of certain consumer cyclical names that have been previously net sold, and net exposure has risen off of multi-year lows.

Source: MS PB

Chasing laggards
Moving on from chasing quality tech to chasing low-quality crap. Not the stuff you see at lows...but this trade has more legs most probably.

Source: Refinitiv

UPGRADE TO PREMIUM

TODAY'S TOP STORIES

Latin America On Edge As Venezuela's Maduro Holds Referendum Whether To Invade Oil-Rich Neighbor Guyana

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https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-...-or-weaponised

2024 gold revaluation coordinated or weaponized?
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-pu...?itok=AZ-m-Vmi

BY KINESIS MONEY
FRIDAY, DEC 01, 2023 - 10:04

In this week’s episode of Live from the Vault, Andrew Maguire prepares us for 2024 with a new-look studio and shares some explosive predictions for next year and a recap of 2023’s stairsteps.

Looking back at the very first episode of LFTV, when Andrew first predicted a gold price reset, it is now time to reveal what the economic effects of this might be. The precious metals expert explains how the coming shock might even be weaponized.


https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-...-or-weaponised

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-...-or-weaponised


___________________________________________________________________
Timestamps
00:00 Start
02:00 What Andrew is seeing for the end-of-the-year trade
07:40 Looking back to episode 1, have Andrew’s calls played out?
13:45 The economic effects of a gold price reset
21:30 How the COMEX will react to new gold prices
27:00 How a reevaluation might be weaponized
35:25 How does silver figure into the gold price reset?
______________________________________________________________________________
Make sure you catch the next episode of Live from the Vault - Subscribe.
Why invest in gold and silver with Kinesis? https://kinesis.money/investor/

Explore our website: https://kinesis.money

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge and are not selected, edited, or screened by Zero Hedge editors.

1. https://assets.faireconomy.media/nfs...ar392875_2.gif BenjaminIs
2. | Commercial Member | Joined Dec 2014 | 10,691 Posts | Online Now

Good day fellow traders on Forex Factory. I have been trading Forex for over 10 years now and with the incredible movements on a monthly basis which has been caused by the intervention efforts of the world's central banks trading today is much different trading before 2008. Thus RISK MANAGEMENT must be a priority for any serious forex currency trader. You should never RISK more than 5% of your trading capital on any one trade plan. I also strongly suggest that you never trade more than 20% of your total trading capital at anytime. Example - If you are trading $50,000 in US Funds NEVER have more than 20% or $10,000 US Dollars on your various trade plans always using the 5% rule for risk on each trade plan being used.

The Money Flow Trading Method is based each trading day on Risk On or Risk Off which means are the markets heading down or heading up. I use the DOW to determine this each day. When the markets head down and we have Risk Off the money flows into US Dollars first and then the money is parked usually into US Bonds so the bonds go up and the yield goes down. Money also flows to USD/JPY. I will give more explanations when the forex markets reopen on Sunday. If you have any comments or questions please post them on this thread. Tomorrow we have two important events the most important being the referendum in Italy.

The results will move the markets whichever result we see. This is a Fundamental Fact and that combined with Technical Indicators as to Support and Resistance along with investor perception of the meaning of the results short term will lead the direction of the market. I will be thinking of going short on USD/JPY depending on the results of course and Risk being off.