NEWS OF THE WORLD ON FIRE
A look at globe-spanning events in Africa, USA, Middle East, Central Asia, Europe
NEWS ITEMS REVIEWED :
South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. In this article, I will provide a plausible reason for why the Ugandan judge took a more hardline stance compared to the ad hoc judge from Israel.
The tragedy of Artsakh—the fulfilment of Yevgeny Primakov’s Prophesy
Kazakhstan’s passive-aggressive tango with the Russian Federation. Controversy over a NATO Training Centre in Almaty, which never existed.
Euro-American corporate media outlets release a rebooted version of the “Ukrainian Gang of Six” storyline starring a Max Schreck doppelgänger
#1. SEBUTINDE AT THE INTERNATIONAL COURT
With some notable exceptions, pan African organizations and individual African states have mostly been subdued in their official reactions to Israel’s atrocious behaviour in Gaza, but it wasn’t always the case.
In fact, the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, many African countries— with their memory of European colonial yoke still fresh— were clearly sympathetic to Palestinians, even while many of them simultaneously maintained cordial diplomatic ties with the Israeli state.
Vocal support for Palestinians within Africa was at its most strident in the 1970s, with some countries and several revolutionary organizations in the continent forging ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
The Israeli state invested heavily in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, building critical infrastructure, granting scholarships to students to study at Israeli universities, training the security services and military forces of countries such as Tanganyika, Uganda and the Empire of Ethiopia.
Despite Israel’s concerted efforts, its calculated acts of generosity could not erase from the minds of many Africans the disquieting resemblance between its treatment of Palestinians and the darkest chapters of European colonial oppression on the continent.
So, when the Yom-Kippur War broke out in 1973, nearly all African countries promptly broke diplomatic relations with Israel in solidarity with Egypt, a highly respected founding member of the Organization of African Unity (1963-2002), which was then the biggest advocate for the Palestinian Cause.
However, the fervour of the revolutionary anti-colonial wave that bolstered the Palestinian Cause in Africa proved to be fleeting. As time rolled by, and the continent got mired in a cycle of military coups, civil wars and poverty, external issues, such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, fell off the radar. Only radical groups such as the ANC and SWAPO remained steadfast in their unwavering support for the Palestinians.
By the early 1990s, many Sub Saharan African countries had restored those diplomatic ties with Israel cut over the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In fact, by the time those countries resumed their ties with Tel Aviv, Egypt itself had already enjoyed a full decade of diplomatic relations with Israel. Back in February 1980, Saad Mortada went to Tel Aviv to assume the position of Egypt’s first Ambassador to Israel while Eliyahu Ben-Elissar went to Cairo to take up the position of Israel’s first Ambassador to Egypt.
With the reinstatement of diplomatic relations, Sub Saharan African countries resumed the practice of counterbalancing their friendship with Israel with vocal calls for the Palestinian right of self-determination to be respected.
For example, Nigeria was one of the countries that established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1960, severed those ties in 1973 in solidarity with Egypt, and then restored the relationship in 1992.
Nigeria’s cordial relations with Israel is balanced by its friendly ties to the PLO. Nigeria immediately recognized The State of Palestine declared by the PLO on 15 November 1988 and allowed it to establish a full fledged embassy on Nigerian soil. That was five years before the Oslo Accords (1993) that birthed the ineffectual Palestinian National Authority.
SIDE BAR: ISRAEL-NIGERIA INTELLIGENCE OPERATION (1984)
By the end of 1973, only four African states were still maintaining their ties with Israel. The rest had severed diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv in solidarity with Egypt, which had fought Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
Nigeria was among the vast majority of African states that had cut diplomatic ties with Israel. Nevertheless, cooperation between Nigerian and Israeli security services continued without impediment.
In June 1984, there were no diplomatic relations between Nigeria and Israel, but that did not prevent a joint operation of Mossad and the Nigerian Security Organization in the British capital city of London to kidnap, sedate and secretly transport a fugitive ex-Nigerian cabinet minister (Umaru Dikko) back to Lagos city in a wooden crate labelled “diplomatic cargo”.
For juicy details, see the Wikipedia entry on The Dikko Affair.
As previously implied, by January 1990, only a few radical organizations within the continent still retained the revolutionary anti-colonial sentiment that characterized support for the Palestinian Cause in the 1970s. The African National Congress (ANC) was the archetype of such an organization.
During its time as an activist organization fighting the apartheid South African regime, the ANC was a strong ally of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
For its own part, Israel secretly assisted the apartheid South African regime in developing nukes in the 1970s, despite the fact that many of the apartheid regime’s officials were antisemites who had been sympathetic to Nazi Germany during World War II.
In its official year book of 1978, an appreciative apartheid regime said the following about its relationship with Israel:
Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples
Despite misgivings expressed by certain cabinet ministers, the Israeli government decided to deepen its diplomatic, intelligence and military relationship with the apartheid state.
In 1981, Israel handed its IAI Scout drones to apartheid SADF for field-testing in the Angolan theatre of the South African Border Wars (1966-1990). The following year, the Israelis deployed the field-tested drones during their Invasion of Lebanon (1982-1985). Israel also granted the apartheid South African regime a manufacturing license to produce a localized version of the Jericho ballistic missile.
By January 1989, it was clear to the Afrikaner Broederbond ruling elites that the apartheid South African state had only but a short time to live. Tired of never-ending conflict, diplomatic isolation and UN-mandated economic sanctions, those ruling elites were ready to make big concessions.
One month earlier, December 1988, the apartheid regime had agreed to withdraw its occupation forces from Angola and Namibia as part of an accord to end the long running South African Border Wars. The agreement also contained provisions for the independence of Namibia from 75 years of apartheid South African rule.
Not all members of the Dutch-Afrikaner ruling class were happy with the concessions being made to former enemies. The hardline apartheid leader Pieter Willem Botha—alias “Die Groot Krokodil”— drew a line in the sand. No more concessions. The discriminatory apartheid system would remain in place and ANC would remain a banned “terrorist organisation”.
However, the die was cast, and the abrasive political leader, known to his supporters as Die Groot Krokodil (The Great Crocodile), was not going to stand in the way of the vast majority of Dutch-Afrikaner ruling class, which had already resolved to negotiate an end to the racially discriminatory system that targeted the black majority and non-white minorities of South Africa.
On 14 August 1989, Pieter Botha was ousted from power, and his more moderate subordinate, Frederick de Klerk, assumed leadership. Shortly after, Frederick lifted the ban on anti-apartheid political organisations, including the ANC. On 11 February 1990, he released the imprisoned de facto leader of the ANC, Nelson Mandela.
Immediately after his release, Mandela went on a world tour, visiting many countries in the Europe, Africa, North America and Asia. In the United States of America, he faced a barrage of criticism for supporting Muammar al-Gaddafi, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization.
Mandela defiantly defended the alliance of the ANC with Gaddafi, Castro and Arafat during a famous interview with American journalist, Ted Koppel, as reported in my previous article, which can accessed by clicking on the thumbnail below:
NELSON MANDELA ON THE PALESTINAN ISSUE
When ANC transitioned from an activist organisation of the apartheid era to the ruling party of the post-apartheid South African state that emerged in May 1994, its commitment to the liberation of Palestinians from Israeli yoke became official government policy.
Shortly after retiring as the first president of post-apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela visited the Gaza Strip. Below is a short video clip of that Gaza visit in October 1999:
Every post-apartheid president after Mandela have reaffirmed the official policy of strongly supporting the Palestinian Cause. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the South African government took Israel to the International Court of Justice on 11 January 2024 over the atrocious behaviour of the Israeli military forces in the Gaza Strip.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) must not be confused with the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The ICC is a clownish entity that has come under the influence and control of successive US governments, none of which officially recognized its authority. In fact, the US government is bound by the American Service Members Protection Act (2002) to use violence— if necessary— to rescue any American or Allied nation military personnel detained by the unrecognized ICC.
As far as US government is concerned, the unrecognized clownish entity (ICC) is merely a tool for subjecting leaders of enemy countries to kangaroo court proceedings. Nothing more. A few rare attempts made by ICC prosecutors to investigate war crime allegations against American or Israeli soldiers were quickly shut down after US government officials issued threats.
Unlike the ICC, whose authority is unrecognized by many countries across the world, the ICJ has undisputed jurisdiction over all countries that are members of the United Nations. Compared to the ICC, the ICJ is relatively independent of external influence.
The South Africa’s case of genocide brought against Israel was not particularly difficult to make before the judges of the ICJ.
There was no need to present before the judges those grim photographs showing sprawling scenes of carnage in Gaza that stretched for miles, in all directions—the excavated roads, bomb-cratered streets, entire neighbourhood blocks razed to the ground, the rubble of pulverized residential buildings, mosques, schools, churches and hospitals, the thousands upon thousands of mangled and mutilated bodies of men, women and children blown away Israeli bullets, artillery shells, guided missiles and aerial bombs.
All South Africa’s lawyers had to do was simply present video clips and written transcripts of politicians, senior military officials and other influential people within Israel screeching about the need to either wipe Palestinians off the face of the earth or expel them en masse from their Gazan homeland.
Examples of damning video footage and news clippings include:
Isaac Herzog, the ceremonial President of Israel, justifying the massacre of Gazans by suggesting that civilians aren’t innocent as shown below:
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, in a dehumanizing rant, referring to Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals” that will be denied food, water, electricity and other necessities of life. Video below:
David Azoulai, the head of the Metula Local Council in Israel saying that Gaza should be flattened and made to look like the Auschwitz Museum:
Batshit-crazy Amichai Eliyahu, a cabinet minister in the Israeli government, had the following to say about Gazans:
Israeli politician and former government official, Ayelet Shaked, says Gaza should be destroyed and its native population expelled. Video below:
Then the Big honcho himself, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, gives a speech comparing his intentions towards Palestinian Gazans to the Biblical era massacre of men, women, children and animals of the Amalek nation. We have below the video montage of genocidal rhetoric from various public figures, starting with Netanyahu:
The ICJ bench of fifteen regular judges and two ad hoc judges drawn from South Africa and Israel had the opportunity of seeing some of those videos and news clippings of Israeli officials brazenly incriminating themselves.
Nevertheless, there were initial fears that the judges from certain countries—Germany, USA, France, Australia, Belgium, Japan—would be swayed by the pro-Israel stance of the governments of their native countries.
This fear was expressed by Craig Murray, a diplomat-turned-journalist, who provided an excellent report of the first day of court hearings at the ICJ, during which South Africa presented its case of genocide against Israel.
In his report, Craig expressed a fear that the American, German and Ugandan judges could be swayed by their home governments to rule in favour of Israel.
I disagreed with him in the case of Uganda. Like many writers in the alternative media space, Craig suspects that an African country’s friendliness with Israel and USA might be a sign of subservience to Tel Aviv and Washington DC. In my previous article titled “ECOWAS: A Primer”, I debunked that sort of simplistic assumption.
After reading Craig Murray’s otherwise excellent report on South Africa’s day at the ICJ, I wrote the following comment to refute the claim that Uganda was under the thumb of the Israelis and Americans:
I made an obvious typographical error in my response above. The Ugandan judge is female not male. But the important thing to note is that even African countries enjoying good relations with the USA and Israel— such as Uganda and Nigeria— have unequivocally expressed their support for South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ.
After listening to both South African and Israeli legal teams, the judges of the ICJ issued a ruling on Friday 26 January 2024. The ICJ stated that there was a plausible case of genocide against Israel, but refused to grant South Africa’s prayer that Israel cease all military activities in the Gaza Strip. Instead, the court ordered Israel to observe six provisional measures that would supposedly protect Palestinians in Gaza from genocide.
The six provisional measures ordered by ICJ are paraphrased as follows :
Israel shall, in accordance with international law, prevent genocide and desist from killing, injuring, destroying life and preventing births of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above
Israel will act to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip
Israel will take immediate and effective steps to provide urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
Israel will act to prevent the destruction of and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza
Israel shall submit a report to the ICJ on actions being taken to comply with the provisional measures within a month of the court’s ruling
The six provisional measures were by no means the product of a unanimous ruling of all seventeen judges. Fifteen judges ruled in favour of all six measures imposed on Israel while two judges dissented on either all or most of those measures.
Contrary to the expectation of Craig Murray and some other alt-media pundits, ICJ judges from the Germany, USA, France, Australia, Belgium and Japan did not follow the pro-Zionist line of their home governments. They all ruled in favour of the six measures.
I am not entirely certain, but it is possible that the French judge, Ronny Abraham, who ruled in favor of all the measures, has Mizrahi Jewish heritage.
Nobody was particularly surprised to see that judges from Somalia, Slovakia, Russia, China, South Africa, Brazil, Lebanon, Jamaica and Morocco ruled in favour of all six provisional measures.
Likewise, nobody was shocked that Israeli Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak— seated at the ICJ bench on ad hoc basis—ruled against most of the provisional measures ordered by the court. Nevertheless, his conscience was sufficiently pricked that he was compelled to go against the wishes of the Israeli legal team and vote in favour of two out of the six measures.
He supported the majority ICJ ruling that stipulated that his own country (Israel) must act to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide against Palestinians. He also backed another provisional measure that ordered Israel to take immediate and effective steps to provide urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to besieged Palestinians in Gaza.
The Ugandan judge, Julia Sebutinde, was steadfast in her dissent, rejecting all six provisional measures, including the two measures supported by the Israeli judge.
She claimed in her written dissent that the dispute between the State of Israel and the people of Palestine is essentially and historically a political matter. It was not a legal dispute susceptible to judicial settlement by the Court. She also claimed that South Africa did not demonstrate that Israel’s actions are being committed with genocidal intent. In other words, she was arguing that Israel’s behaviour in Gaza was not within the scope of the UN Genocide Convention.
Obviously, everything she said was nonsense, and it does not explain why she could not, at the very least, support the two measures backed by the Israeli judge, Aharon Barak.
Justice Julia Sebutinde has no genuine legal arguments to support her rejection of an order that Israel prevent and punish incitement to genocide pushed everyday by Israeli government ministers, senior military officials and other powerful politicians. She has no legal arguments to justify her ruling against the order that Israel facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid to starving Palestinians in Gaza.
But in my humble opinion, she might have unexpressed eschatological arguments for rejecting all six measures. For obvious reasons, she was never going to make religiously motivated arguments before an avowedly secular court to explain her dissent. So, she was forced to come up with some weak made-up secular arguments to obscure her true reasons for ruling the way she did.
The first thing to understand is that the fastest growing religion in the African continent is American-style Pentecostal Christianity, which place heavy emphasis on “miraculous healing”, “speaking in tongues”, prosperity theology, and fanatical support for Israel.
Americans who read my blog are probably familiar with Pentecostal preachers such as Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggart and Oral Roberts. My German readers may (or may not) know the German Pentecostal preacher, Reinhard Bonnke, who was quite popular in many African countries, including Nigeria where he held several stadium-sized Christian revivalist rallies teeming with thousands of adherents of Pentecostalism.
For obvious reasons, I don’t expect non-Africans reading this blog to know many Nigerian Pentecostal preachers— such as Enoch Adebayo, Benson Idahosa, Ayo Oritsejafor, Temitope Balogun Joshua and Mike Okonkwo—who built Pentecostal churches with millions of followers both in Nigeria and other African countries.
When I say Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious faith in the continent, what I actually mean is that many Africans raised in the much older Catholic, Methodist and Anglican faiths are defecting to the preachers who emphasize “speaking in tongues” and “miraculous healing of illnesses through prayers”.
When I hear Euro-American corporate media saying that there is competition between Islam and Christianity for adherents in Africa, I just laugh at the ignorant nonsense.
In reality, Muslims who follow the tenets of the Koran are very unlikely to abandon them in favour of Biblical teachings and Christianity. Similarly, it is relatively rare that an African raised in the Christian faith would suddenly seek to convert to Islam. What is actually common is for Christians to hop from one Christian denomination to another. Islam has nothing to do with it.
Since the late 1980s, it has become increasingly common for African Christians raised as Anglicans and Methodists (and to a lesser extent, Catholics) to defect to Pentecostalism.
As a teenager growing up in heavily Roman Catholic Eastern Nigeria during the 1990s, I personally witnessed the growth and proliferation of Pentecostal churches throughout the region. These Pentecostal churches seemed to sprout up everywhere, making massive inroads that caused the Anglican Church to experience heavy congregational losses. The impact on the Catholic Church has been relatively moderate, but yet noticeable.
The Catholic Church was sufficiently alarmed by the gains being made by Pentecostalism in Africa that it organized a conference in Rome to discuss the matter on 22 March 2017. The conference in Rome was helmed mainly by Catholic clergymen from Nigeria.
To put things in proper context, as of today, there are about 609 million African Christians compared to 581 million African Muslims.
About 238 million Africans adhere specifically to Pentecostal Christianity in all its flavours. That is about 39 percent of Christians in Africa and 17 percent of the continent’s entire population of 1.4 billion.
Three decades ago, African believers of Pentecostalism were less than 5 percent of the total population of the continent.
It is highly probable that Justice Julia Sebutinde of the ICJ is an adherent of the homegrown African variant of Pentecostal Christianity, which tends to be more fanatically pro-Zionist than the original American version.
When Sebutinde’s steadfast rejection of all six provisional measures of the ICJ became public knowledge, the usual clueless folks in alternative media began to peddle claims that the Ugandan government had influenced the actions of judge.
The China-based French commentator, Arnaud Bertrand, immediately went to the usual conclusion borne out of ignorant assumptions. He thought that Uganda’s amicable ties with Israel could have compelled the Museveni government to covertly instruct Justice Julia Sebutinde to rule against the South African petition.
Surprisingly, Arnaud was not curious as to why ICJ judges from USA, Germany, France and Australia had not been influenced by the strident pro-Zionist stance of their home governments. He had also not bothered to learn that African countries friendly to Israel—such as Uganda and Nigeria—had publicly supported South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ.
Of course, the rubbish claims peddled by Arnaud Bertrand and many of his ilk in alternative media was quashed when Uganda’s UN Ambassador, Mr. Adonia Ayebare, disassociated his country from the ruling of Justice Julia Sebutinde in a series of statements posted on Twitter.
I have posted the most relevant tweet below:
Ambassador Adonia Ayebare explained that Uganda was sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people. He also explained that Sebutinde had a history of delivering court rulings that did not accord with the position of the Ugandan government. He recalled that in 2022, Sebutinde had ruled against Uganda in a case brought before the ICJ by Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The DRC was aggrieved that Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF) had violated its sovereignty by entering its territory to participate in the Second Congo War (1998-2003). That particular war involved the government armies of nine African countries and an assortment of rebel groups drawn from various African states.
Justice Sebutinde had joined other ICJ judges in ruling in favour of DRC. She ordered her own country (Uganda) to pay $325 million in reparation to the government of the DRC for getting involved in the Congolese Civil War.
Having established that Justice Julia Sebutinde’s decision was not influenced by the Ugandan government, we are left with the religious motive.
Fanatical Zionism is a key feature of Pentecostalism, especially its African variant. If Sebutinde is an adherent of Pentecostal Christianity, then it is a given that her religious faith would influence her judicial rulings with respect to Israel.
Pentecostal Christians believe that the State of Israel, created in 1948, is a continuation of Biblical Israel mentioned in Christian Holy Scriptures. In accordance with Pentecostalism’s theology of rapture, support for Israel is a mandatory religious duty necessary for the fulfillment of the “final rapture” and “second coming of Jesus Christ”.
As an adherent of Pentecostalism, Julia Sebutinde would be more extreme in her support for Zionism compared to secular Jewish Israeli politicians who hold agnostic or atheistic views, such as Benny Gantz, Ehud Barak, Yair Lapid, and Isaac Herzog.
I dare say that she is likely more extreme than Benjamin Netanyahu, who is not motivated by any heartfelt religious zeal, but rather by a survival instinct to prolong his tenure as Prime Minister and dodge the criminal investigation that would reopen once he is no longer at the helm of the Israeli government.
For those readers who were perplexed as to why the ad hoc Israeli judge on the ICJ panel showed more sympathy for Palestinians than Julia Sebutinde, I hope I have given you a plausible reason.
But just in case you are having trouble figuring it all out, let me step down to a pedantic level. As a secular Jew, who may even be atheist/agnostic, Justice Aharon Barak lacks the fanatical religious zeal of a Pentecostal believer of rapture theology. He does not think that backing Netanyahu’s regime is his religious duty.
As a liberal Ashkenazi Jew, Justice Aharon Barak— while still a fervent Zionist—might even be mildly embarrassed by the deranged genocidal speeches of thuggish politicians like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. So, it is no surprise that the Israeli Judge readily agreed to two measures of the ICJ that forbade Israeli public officials from inciting genocide against Palestinians and ordered the Netanyahu government to remove all obstacles preventing food and other basic necessities from reaching the besieged inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.
By contrast, fanatical Christian Zionism professed by Pentecostal believers demand that the fate of “Palestinian undesirables” be left in the hands of the Israeli government, which is seen as a modern-day representative of “God’s chosen people”.
Followers of Pentecostalism, especially its African variant, are not fazed when Netanyahu implies that he might subject Palestinians in Gaza to a reenactment of Biblical era genocide of the Amalek people. After all, if God tolerated the original genocide that wiped out men, women and children of Amalek then there is no reason why Netanyahu regime— the current representative of “God’s chosen people”— shouldn’t get a pass.
By that same logic, there is no reason for Justice Julia Sebutinde to support an ICJ ruling that orders representatives of the “chosen people” to desist from further incitement of genocide against Palestinians. There is equally no reason to support the ICJ ruling ordering Israel to eliminate all impediments to the provision of food and other basic necessities to Palestinians dying of starvation.
Thankfully, the vast majority of the judges on the ICJ bench are not zealous religious nuts. So, the six provisional measures of the International Court of Justice are binding on Israel.
Unfortunately, with the backing of the governments of the Collective West, especially the United States, Israel has been flouting the orders of the ICJ. Israeli military forces continue to raze entire neighbourhoods to the ground and massacre Palestinians. The delivery of food and other basic amenities to starving Palestinians in Gaza is deliberately being held up by the Netanyahu regime. Israeli political figures are still delivering public speeches advocating ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.
Since the ICJ ruling of 26 January 2024, senior Mossad Intelligence Officer, Mr. Rami Igra, has appeared on Israeli TV to justify the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by claiming that all of them are responsible for the actions of Hamas:
We also have mentally deranged Israeli legislator and ex-government official May Golan— a self-proclaimed “racist”— describing her pride at the destruction of Gaza and its inhabitants in a speech to the Israeli Parliament:
As recently as 8 March 2024, an influential Israeli rabbi in the city of Jaffa appeared on the record to boldly claim that genocidal wiping of all Palestinians is “permitted by Judaism”. He says Palestinian children should not be spared because they will grow up to fight Israel—a common sentiment expressed by many hardline Israeli public figures. Now, let us watch Rabbi Eliyahu Mali elucidate:
Given the failure of the Netanyahu regime to obey any of the six provisional measures, South Africa has returned to the ICJ with another complaint against Israel. This time around, many countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even two nations from Europe, have all addressed the ICJ bench in support of South Africa’s case.
With the exception of Belgium, Spain and Norway, the Collective West is backing Israel in its pogrom against Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.
Inside many European and North American countries, large segments of the population are holding rallies to protest the five-month-old horror show unfolding in Gaza. Pro-Zionist governments in charge of those countries are doing what they can to encourage the local police to suppress the demonstrations under the pretext of combating “pro-Hamas antisemitism”.
Observing officials of European and North American governments discuss Hamas in mass media outlets, one might be deceived into thinking:
That Israel’s state-driven oppression of Palestinians had not existed for decades prior to creation of Hamas
That Israel’s extreme cruelty in occupied Palestinian territories had not established the conditions for Islamist militancy to burst onto the scene
That the Israeli state itself had not initially nurtured Hamas as an Islamist counterweight to secular-minded Palestinian nationalist groups
So engrossed are those governments of the Collective West in trying to suppress anti-Zionist dissent within their nations that they fail to recognize the universal disgust with which the rest of the world views their complicity in Israeli massacres of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom are children, and the ongoing mass starvation of millions in the besieged Gaza Strip.
International revulsion at the callous attitude of the Collective West towards long-suffering Palestinians have destroyed any surviving vestiges of moral standing claimed by the self-declared “Global Guardians of Democracy”.
In fact, universal disgust towards the US-led world order—which has shielded Israel from accountability and facilitated its impunity over several decades— is already accelerating the shift towards the new multipolar world envisioned by China and Russia.
If the rest of the world was previously unwilling to take seriously the crocodile tears being shed by the hyper-hypocritical Collective West over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now they are only going to laugh when the matter is brought up again. The number of Ukrainian civilians killed incidentally in the Russo-Ukraine War is only a fraction of the numerous Palestinian civilians deliberately targeted for death by Israeli troops in Gaza.
The disgust felt by the rest of the world towards the Collective West is exemplified by the October 2023 video clip of Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Munir Akram berating Canada’s UN Ambassador for blindly supporting Israel’s carnage in Gaza under the pretext of fighting Hamas:
Please keep in mind that when the video was recorded on 29 October 2023, the Israelis had only killed 7,000 Palestinians (half of which were children) with 17,000 injured. The death toll has since ballooned to 30,035 deaths (of which 12,300 are children). Israel has also been deliberately targeting and killing Palestinian aid workers, medical personnel and journalists in Gaza.
Impelled by the guilt of its complicity in the Holocaust, Germany has turned into an incorrigible supporter of Israeli atrocities. Its weak-minded leader, Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz, like other government leaders of the Collective West, has been robotically squawking his support for whatever Israel is doing to the oppressed Palestinians.
Having suffered genocide at the hands of the German colonial regime, Namibians were the first to blast Olaf Scholz’s country for backing the atrocities of the Israeli state:
Namibia’s fury at Germany was followed up by Malaysia. Mr. Anwar Ibrahim, the Malaysian Prime Minister, accused Germany of outright “racism” during a joint press conference in which the robotic Olaf Scholz repeated the rubbish, but standard, Collective West talking point about Israel acting only against Hamas.
Anwar Ibrahim rejected the idea that the capitulation of Hamas would solve all problems, noting that Israel has been oppressing the Palestinians since 1948. That was 40 years before Hamas came into existence, I hasten to add.
Watch a short extract of the tension-soaked joint press conference between Olaf Scholz and Anwar Ibrahim in Berlin on 12 March 2024:
Last year, during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in San Francisco, this same outspoken Malaysian leader denounced the hypocrisy of the Collective West in the presence of President Joe Biden and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. As seen in the November 2023 video below, Ibrahim asks why the world is being asked to condemn Russia when Israel, with backing of the Collective West, is committing horrendous atrocities in Gaza:
Euro-American corporate media outlets have tried to launder the lies of the Israeli state about “fighting only Hamas militants who are using civilians as human shields”. Unfortunately for the media and Israel, the advent of the internet has made it possible for images and videos of Israeli atrocities to be independently shared around the world, almost in real time.
No amount of propaganda can make the world unsee those images and videos. No amount of lies can obscure video footage of deranged politicians, media personalities, security officials and senior military officers inside Israel speaking on the record of their intention to massacre Palestinians until there are none left.
Nobody with an ounce of common sense believes that Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip is all about eradicating Hamas as disingenuously claimed by pro-Zionist governments of the Collective West and their allies in the Euro-American corporate media.
In the long term, the salvation for the Palestinian people will come when the ongoing decline of the Collective West has reached the level in which they are no longer in a position to supply Israel with money and weapons needed to sustain the operation of the Zionist Death Machine. At that stage, Israel would have no choice than to negotiate a just peace with the Palestinians.
A good starting point for genuine negotiations would be the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which offered Israel normalization of relations with the Arab world in return for ending its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories (1967 borders), Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms and Syria’s Golan Heights.
It will be remiss of me to end Section #1 of this multi-part write-up without posting a historic video clip of Ottoman-ruled Jerusalem from the year 1896, which shows Mizrahi Jews, Muslims and Christians living side by side in peace long before the British Empire and Zionist settlers from Europe disrupted things:
I post this video in the hope that it would debunk the lies peddled by American Zionist media influencers— such as blathering Ben Shapiro, steroid-drenched David Reaboi and smooth-talking “libertarian” Dave Rubin— who sell the myth of centuries-old Muslim hatred of Jews to conservative Americans who are ignorant of the world outside the borders of USA, and ignorant of the Middle East and the history of the 76-year-old Israel-Palestine Conflict.
Of course, there are American conservatives such as Darryl Cooper, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens who have expressed misgivings about Israel, but Zionist influencers such as Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin still have large rightwing audiences that are loyal.
Shapiro’s propaganda is made easy by the US Culture Wars, which allows for the portrayal of support for Palestinians as a “leftwing cause” since many self-proclaimed supporters of the Palestinian Cause in USA are liberals who wave Palestinian flags while spouting woke racialist garbage about “white supremacy” when many of Israel’s most extreme public officials are Mizrahi Jews indigenous to the Middle East.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Ayelet Shaked and Amihai Eliyahu, all of whom are of Iraqi Jewish origin, serve as notable examples of such extremists.
In fact, there are several Israeli Army formations that are dominated by Mizrahi Jews. The notorious Golani Brigade, responsible for murdering loads of Palestinians, is largely made up of Mizrahi Jewish soldiers. Former government official, Ayelet Shaked, did her military service in the Golani Brigade.
I have not even mentioned dark-skinned Ethiopian Jewish soldiers and olive-skinned Arab citizens of Israel serving in the occupation army. Unlike Israeli Jews, Arab-Israeli citizens aren’t subject to conscription, and yet over a thousand of them volunteer for military service in Tzahal.
There are lots of things wrong with Israel, but claims of “white supremacy” being among them is just plain silly. I am sure Khaled Kabub, George Karra and Salim Joubran, all former or current Arab judges of the Israeli Supreme Court would concur. So would Israeli Supreme Court Judge Abdel Rahman Zuabi if he were still alive.
#2. KAZAKH-RUSSIA: A PASSIVE AGRESSIVE TANGO
This is actually a sequel to my October 2022 treatise scrutinizing the diplomatic relationship between Kazakhstan and Russia. I encourage those who haven’t already read that old article to do so by clicking on the thumbnail below:
AN ASSESSMENT OF KAZAKH-RUSSIA RELATIONS
As I noted in my October 2022 article, the United States has been trying to exploit the fact that a large segment of the Kazakh ruling elites are fearful of the cultural and linguistic reach of Russia within their country, and deeply resentful of Russia's immense power and influence in the larger Central Asian region.
Those feelings of resentment aren’t unique to Kazakhstan at all, but felt in many former USSR republics, including those that are officially allies of Russia and beneficiaries of Kremlin’s largesse.
After independence in December 1991, one of Armenia’s earliest actions was to begin to close down Russian language schools.
Tajikstan implemented its own derussification project despite accepting monetary grants from the Kremlin and hosting a Russian military base. The President of Tajikistan led by example. He started with his own name, which he changed from Emomali Sharipovich Rahmonov to just Emomali Rahmon. He got rid of the “ov” at the end of his former russified surname and disavowed his Russian middle name. What reason did he give for doing that? Well, he said that he wanted to honour his own native Tajik culture. Apparently, it is impossible for Tajik and Russian cultures to coexist in his country.
Uzbekistan dropped Russian as an official language within its territory after independence. Recently, Russia’s Foreign Ministry had cause to summon Uzbekistan’s Ambassador in Moscow, Mr. Botirjon Asadov, to protest a comment made by Sherzodkhon Kudratkhuja (also rendered as Sherzod Qudratxoja) who happens to be the rector of the University of Journalism and Mass Communication in the Uzbek capital city of Tashkent.
Sherzod had publicly labelled citizens of Uzbekistan who speak Russian but doesn’t understand the Uzbek language as either “occupiers” or “idiots”. That got Russian Foreign Ministry officials hot under the collar because the comment seemed to suggest that Russians were “colonial occupiers”.
The summoned Uzbek Ambassador Botirjon Asadov learned from his Russian interlocutors that Sherzod’s statement was “extremely offensive” and “absolutely unacceptable”.
Under the leadership of Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan progressively whittle down Russian influence and adopted some Western values, including altering his country’s Soviet-derived national laws to fit better with English Common Law.
While doing all of this, Nazarbayev maintained “good” relations with Vladmir Putin not because he liked the Russian leader, but because he was not as stupid as Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
Nursultan knew very well what would happen if he tried the patience of Russia, especially with regards to Northern Kazakhstan filled to the rafters with ethnic Russians. Besides, a gigantic chunk of Kazakhstan’s international trade is with the Russian Federation and no mainstream Kazakh politician, no matter how russophobic, would ever try to jeopardize that.
When the quietly russophobic Nursultan Nazarbayev retired as President of Kazakhstan, allegedly to tend to his health (prostrate cancer), he made sure to install his protégé, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in power. However, the two powerful Kazakh politicians fell out because Nazarbayev wanted to keep pulling the puppet strings while Tokayev preferred to cut those strings and act independently.
The power struggle between incumbent President Tokayev and former President Nazarbayev bubbled heavily below the surface. And for three years, it was kept from exploding by Vladimir Putin whose efforts to mediate between Tokayev and his estranged mentor ultimately failed.
In January 2021, there were angry street demonstrations against rising petroleum prices in Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev’s allies seized the opportunity to hijack the protests and tried to use the cover of the demonstrations to overthrow Tokayev.
Faced with russophobic (but pro-China) Tokayev and russophobic (but pro-Western) Nazarbayev, Vladimir Putin decided that Tokayev was a much better choice. Russian-led CSTO troops entered Kazakhstan and destroyed the attempt to remove Tokayev from power.
Subsequently, Tokayev displaced many of Nazarbayev’s allies still occupying key government posts. Nazarbayev himself was stripped of his position as Chairman of the Security Council of Kazakhstan. And much later, the capital city of Kazakhstan named after him reverted to its original name, Astana.
There is no doubt that Tokayev was grateful to Russia for the survival of his government, but there is no evidence that the longstanding russophobia was purged from his mind.
In fact, what any discerning observer notices is the passive-aggressive streak in Tokayev’s interaction with the Russians—the subtle attempts to irritate Russian officials at any chance he gets.
Many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America refused to diplomatically isolate Russia or implement any of the plethora of sanctions imposed by the NATO countries. Kazakhstan moved in the opposite direction.
In September 2023, President Tokayev assured Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz, during a visit to Germany, that Kazakhstan would implement the regime of sanctions introduced by NATO countries against Russia.
The following month, October 2023, the Kazakh Vice-Minister of Trade and Integration, Mr. Kairat Torebayev, announced that his country would ban the export 106 different defence-related products to Russia in order to comply with EU and USA sanctions. Torebayev gave drones, specialized electronics and microchips as examples of products that Kazakhstan has banned from export to Russia.
The resident US Ambassador to Kazakhstan, Mr. Daniel Rosenblum, fluent in Russian, is a man who has spent over two decades forging ties with various public officials and non-government organizations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Before his current appointment as Ambassador to Kazakhstan in November 2022, he was the US Ambassador to Uzbekistan.
On 23 October 2023, a false story was widely circulated in Russian Telegram channels that Ambassador Daniel Rosenblum had been “invited to open a NATO training centre in Almaty, Kazakhstan”.
The Kremlin was not pleased and demanded an explanation from the government of Kazakhstan about the alleged “NATO Peacekeeping Centre”.
Kazakh defence ministry officials moved to debunk the story. They explained that the US Ambassador had been invited by Kazakh authorities to commission a new conference hall within the Peacekeeping Operations Centre, a pre-existing training facility run exclusively by the Kazakhstan Ministry of Defence since 2006.
Of course, the entire point of scorching the “NATO facility” hoax peddled by certain Russian websites was to present a picture of sovereign Kazakhstan merely inviting the ambassador of friendly country (USA) to the opening of a new building solely owned and operated by the Central Asian country.
The Americans could have played along, but they didn’t. Danny Rosenblum decided to deepen the suspicions of the Russians—and embarrass his Kazakh hosts— by recalling that the US government provided some of the funding for the pre-existing Peacekeeping facility in Almaty.
By the way, here is a video of Danny Rosenblum cutting the ribbon to commission the new conference hall within the Peacekeeping facility:
At times, Kazakhstan's passive-aggressive approach towards Russia can take on a humorously embarrassing dimension. On 9 November 2023, Tokayev welcomed the visiting Vladmir Putin to the capital city of Astana. Private talks were held behind closed doors, reportedly in Russian language.
However, when it was time for the publicly-held joint press conference, President Tokayev unexpectedly switched to the incomprehensible Kazakh language, compelling a surprised Putin and his bewildered Russian delegation to scramble for the translation ear pieces.
In the speech made in Kazakh language, Tokayev belted out some platitudes about the “unshakable values of mutual respect and trust” underlaying bilateral relations between his country and Russia. He also added that Kazakhstan was “committed to the strategic direction of further strengthening comprehensive cooperation with Russia.”
Tokayev played innocent. On the surface, there was nothing wrong with a national leader wishing to speak in his native tongue via a translator to a visiting foreign leader. But the fact of the matter is that he has always spoken Russian to Vladimir Putin and other Kremlin officials in the past.
Common decency and diplomatic protocol demanded that he forewarn his Russian guests about the language switch before the press conference. But no, he had intended to embarrass Putin and his delegation, and relish it.
Watch video below:
Perhaps, it was quiet anger at Putin’s mispronunciation of his name that led Tokayev to get the passive-aggressive machinery revving. According to some reports, the Russian President had referred to the touchy Kazakh national leader as “Kemel Jomartovich” before correcting himself.
Funnily enough, Putin has mispronounced the name multiple times in the past. Tokayev may have wrongly felt that Putin was deliberately taking the piss because of Kazakhstan’s steadfast refusal to recognize the existence of Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic.
Sometimes, the passive aggression comes through in playful Russian as happened at a conference hosted by the Valdai International Discussion Club in year 2019. During the plenary session of that conference, President Tokayev tried a subtle criticism of Russia, stating that possession of nuclear weapons was not a guarantee of security and economic prosperity.
Watch the video clip below:
In response to Tokayev’s statement, Putin quipped: “Saddam Hussein thought so too.” The Russian President’s acerbic comment is an obvious reference to the penchant of the US government to dispose of national leaders of enemy countries who have given up their weapons of mass destruction.
Iraqi Head of State Saddam Hussein gave up his nuclear weapons after the Gulf War (1990-1991). Nevertheless his Baathist regime was overthrown during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was hanged on 30 December 2006 by a new Iraqi government stuffed to the rafters by his Shia Arab enemies and helmed ceremonially by an ethnic Kurd, President Jalal Talabani.
The longtime ruler of Libya, Muammar al Gaddafi, also gave up his nascent nuclear programme in 2003 as part of his rapprochement with the US-led Collective West.
In February 2011, Nicolas Sarkozy (France), David Cameron (UK) and Barack Obama (USA) supervised the destruction of Libya’s statehood through aerial bombardment and supply of weapons to Libyan jihadists, who were falsely portrayed as “pro-democracy freedom fighters” in the Euro-American corporate media.
At the closing moments of the NATO-sponsored civil war, in October 2011, Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered. With him died the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Republic, transforming the North African country from a well-run state to a semi-anarchic, dystopian place, where two warring entities, claiming to be the national government, fight each other sporadically.
Government of National Unity (GNU) and the rival Government of National Stability (GNS) are both claiming to be the legitimate national authority in the dysfunctional North African country. The GNU is currently recognized as the true government of Libya by United Nations.
Meanwhile, jihadist veterans of the 2011 Libyan Civil War have since transferred their NATO-issued weapons to fellow jihadists in the Sahel Belt countries and reinvented themselves as slave traders specializing in the business of auctioning West Africans intercepted before they could make it to the shoreline of the Mediterranean Sea, and into dinghies bound for Italy and Malta. Those lucky enough to evade Libyan slave traders ultimately sail to continental Europe where they become illegal migrants— Clandestini, as the Italians would say.
But then, I digress…
Putin’s witty response elicited laughter from the audience— and from Tokayev himself—because everybody understood the import of the Russian leader’s comment. Without a pile of nuclear weapons that can scare the US government, you had better not be the head of a country considered to be an adversary. It is a lesson that Kim Jong Un, the youthful paramount ruler of North Korea, has learnt since the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Muammar al Gaddafi. Hence, the reason why North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme expanded under his rule.
Despite the passive aggression and resentful attitudes to Russia, Kazakh ruling elites are smart and nothing like their crazed counterparts in Ukraine. The Kazakhs are fully cognizant that their Central Asian nation would always share a border with Russia, and so it is in their best interest to cooperate.
The need for cooperation is underlined by the fact that Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country as the Caspian Sea is akin to a gigantic lake since it is an inland water body without access to the world’s oceans through which seaborne international trade traverses.
Kazakhstan’s international seaborne trade is partly reliant on transit through Russia’s lands and waterways such as the Volga-Don Canal. The 101-kilometre-long canal, that opened in 1952, connects the Caspian Sea to the Sea of Azov, which, in turn, connects to the Black Sea.
Since 2007, Kazakhstan has been lobbying Russia for the construction of 692-kilometre-long Eurasian Canal. If built, the proposed Russian internal waterway would be four times longer than the Suez Canal and eight times longer than the Panama Canal.
The advantages of the proposed Eurasian Canal over the existing Volga-Don Canal for the landlocked nations of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan includes the capacity to accommodate larger vessels and handle higher volumes of cargo. In other words, the canal has the potential to enhance trade and boost the economies of the three Caspian states.
Kazakh authorities are also eager participants in the summits of Caspian Littoral States, which brings together all the countries bordering the petroleum-rich inland sea, namely Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Russia.
These summits usually discuss the management of water resources and fisheries. They are particularly important for Kazakhstan since it borders the shallowest section of the Caspian Sea.
The summits also have the potential to create opportunities for reaching an agreement on the management of petroleum reserves in the Caspian basin, which include 48 billion barrels of crude oil and natural gas reserves of 292 trillion cubic meters.
#3. TRAGEDY OF ARTSAKH: PRIMAKOV’S PROPHESY
I find it quite interesting that many political pundits— especially in the alternative media space—keep creating the impression among their audiences that successive leaders of Armenia were pro-Russian until one “evil man” called Nikol Pashinyan came along and injected russophobia into the mix.
Post-Soviet Armenia has never been a true ally of Russia. Like I stated in Section #2 of this multi-part write-up, Armenia shut down Russian language schools after its independence in December 1991.
I would argue that none of Armenia’s national leaders were ever particularly friendly to Russia, but they desperately needed the financial aid and military protection that the Kremlin could offer against Republic of Turkey next door. For understandable historical reasons, the Armenians fear that the Turks might cross the border and complete the “unfinished business of genocide”.
The difference between previous Armenian leaders and Nikol Pashinyan is that he has refused to restrain his russophobia behind a thick wall of quiet anti-Russian resentment like all his predecessors. He and his cabinet officials openly flaunted their dislike of the Russians, which is actually a proper reflection of the attitudes of many ordinary Armenians living both inside Armenia and in countries such as France, USA and Canada.
Obviously, I exempt Russian-Armenians as I have not seen any hard evidence of their hostility towards the country (Russia) they reside in.
For the entire thirty-two years of its existence, Republic of Artsakh was never recognized by the Armenian government as a “sovereign state”.
Yes, you heard that right.
Successive Armenian governments defended the unrecognized “Artsakh” administering parts of the historic territory of Soviet Azerbaijan—including Nagorno-Karabakh—but refused to grant it any official recognition.
Driven by intense russophobia, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan also crossed a line that none of his predecessors had ever ventured towards. He ended Armenia’s decades-old strategic ambiguity on how it officially perceives unrecognized “Artsakh” by issuing a laconic statement saying that his government sees the entire Nagorno-Karabakh as de jure part of Azerbaijan.
Pashinyan had issued this extraordinary public statement as part of a long-term plan to submit Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani rule and render the presence of Russian peacekeepers over there unnecessary and obsolete— and with a bit of luck, also argue for the removal of all Russian military bases in Armenia on grounds of the same obsolescence.
What Pashinyan did not reckon was how his words would be seized upon by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to launch a lightning speed military campaign to overrun Nagorno-Karabakh and end the existence of the unrecognized secessionist state administering it.
When Vladimir Putin tried to intervene to halt the campaign, Aliyev pointedly told him that if Armenia recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijani territory then there was no reason for the “illegal entity called Artsakh to continue existing at all”.
Ilham Aliyev disregarded the ceasefire agreement brokered by Putin between Azerbaijan and Armenia in November 2020, and ordered his military forces, equipped with Turkish and Israeli weapons, to take full possession of the territory of the crumbling Republic of Artsakh.
The lightning campaign of Azerbaijani forces caused many ethnic Armenians fearful for their lives to flee the collapsing secessionist state. Over a hundred thousand people fled their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh for the sovereign territory of Armenia.
Azerbaijanis, who were humiliated by their comprehensive defeat in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988–1994), celebrated their total victory over their Armenian enemies. Their President, Mr. Ilham Aliyev, celebrated by using the flag of the defunct Artsakh as a floor mat as shown below:
So what was the reaction within Armenia to the betrayal of the Artsakh separatists? Did ordinary Armenian protesters instigate another “revolution” to overthrow Nikol Pashinyan like they did to Serzh Sargsyan in May 2018? Did the armed forces of Armenia stage a real military coup? Did the Parliament of Armenia impeach Pashinyan? The answer to every question here is “no, no, no”.
Yet, many Armenians had the audacity to rail against the Russian Federation for failing to protect a secessionist state that successive Armenian governments had steadfastly refused to officially recognize. The official Armenian Army did not even participate in the defence of the breakaway Artsakh during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020). The Armenian Army also failed again to intervene in Azerbaijan’s September 2023 Military Campaign to finish off the tottering secessionist state.
As a matter of fact, on 28 September 2020, the day after Azerbaijani military forces triggered the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War with their invasion of Artsakh, the government of Nikol Pashinyan banned Armenian men above the age of 18 from leaving Armenia, thereby hindering the ability of Artsakh secessionists to secure sufficient military volunteers.
With the absence of the official Armenian Army on the battlefield, and obstacles laid in the path of Armenian citizens volunteering to help Artsakh separatist fighters, the well-equipped Azerbaijani troops overran territory at breakneck speed that probably left them gasping to catch their breath.
During the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, it took only a month and two weeks for Azerbaijan to capture large swathes of Artsakh-ruled territory. In fact, had Russia not intervened to persuade Azerbaijan to agree to a ceasefire, Artsakh would not have survived the year 2020.
In 2020, the Armenian government was completely useless when Azerbaijan took large swathes of Artsakh-ruled territory, causing many ethnic Armenians living there to flee.
In 2023, the Armenian government was totally irresponsible for creating the conditions that gave Azerbaijan the perfect excuse to take full control of the rest of Artsakh-ruled territory, causing the remaining ethnic Armenians there to take flight.
But who got most of the blame among many Armenians? Russia, of course, is to blame, according to the protesters in front of the Russian Embassy in Yerevan:
Now, let us return to the tragedy of the estimated 100,617 ethnic Armenians who fled their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh because they did not want to test the sincerity of Azerbaijani government officials guaranteeing their safety.
None of this tragic mess would have happened if successive Armenian leaders had not squandered the historic leverage they had over a much weaker Azerbaijan of the 1990s.
Back in the late 1980s, the slackening of Soviet national government control over the affairs of the regions and autonomous Soviet Republics had encouraged a flourish of petty ethnic nationalisms across the land, especially in the non-ethnic Russian territories of the USSR.
SIDE BAR :
The nature of those petty ethnic nationalisms in Gorbachev’s USSR would be quite familiar to citizens of multi-ethnic federations, such as Nigeria and Ethiopia. In the case of Nigeria, we are talking of 250 ethnic nationalities, most of which speak mutually unintelligible native languages, observe disparate cultural traditions, and adhere to different religions.
Ethnic Russian, ethnic Gagauz and ethnic Ukrainian minorities inside Soviet Moldovia began to campaign for their own separate Soviet Republics because they feared that ethnic Romanian irredentists in charge of Soviet Moldovia would declare independence and join Romania.
Subsequent action taken by ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians in Soviet Moldovia ultimately led to military conflict and the creation of the “Transnistria” entity. Initially, the entity existed illegally as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (P.M.S.S.R) within the USSR in 1990. Then, it became the current unrecognized state— the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (P.M.R)— after USSR suddenly died on 26 December 1991.
Copying the example of the other two ethnic minorities, the ethnic Gagauz created their own Gagauz Republic in 1990 as an illegal Soviet Republic on equal footing with Soviet Moldovia within the USSR. After 26 December 1991, the Gagauz Republic carried on as a de facto independent state until it was persuaded in January 1995 to join Republic of Moldova as an autonomous region. The situation in “Transnistria” remains intractable.
In neighbouring Soviet Ukraine, the ethnic Russians of Crimea carried out a referendum in January 1991 to establish a separate Soviet republic. When USSR dissolved eleven months later, the ethnic Russians of Crimea were browbeaten into accepting to become part of an independent Ukraine run by Leonid Kravchuk.
Over in Soviet Georgia, two distinct ethnic minorities—the Abkhaz and the Ossetians— did not want to be part of any future independent Georgian republic. While the USSR existed, the Abkhaz people simply desired a separate Soviet Republic on equal footing with Soviet Georgia. When USSR collapsed, the Abkhaz switched their aspirations to a full sovereign state. The Georgian ethnic nationalists objected, resulting in armed conflict and the emergence of the partially-recognized Republic of Abkhazia in 1992.
The other minority group, the ethnic Ossetians, also created their own Soviet Republic, but as soon as USSR dissolved, they fought the Georgians and got their Republic of South Ossetia— although, the ultimate dream of South Ossetians is to be annexed by Russia in order to reunite with their ethnic brethren in North Ossetia.
In Soviet Azerbaijan, the internecine conflict raging between the ethnic Azeri majority and ethnic Armenian minority stranded inside the autonomous region of Nagano-Karabakh was already three years and 10 months old when the USSR disintegrated. Both sides in the conflict did all they could to ethnically cleanse each other in areas where they had the upper hand. For example, Azeris cleansed Armenians from Baku, Sumgait and Kirovabad (now called Ganja). The Armenians returned the favour in Gugark, Nagorno-Karabakh, Jabrayil, Zangilan, Qubadli, Lachin, etc.
In the middle of the conflict, on 18 October 1991, Soviet Azerbaijan transformed chaotically into a politically unstable sovereign state. Its military forces was poorly trained and barely organized.
On the other hand, the newly independent Republic of Armenia was better organized, and so were the ethnic Armenian separatists inside the now internationally recognized Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The separatists proclaimed their unrecognized Republic of Artsakh on 10 December 1991.
The First Nagorno-Karabakh War, which began as a high-intensity communal clash within the USSR in 1988, rapidly transformed into full-blown warfare in 1992 with the poorly organized troops of the newly independent Azerbaijan facing the firepower of better organized ethnic Armenian secessionist fighters, many of whom were ex-soldiers of the defunct Soviet Army.
By early 1993, Azerbaijan had lost control of large swathes of its national territory, far beyond the original geographic boundaries of the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region, as shown in the map below:
Completely humiliated by a series of defeats at the hands of Artsakh separatists, disorganized ragtag Azerbaijani troops revolted. And in the political confusion that followed, the extremely russophobic President Abulfaz Elchibey was overthrown in a constitutional coup organized by Heydar Aliyev on 24 June 1993.
Heydar Aliyev had served the USSR in various capacities—as a KGB Intelligence officer; Soviet Politburo member; Communist Party boss within Soviet Azerbaijan; a Deputy Soviet Premier; and head of the regional assembly in his native Nakhichevan prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After dissolution, he became the de facto ruler of the autonomous exclave of Nakhichevan, governing without the permission of the Azerbaijani national authorities in Baku.
Once Aliyev took over as national President from Elchibey, the flux of political instability in Azerbaijan slowed down. He signed a ceasefire agreement with Armenia and the Artsakh separatists in the Kyrgyz capital city of Bishkek on 5 May 1994.
With the 1994 ceasefire freezing the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict for the time being, intense negotiations began— with the Americans, the Europeans, and Russians acting as mediators.
Of all the peace mediators in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov was the most knowledgeable of the Caucasian region. He had grown up in the Soviet Georgian city of Tbilisi and studied in the Soviet Azerbaijani city of Baku. In January 1990, he had been part of a Soviet national delegation that travelled from Moscow to Baku to try to halt pogroms being perpetrated by the ethnic Azeri majority against the ethnic Armenian minority. The pogrom in Baku did not stop. The Azeris finished the ghastly job of removing all traces of ethnic Armenians from the city.
Fast-forwarding to the post-Soviet era, Primakov is now a senior government official in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. He meets Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan with a proposal for the Artsakh separatists to return the seven undisputed Azerbaijani districts outside the original boundaries of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO).
In return, the government of Hayder Aliyev would:
Make Artsakh a highly autonomous republic within sovereign Azerbaijan
Allow Lachin Corridor connecting Artsakh to Armenia to come under the control of international peacekeepers
Share some of Azerbaijan’s economic wealth by allowing a petroleum pipeline to pass through Armenia on its way to Turkey.
President Levon Ter-Petrosyan was receptive to the proposal, but certain Armenian political figures and majority of ordinary Armenians, both inside Armenia proper and Artsakh, were vehemently opposed. Back then, in the mid-1990s, the Armenians had the upper hand and so did not want to make any concessions to the militarily weaker Azerbaijanis.
After Levon Ter-Petrosyan told Primakov that “territories conquered by Armenians cannot be given to the enemy.”
The Russian statesman famously replied:
“Azerbaijanis know how to work and wait. They have the resources. Ten, twenty, thirty years will pass. They will gain strength and take everything from you, Armenians.”
President Levon Ter-Petrosyan seemed to understand that Azerbaijan may eventually get its act together and apply its vast petroleum wealth to build a powerful military in the future. So, he pressed the short-sighted ethnic Armenian population both in Armenia proper and Artsakh to consider different proposals for a peace settlement—all of which required making territorial concessions.
For doing that, Levon Ter-Petrosyan was forced to resign in February 1998 by political hardliners such as Robert Kocharyan, Serzh Sargsyan and the now deceased Vazgen Sargsyan.
Subsequent Armenian Presidents—along with Artsakh separatist leaders—spent most of their time in office swatting away one peace proposal after another, insisting that Azerbaijan grant Artsakh a status that is almost identical to that of a sovereign state. For obvious reasons, Azerbaijan refused.
Meanwhile, Azerbaijan followed the developmental trajectory that Primakov had foreseen. It began to exploit its petroleum wealth under Hayder Aliyev. Hayder died in December 2003, and his son, Ilham, inherited the Presidency.
Under President Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s position on Nagorno-Karabakh and other Azeri territories held by Artsakh separatists became more hardline.
That hardline stance was matched by a dramatic increase in government expenditure to modernize, train and outfit the Azerbaijani armed forces with the best military equipment that could be procured.
In two brief military campaigns—Second Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020) and September 2023 Military Campaign— Ilham Aliyev’s Azerbaijan took everything away from the ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, thereby fulfilling the prophesy made by Primakov almost three decades earlier.
Section #4 of this multi-part article was written before Sweden and Denmark closed their sham “investigations” into the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines without giving any cogent reasons for doing so. The Germans are still going through the motions, pretending to be investigating the sabotage.
#4. NORD STREAM: MAX SCHRECK RETURNS?
(a) TRIVIA : How I Got To Know Max Schreck
As noted in a study conducted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the local mass media scene in Nigeria is one of the most vibrant in the continent of Africa.
In the print media space, there are over a hundred newspapers and magazines dealing with local, regional, national and international news as well as gossipy stuff about celebrities of the local Nigerian film industry, which I discussed inside the Side Bar of a previous article.
The electronic media is even livelier in Nigeria, especially when it comes to television and radio broadcasting, which has a long history in the country. The British colonial regime introduced radio broadcasting to Nigeria in 1932.
In 1959, the autonomous regional government of Western Nigeria, led by Premier Obafemi Awolowo, made history by establishing the first indigenous terrestrial TV station anywhere on the continent of Africa—ahead of Egypt and Rhodesia, which both established their own native terrestrial TV stations in 1960; and apartheid South Africa, which began nation-wide televised broadcasting on 5 January 1976.
SIDE BAR: COMMISSIONING OF WESTERN NIGERIA TV (OCTOBER 1959)
In the 1950s, the Nigerian Federation was still a British Protectorate, but one where the three federating subdivisions— Eastern, Western and Northern Regions—maintained a high degree of autonomy from the central government.
Elected Nigerian politicians ran the regional governments, the provinces and municipalities while the central government was controlled by the departing British colonials who were on a ticking clock to grant full independence on 1st October 1960.
Back in the mid-1950s, the regional government of Western Nigeria led by Premier Obafemi Awolowo wanted to introduce terrestrial television to the local people of the region. The British colonials were skeptical and so were the Nigerian politicians in charge of the Eastern and Northern Regions.
But to the surprise of the skeptics, Obafemi Awolowo pulled it off with the successful establishment of Western Nigerian Television (WNTV) in 1959.
The official commissioning ceremony for Africa’s first ever terrestrial television station was held on 31st October 1959. The event was attended by Western Nigeria regional officials, WNTV staff, and British colonials administering the central government.
Video footage of the WNTV commissioning ceremony from 1959. Apologies for the poor screen resolution :
Today, each of the 36 states of the Nigerian Federation run at least one radio network and a TV station. Some state governments even run two or more TV stations. The federal government runs the colossal Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) network, which owns 101 television stations spread across all 36 states of the federation.
There also exists the vast Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria network of radio stations, which competes fiercely for market share with local state-owned and privately-owned radio stations.
I won’t even bother to delve into the foreign-owned BBC World Service Radio, which broadcasts in English and several local languages, most of which aren’t mutually intelligible—meaning that the British government spends heavily on hiring locals who can speak various Nigerian languages.
Apart government-run television services, there are a plethora of privately-owned domestic media companies that offer terrestrial television broadcasting services, subscription-based cable television, and paid satellite television services.
There are also foreign-owned cable networks operating in Nigeria, such as the South African-owned Digital Satellite Television, which was specifically set up in 1995 to bring foreign channels into the living rooms of sub-Saharan Africans at a relatively affordable price. Although not a TV channel, Netflix is now a significant competitor in Nigeria’s media entertainment sector.
So what is the point of all me blathering all about this? Well, in a country that is literally covered with hundreds of radio stations and television stations, there is intense competition for the attention of the audience— a significant fraction of the 230 million people that live inside Nigeria.
In the fierce competition for audience attention, television networks have had to be innovative. Historically, state/regional-owned TV stations tended to be trendsetters, often ahead of their better-funded federal rivals.
It was a state-owned television station in North-Central Nigeria, called the Benue-Plateau Television Corporation (BPTVC), that set another historic record on 1 October 1975 as the first channel anywhere in Africa to switch permanently from black-and-white to colour television broadcasting.
Prior to that historic milestone, Zanzibar and Mauritius had both carried out temporary colour television transmissions in 1973 as an experiment. Nigeria’s BPTVC performed similar experiments in 1974 before switching permanently to colour broadcasting the next year.
One of the adverse historic effects of competition in Nigeria’s local television market was a strong preference for broadcasting foreign programmes. Federal-owned and state-owned TV channels competed with each other for who would broadcast the highest amount of foreign content, often at the expense of locally produced shows.
I use the term “historic” because since the early 2000s, Nigerian television networks have tilted heavily in favour of broadcasting locally produced programmes over imported foreign content.
However, the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s was a different era. It was the golden age of foreign TV programming in Nigeria. During that era, locally produced television shows often lost out in the fierce competition for broadcast airtime with TV content imported from Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, South America, and even post-apartheid South Africa.
For children, there were foreign programmes such as:
Sesame Street, 3-2-1 Contact, Rentaghost, He-Man
Danger Mouse, Count Duckula, Voltron, Tom & Jerry
Power Rangers, Victor & Hugo, Super Ted, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
For an older audience, there were TV series such as:
A-Team, Father Dowling Mysteries, Knight Rider, Get Christie Love!
Doctor Who, Kojak, Santa Barbara, The Wonder Years, Moonlighting
Yes Minister, The Incredible Hulk, Fantasy Island, Egoli, Matlock
The Jeffersons, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Another Life, Sanford & Son
Falcon Crest, Dynasty, Dallas, Charlie’s Angels, Neighbours
Different Strokes, Cosby Show, Quincy M.E., Columbo, Wonder Woman
X-Files, Fall Guy, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Sabrina The Teenage Witch
Outside pure entertainment, there were rebroadcasts of foreign news. For instance, I recall Anambra State Broadcasting Service (ABS) doing rebroadcasts of The 700 Club programme from Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, which was quite funny for a teenager growing up in heavily Roman Catholic Eastern Nigeria of the 1990s.
There were also rebroadcasts of ABC World News Tonight anchored by Peter Jennings. All of these happening in Nigeria well before cable TV services and satellite dishes became common enough for us to directly watch CNN International, which is not exactly the same as the domestic CNN Channel broadcasting inside USA, although some anchors appear on both—Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour, comes to mind.
I still recall the rebroadcasts of Transtel TV programmes from West Germany in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many of them were science programmes, which eventually inspired me to study Mechanical Engineering as a young adult.
In the 1980s and 1990s, there were also loads of Indian, Hong Kong, British and American films broadcast on federal and state television channels, usually on weekends. These included horror movies of the gothic vampire genre.
There were local broadcasts of a series of Dracula films featuring Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman and Bela Lugosi in the titular role of Count Dracula.
I found the portrayal of the Count from Transylvania by Christopher Lee and Frank Langella to be authentic and quite scary. Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Dracula was quite ludicrous to me, especially the fact that he could actually move around in daylight.
Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of the Count was not that great at all. I found his acting to be a bit wooden and there wasn’t much in the way of scariness about the way he carried himself in those black and white gothic vampire movies of the 1930s.
There were also fascinating documentaries televised in Nigeria about silent movies of early 20th Century featuring film footage of Berlin-born Max Schreck who played a Dracula-like vampire character called Count Orlok in the 1922 classic film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.
(b) REBOOT: Plot Revision For “Ukrainian Gang of Six”
If you haven’t grown confused and frustrated, and given up on trying to comprehend what Nigerian TV history has to do with destruction of the Nord Stream Pipeline, then I thank you for indulging me.
Towards the end of last year, I was doing my usual rounds on various media platforms, trying to see what was ablaze in various parts of the world, when I came across the photograph below:
The first thing that came to my mind was— woah, Max Schreck is back from the dead to haunt Ukrainian soldiers, starting with the two masked men in drab sweatshirts.
But upon zooming out to read the text of the Washington Post article in which the photograph was set, I quickly realized that the man in the black sweater was not the Max Schreck who appeared from time to time in silent film documentaries televised in Eastern Nigeria of the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, he was some unlucky Ukrainian Special Forces officer named Roman Chervinsky who has been banged into jail for alleged abuse of power, which supposedly occurred while he was trying to convince a Russian Airforce pilot to defect to Ukraine in July 2022.
The Max Schreck doppelganger, a forty-eight-year-old army colonel, thought he was the Ukrainian version of the suave fictional British spy, James Bond, but FSB Intelligence officers—working with the Russian Air Force pilot—proved that not to be case. In fact, the Ukrainian Special Forces officer turned out to be a bumbling idiot along the lines of the equally fictional British spy, Johnny English.
At the behest of FSB Intelligence officials, the Russian pilot managed to coax Colonel Roman Chervinsky into giving the exact coordinates of a secret Ukrainian airfield, resulting in a Russian missile attack that killed a Ukrainian soldier and injured 17 others.
The outraged Ukrainian government arrested and charged Chervinsky with abuse of power. Apparently, the army colonel had botched an operation— not officially sanctioned by his superiors—to facilitate the defection of a Russian pilot assigned to fly two important fixed-wing planes, namely Sukhoi Su-24 and Sukhoi Su-34. Both are aircraft that NATO officials would eagerly tread broken glass to have in their custody.
Colonel Chervinsky, for obvious reasons, wasn’t pleased with his shoddy treatment, given all the sacrifices he has been making for his floundering country. The military officer said that he was been punished for criticizing the Ukrainian government in general and Andriy Yermak in particular.
A former film producer, Yermak is a senior adviser to President Zelensky. He is said to be an immensely powerful man, who may have already shifted from offering advice to actually controlling Zelensky.
Obviously, accusing a man as powerful as Yermak of spying for Russia, without actual evidence, as Colonel Chervinsky has done, was bound to provoke a furious reaction, such as getting banged up in a Kiev jail while undergoing prosecution for “abuse of power”.
“Abuse of power” was not the only allegation levelled against Chervinsky. While cooling his heels in jail, the embattled army colonel was shocked to learn that media outlets outside Ukraine were pinning another allegation on him.
In November 2023, NATO-aligned corporate media outlets of Europe and North America, led by Washington Post, alleged that Colonel Roman Chervinsky had served as the logistics coordinator for a clandestine operation, involving six yacht-sailing Ukrainians, which resulted in the destruction of the undersea Nord Stream pipelines back in September 2022.
Chervinsky vehemently denied the allegations. In an obvious state of shock and confusion, he claimed “Russian propagandists” were spreading the hastily updated version of the old “Ukrainian Gang of Six” storyline.
I am confident that once the storm of confusing thoughts clouding the colonel’s mind has cleared up, he would realize that NATO propagandists are the ones using a crowbar to shoehorn him into the newest version of a storyline that debuted in March 2023, shortly after the visit of Olaf Scholz to the United States.
Ever since, veteran American journalist, Seymour Hersh, exposed the fact that the US government—in concert with Norway—had damaged the undersea Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Biden Administration has been scrambling to deny and discredit Seymour’s revelations.
At first, Seymour’s exposé was dismissed with a wave of the hand. The Biden administration and its media allies persisted in pushing the story that the inexplicably evil Russkies had blown up their own multi-million-dollar natural gas pipelines.
But that storyline was so absurd that it was eventually abandoned, especially when German investigators appeared reluctant to explicitly assign blame to the Russians for the destruction of the pipelines.
When Olaf Scholz suddenly turned up in Washington DC at the beginning of March, there was considerable speculation about the purpose of his US trip and his meeting with President Joe Biden. Some keen observers questioned the timing of the visit.
An answer to that question was seemingly delivered sotto voce when the Ukrainian Gang of Six narrative made its first appearance in NATO-aligned mass media outlets in Germany and United States on 7 March 2023.
The original version of the narrative, peddled by New York Times of USA in concert with Die Zeit of Germany, had nothing to say about a “coordinator” named Colonel Roman Chervinsky— a soldier now conveniently in a Ukrainian jail over an unrelated matter.
The original narrative—without the character of Roman Chervinsky—was quite emphatic that no nation-state involved. That narrative claimed the pipeline attacks were perpetrated by a gang of Ukrainian patriots acting independently without the knowledge of the Ukrainian government.
According to the narrative, the gang of six Ukrainians hired a yacht and sailed through the Baltic sea towards a location off the coast of Denmark. Upon reaching there, two divers belonging to the Ukrainian gang jumped into the sea, presumably carrying plastic explosives. Underwater, they set the explosives, swam back to the water surface, reunited with fellow conspirators waiting inside the yacht, and sailed away. Moments later, both Nord stream pipelines went KAAABOOM !!!
To even add some flesh to the narrative, Der Spiegel even identified the yacht supposedly used in the sabotage operation with the name “Andromeda”. Conveniently, abandoned Ukrainian passports, in pristine condition, were found onboard the yacht.
The legend of those pristine Ukrainian passports recalls the crisp, unblemished book shown during a BBC interview with President Isaac Herzog. The Israeli Head of State had claimed on BBC television that the book, which appeared to be in pristine condition, was actually an Arabic language version of Mein Kampf. It was supposedly found on a deceased Hamas fighter lying in the ruins of a children’s bedroom in Gaza.
Watch the video below:
Obviously, the Israelis are desperately trying to convince the world that Hamas is a reincarnation of the Nazi Party, which must be destroyed, even at the cost of killing every man, woman and child in the Gaza Strip. Of course, most of the world isn’t buying the propaganda coming out of Tel Aviv.
Likewise, the German news weekly magazine, Der Spiegel, was not taken seriously when it published photos of the Andromeda— the yacht allegedly used by the Ukrainian Gang of Six in the pipeline attacks.
The original Ukrainian Gang of Six storyline was almost as absurd as the one claiming that evil Russkies sailed to an area of Baltic Sea close Denmark to blow up their own natural gas pipelines.
If Russians wanted to cut natural gas supply to continental Europe, they would simply switch off the gas compressors and shutter the valves mounted on segments of both pipelines inside Russia. There would be no need for a team of Kremlin-backed saboteurs to sail the ocean blue towards Denmark to achieve similar results in a much messier way, and at great cost to Russia.
For similar reasons, the Ukrainian Gang of Six narrative fails to make sense. If a bunch of Ukrainians were dying to destroy Russian gas pipelines, why would they ignore the Russian pipelines passing through Ukrainian territory and embark on an extremely difficult mission to destroy the pipelines at a location so far away from their own country? A dangerous mission that requires a deep dive to the sea floor in order to reach the pipelines.
Now, what about the story of the yacht and the two divers? I am not even sure where to start in debunking that nonsense.
First of all, the yacht identified as the vessel used by the Gang of Six does not even have enough room for all the equipment that would be required for a mission that involves a perilous dive to the bottom of the sea. I am not even sure it is suitable for carrying the amount of plastic explosives required to wreck the pipelines.
Second of all, if the Gang of Six had actually managed to sail through a section of the Baltic Sea heavily patrolled by NATO naval ships and gotten to the location off the coast of Denmark, we would never have heard of Nord Stream sabotage because the two divers would have been incapacitated and disoriented before getting anywhere close to the sea floor where the pipelines were embedded. We would never know of any sabotage because the clown Gang would have aborted the mission as soon as the divers got into trouble after plunging into the sea.
As a mechanical engineer, I can tell you that the high levels of hydrostatic pressure in the depths of the sea would have caused both divers to suffer compression injuries, assuming they were wearing standard scuba dive gear.
German media claimed that “two members of the Ukrainian group were experienced divers”.
A rather meaningless assertion from the media if your boat is too small to contain a decompression chamber, plus a motorized winch containing reels of thick metallic cables for raising and lowering the chamber into the sea. The boat will also require a large tank of blended breathing gas— a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium— that would be supplied to the divers via long flexible tubes as they descend to the floor of the Baltic Sea.
Of course, the divers could have donned a special suit made of a light metal alloy or fibreglass. In that case, they might not require the cumbersome decompression chamber. But then, problems associated with being inside a semi-rigid suit, a kind of straitjacket, arises. Dexterity and mobility are required for the delicate task of digging out the pipelines embedded into the sea bed and placing explosives on them.
Even if we allow for the special suit of light metal or fibreglass, there is still the problem of sufficient space in the yacht for the big tank of blended breathing gas that will supply the divers as they go underwater. What about the space for the motorized winch with reels of umbilical cables that would be attached to the divers while underwater?
Most likely, these science-illiterate presstitutes in NATO countries think that blowing up these pipelines, at a depth of 80-110 metres, is something that ordinary divers with uncomplicated diving equipment can achieve. That is why they boldly write up childish stories cooked up at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
It is my considered opinion that the original Ukrainian Gang of Six story was cooked up by CIA officers who actually wanted to embarrass President Joe Biden with its absurdity.
It is even possible that it was exactly the same spies who secretly spoke the truth to Seymour Hersh that produced the crappy Gang of Six story while sniggering at the White House.
In April 2023, the original version of the Gang of Six storyline died when Swedish investigators openly rejected the notion that the pipeline attacks was executed with support of a national government.
With Swedish skepticism widely publicized, the storyline faded away from the print and electronic media of NATO countries. It also disappeared from the pages of those anglophone African newspapers that specialize in “copying” and “pasting” stories from Reuters News Agency, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Associated Press (AP).
But, just like Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula who kept finding pathways to resurrection after getting slain repeatedly by Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing, the absurd Ukrainian Gang of Six story has refused to stay dead in its coffin.
With substantial improvements to the plot, the narrative was resurrected on 11 November 2023 by Washington Post, which has the unofficial CIA spokesman David Ignatius as its associate editor.
In this updated version of the Gang of Six narrative, the plot holes have been taken care of. The problematic claim in the original version of the story that the six Ukrainians had no support whatsoever from the nation-state has been jettisoned.
In the November 2023 version of the story, the Gang of Six did not act independently. They were supported with resources of the Ukrainian state. Apparently, Colonel Roman Chervinsky “coordinated” the logistics of the sabotage operation under orders of senior Ukrainian military officers, who ultimately reported to the cherubic-faced General Valery Zaluzhny who commanded the Armed Forces of Ukraine until his dismissal on 8 February 2024.
I chuckled while reading a Washington Post article on my smartphone. What amused me was the manner in which Chervinsky and Zaluzhny, both Ukrainians military officers, who have fallen out of favour with the Zelensky government, were conveniently being shoehorned into a narrative that resembles the storyline of a poorly produced movie.
Of course, none of the identities of the actual gang of six individuals have been released yet. My suspicion is that the corporate media is still waiting for the Ukrainian government to hand over the names of six individuals that have offended either Yermak or Zelensky himself.
For obvious reasons, it cannot be any six critics of the Ukrainian government selected at random. Those six critics would have to be young, healthy, military-age individuals, probably with a diving background, so that the narrative would sound convincing.
It might probably take a while to find six sacrificial individuals to set up as the yacht-sailing perpetrators of the Nord Stream pipeline attacks. My guess is in a couple of months, the corporate media would release names and photos of six unlucky individuals being railroaded like Chervinsky.
Whatever happens, going forward, the character of General Valery Zaluzhny won’t be playing any further role in future versions of the Gang of Six canard, now that he has been sacked from his military post and exiled to London in the guise of Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK.
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Thank you. You covered an immense territory of information in this post. I did enjoy your recounting of the various Dracula iterations. I concur with your assessment mostly. I did watch the Oldham version recently and had forgotten that Keanu Reeves had played the Harker role. Interesting post.
Thank you for ICC vs ICJ, indeed I wasn’t aware of the distinction. Embarrassing but true.