Pepe Escobar

Zero Hedge( Article from Asia Times)

13th February

This is a great article by Escobar a man with long , hands-on expertise on Asian affairs. It is an antidote to all the piss-poor stuff we get from the Libertarians about “authoritarian” Russia. That word no more characterises Russia than “free” characterises Britain. In fact, a nation which bases its freedoms on Magna Carta, 1215, and the Bill of Rights, 1789, is not only not free, it’s a joke. To my way of thinking two great powers straddle the world, Russia the Eurasian pole and the USA, the Euramerican pole. Their convergence represents the great hope for global peace and prosperity. It has precedent in Lincoln’s Russian alliance and the Roosevelt-Stalin, anti-Churchill pact. Trump, and even Obama, attempted to move in this direction. Resistance to this. orchestrated from London, was feral. As Escobar shows, there are so many dimensions to Russia and even to the Soviet Union. Stalin now begins to look like an Asia despot, he was Asian, who tried to marginalise the communist party but failed. However, Russia has now succeeded completely in defining its place in the world, straddling Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, in the USA things remain obscure. Trump seems to have emerged stronger than ever after “losing” the election and being gifted an absurd attempt at impeachment which defies belief. The hawkish anti- Russia and China stuff doesn’t seem to be coming from Biden. Instead we have series of military leaders making hostile pronouncement on foreign policy: General Kenneth MacKenzie on Iran; Admiral Charles Richard making senile nuclear threats against Russia and China and our very own General Sir Nick Carter hyping cyberwars and an Asian NATO, no less. And, talking of NATO, we have , of course, the belligerent bureaucrat, the supreme warlord, the Shogun of the West, Jens Stoltenberg pontificating provocations such as getting Ukraine to join NATO( They are Nazis so I suppose that gives the proposal some rationale). All in all, certain elements in the West have never recovered form the failure of Barbarossa at the gates of Moscow in 1941. Stalin broke the hearts of Western imperialism and it has just been madness ever since. Can it end? Can a sane and rational leadership emerge in the West to finally put an end to three thousand years of war and inaugurate a new, peaceful epoch in the human story.

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