In his Munich speech to the assembled political elites of the western world, Putin basically told them that he was not buying into the concept of the USA and its allies running the planet as a unipolar entity. He said a lot of conciliatory things in that address too, but this appears to be almost exclusively what those western dignitaries took home with them… Putin is not one of us.
MARGARET KIMBERLEY—On April 21, 2022 former President Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford University on the subject of social media. In typical Obamaesque fashion, he didn’t state his point plainly. He used a lot of time, more than an hour, to advocate for social media censorship. He only used that word once, in order to deny that it was in fact what he meant, but the weasel words and obfuscation couldn’t hide what Obama was talking about.
ERIC ZUESSE—Russia’s first strategy against further enlargement of NATO was to demand, on 15 December 2021, to the U.S. Government; and, two days later, to America’s main anti-Russian military alliance, NATO; that NATO would never add any new member-nations — especially not Ukraine. This demand was firmly rejected, on 7 January 2022, by both America and its NATO arm. Worse yet for Russia: after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, hoping thereby to prevent at least that country joining NATO, both Finland and Sweden were so scared that they might be invaded next, that both countries expressed in early April 2022 a desire to join the anti-Russian alliance, and were welcomed by America and its NATO arm to apply to join. So, even if Russia wins its war in Ukraine, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will have actually failed, because NATO seems now more likely even than before to increase — exactly the opposite of what Russia had been intending.
Cautious optimism in connection with some relaxation of the current tight censorship regime may be in order, but exuberant hopes that Musk will singlehandedly rescue the First Amendment and restore freedom of speech to the American polity may be simply delusional. We agree with Caitlin Johnstone: “I’ll start paying attention to Musk’s talk about free speech if and when Twitter stops censoring Russian media and unbans people like Scott Ritter who were removed from the platform for questioning official empire narratives about what’s happening in Ukraine. Until then I’m going to assume he’s at most only interested in protecting speech that doesn’t threaten the powerful like Republican partisan bullshit and hate speech against marginalized groups.”
Colonel McGregor: “Putin set out to honor his word from 2007 at the Munich Security Conference where he said ‘We will not allow the expansion of NATO to a point where NATO is touching our border, specifically, Ukraine and Georgia. We see these as Trojan Horses for NATO’s military power and US influence… He repeated that (warning) over and over and over again, in the hopes that he could avoid taking action to effectively clean-out eastern Ukraine of any opposition forces whatever, and to put his forces in a position vis-a-vis NATO to deter us from any further attempts to influence or change Ukraine into a platform for the projection of US and western power into Russia.
