LIFE UNDER CAPITALISM

PATRICK ARMSTRONG—I said the Americans were dumb enough to think Strategic Culture Foundation was funded by the GRU which, I emphasised, was and always had been a 100% military intelligence organisation. He thought they’d said SVR (the Russian foreign intelligence organisation). (I checked – he was correct, they do say SVR – it was the GRU they claimed had been behind the Steele Dossier or the whatever-it-was in St Petersburg during Russiagate. I’ve forgotten the details – Trumputin was such a Gish gallop of rubbish that it’s hard to remember what was taken as absolutely true one day and forgotten the next). I reiterated several times that I wrote what I felt like, when I felt like it, and so far they’ve published everything I’ve sent them. They can refuse something, but the moment they change what I’ve written, I quit.

The pandemic has revealed the power of big pharma. Major drug manufacturers and suppliers have the power to set prices, influence regulators and lobby lawmakers. This power has allowed big pharma to push potentially dangerous drugs. How? Palki Sharma tells you.

The crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the finest works of late Soviet cinema. In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans set out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard-swept landscape of Nazi-occupied Belorussia. When they fall into the hands of German forces and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that lifts the film’s earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory.

JACQUES PAUWELS—The fact that fraternizations were officially strictly prohibited, apparently made them even more fascinating and appealing to soldiers. It is probably thus that we can interpret a myth that enjoyed an inordinate amount of success among soldiers of both sides throughout the war. Countless soldiers were convinced that, somewhere in the no man’s land, in abandoned trenches and preferably deep under the ground, and thus beyond the reach of projectiles and of officers, beastlike deserters of all armies dwelled together in a kind of permanent state of fraternization. By night they would rob the dead and wounded, seek food, etc. They became such a threat to the troops that eventually the army brass ordered them to be exterminated with gas.

MIKE MADDEN—NATO and U.S. officials said regular units of the Russian military crossed a few kilometers into Ukrainian territory on August 2014, which Russia denied, when the separatist forces had been pushed eastward toward the Russian border and hundreds of civilians had been killed. On Aug. 25, 2014, 10 Russian paratroopers were captured 20 km inside the Ukrainian border. 

Nuland called this “Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine.” The incursion would be more properly characterized as Russia exercising the liberal interventionists’ favorite Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

As happened in Georgia in 2008, a government militarily attacked its own people and Russia intervened to drive the military forces back and protect the local population. In that 2008 case, a European Union investigation determined that Georgia, not Russia, was the aggressor.