ROTTEN GOVERNMENTS

MoA—There don’t seem to be many rich city kids in Minsk. Throughout the week the protests groups in Belarus were rather small. The ‘western’ media have pushed high number counts and talked of countrywide protest when twenty women stood on a sidewalk in Minsk. Photos can tell the real story in such situations. Some observers got very excited when some 200 staff of the MTZ Minsk Tractor Works staged a short walkout. But MTZ Minsk Tractor Works has 17,000 employees.

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM—There is strong suspicion that the Trump administration is deliberately playing the mad man as a negotiating tactic. It’s an unconscionable and extremely dangerous gamble with world security, but this would seem to be Trump’s diabolical art of the deal.

ANDRE VLTCHEK—The anti-Soviet, and even anti-Russian narrative has become absolutely bulletproof. Manipulative documentary films, books, school curriculums in Europe and North America; they all pass off as facts in simple propaganda gigs, without offering any evidence. Very often, they take historic events and data, twist them, turn them around, and repeat the consequent fabrications again, again and again. There are thousands of mass media outlets participating in the project. It definitely works. Such an approach is effective. Deadly effective.

MoA—The New York Times is now running a virtual public relations campiagn for the Deep State: “President Trump is right: The deep state is alive and well. But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of his fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others — who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.”

JANICE KORTKAMP—Really the most important thing for westerners to know is this: that in any conflict there are the expansionist-aggressors and there are defenders. In Syria, the expansionist-aggressors are the US, UK, Israel, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar; while Syria and its allies of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are the defenders. This means for there to be peace, the expansionist-aggressors must end their aggression. It’s not rocket science