RICHARD MEDHURST—Hezbollah is gradually expanding its operations. Its missiles and rockets are beginning to zero in on more targets of importance in Israel, and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which remains a piece of Syrian territory. The probable upcoming presidency of uber Zionist Donald Trump will NOT fix the situation with the Israelis and may very well aggravate it. Trump and his in-laws, the Kushners, a notorious Zionist-American clan, will likely put US soldiers on the ground to further assist Israel in its battles with the anti-Zionist/imperialist alliance and Hamas itself. How that will play with Trump’s “antiwar” image in many quarters is still anybody’s guess.
RUSSIA & NOVOROSSIYA
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JOE LAURIA—The issue at hand is the fundamental difference between imperialism and revanchism. Western critics purposely or ignorantly confuse the two to serve their interests.
Succinctly, the difference is this: imperialists take control of a country that does not want them there and resists. A revanchist wants to absorb former imperial lands where the population is largely the same ethnicity and welcomes the revanchist power to protect them from an outside threat.
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PEPE ESCOBAR—It’s a cold, rainy, damp morning in the deep Donbass countryside, at a secret location close to the Urozhaynoye direction; a nondescript country house, crucially under the fog, which prevents the work of enemy drones.
Father Igor, a military priest, is blessing a group of local contract-signed volunteers to the Archangel Gabriel battalion, ready to go to the front lines of the US vs. Russia proxy war. The man in charge of the battalion is one of the top-ranking officers of Orthodox Christian units in the DPR.
A small shrine is set up in the corner of a small, cramped room, decorated with icons. Candles are lit, and three soldiers hold the red flag with the icon of Jesus in the center. After prayers and a small homily, Father Igor blesses each soldier.
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EDITOR—The panel discusses the outstanding aspects of Tucker Carlson’s Putin Interview, what it signifies in the context of US imperial propaganda in an age of challenges and decline, whether the format of the interview itself—one of unusual depth and length—will help or harm the ultimate aim of educating Westerners, especially Americans, about the realities of the world so that peace can be secured, warmongers defeated once and for all, and a nuclear war can be averted.
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IAN KUMMER—The most important question is also the most difficult one. What will be the short and long term impacts of the interview? I do not think this will have any impact on opposing camps in the US political establishment who have already made up their minds on the Ukraine issue. But this will influence public opinion. For millions of American citizens, this is the first time in their lives they’ve heard the unadulterated Russian perspective, and that is in of itself significant. The interview has over 100 million views (and the exact number is hard to count because it has been shared so far and wide), and is already being translated into other languages and broken up into digestible sound bytes for people not interested in watching the whole video. And this is part of the reason I think it was good for Putin to focus on such broad historical topics because that makes the video evergreen, it will still be relevant in 5 years even if the conflict in Ukraine has already ended.