JOHN HELMER—The reason for the OPCW’s delay is now exposed by the failure of this week’s report to confirm what Seibert and other German government officials have been claiming to be their evidence of a Novichok assassination attempt against Navalny. Seibert hinted at this himself in his September 14 statement. “The federal government,” he said, “has also asked other European partners with France and Sweden for an independent review of the German evidence based on new samples from Mr. Navalny. The results of this review by special laboratories in France and Sweden are now available and confirm the German evidence. Regardless of the ongoing investigations by the OPCW, three laboratories have now independently provided evidence of a nerve agent from the Novichok group as the cause of Mr. Navalny’s poisoning. We renew the call for Russia to explain what has happened” (emphasis added).
US EXCEPTIONALISM
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“TOTALITARIAN” ANTI-COMMUNISM: LOADED LANGUAGE STRAIGHT OUT OF CIA, NEO-CON PLAYBOOK
40 minutes readBRUCE LERRO—Meanwhile, on the right, neo-conservatives had been furious with what they felt was Nixon and Kissinger’s appeasement of the Soviet Union. Most neoconservatives hated Hough’s comparative politics because it neutralized the Soviet Union, presenting it as a state like any other state, instead of the demonical monster that it was imagined as being. In his book The Origins of Soviet Autocracy British scholar, Leonard Schapiro argued that unlike Tucker’s claim, the origins of totalitarianism in Russia do not begin with Stalin, but with Lenin. Shapiro treated the Bolshevik seizure of power as a coup rather than a democratic revolution. He did not think that Trotsky or Bukharin offered any serious alternative. Challenging Shapiro, based on his political biography of Bukharin, Steven Cohen argued that Bolshevism had a far greater evolutionary possibility that could have been realized had Bukharin rather than Trotsky won the power struggle against Stalin after Lenin death, but whether one sided with Trotsky or Bukharin, Bolshevism and Stalinism were very different. The differences between Bukharin and Trotsky were minimal compared to their differences with Stalin.
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ERIC ZUESSE—In particular, nothing is more abhorrent to the U.S. regime than to stop or impede its sanctions. These sanctions include, for example, punishments against any company or government that will, in any way, assist in Russia’s 96% completed NordStream 2 natural gas pipeline to Germany, for the EU to buy Russia’s pipelined natural gas instead of America’s fracked canned shipped natural gas. The U.S. regime insists that EU nations buy the far costlier trans-Atlantic-shipped fracked U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG). That insistence upon the EU’s wasting money, in order to prop-up America’s fracking industry, is, indeed, exceptional, because European nations haven’t customarily been treated as being mere colonies of other powers.
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Alexey Doth Protest Too Much: Covert Ops & Russian “Dissidents”
13 minutes readCALEB MAUPIN—Russia has many dissidents, of both leftist and right-wing persuasions. The Communist Party holds seats in the Duma and has long criticized Putin’s leadership. The Liberal Democratic Party is equally critical, and also holds elected office. However, Navalny’s slick “dissent” seems to follow an odd pattern of serving Wall Street’s short-term needs. For example, the latest unproven but widespread claim that Navalny has been intentionally poisoned by the Russian government, comes just on the brink of the final stages of the Nordstream 2 pipeline project. Just as Germany is on the brink of buying loads of natural gas from Russia, and more closely solidifying its economic relationship with Russia, Navalny is in the headlines again.
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Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton speak about the dystopian show trial going on against political prisoner Julian Assange with journalist Kevin Gosztola, who is covering the UK court hearings to potentially extradite the WikiLeaks publisher to the US. We discuss the major threat this case poses to the freedom of the press — yet how it is being criminally under-reported and whitewashed in the corporate media.