Category Archives: UN

Boyd Cathey: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: In Ukraine

Boyd Cathey, Christianity, Foreign Policy, Hebrew Testament, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Russia, UN, War

America’s habitual manner of dealing with ‘foreign nations, whether friend or foe—is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable’ ~ H.L. Mencken

BY BOYD CATHEY

Four critical forces stand behind and vigorously motivate American and NATO policies in Ukraine. These forces support without apparent limitation the globalist-controlled and corrupt  Zelensky government in Kiev in its never-ending war against Russia. And like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of the last book of the New Testament, these Armies of the Night propel us, ineluctably and seemingly without concern for what lies ahead, towards nuclear Armageddon.

How has this been possible? How is it that the American citizenry, indeed, the citizenry in most European countries have, for the most part, supinely accepted this state of affairs?

Rationally and geopolitically, the conflict in Ukraine really should be of minor concern to us. It is not our role to be the world’s policeman and to intervene in every conflict, in every distant corner of the world. We have, I would suggest, no actual strategic interest there, except maybe to encourage a peaceful settlement. The Russians were not threatening us or NATO in any discernible or major way. Ukraine is in their backyard, not ours. And yet, we find ourselves mired in an ever-expanding, ever-widening conflict in a country that most Americans cannot even find on a map that may well result in World War III.

Most of the responsibility for what has happened we must bear. President George H. W. Bush and Secretary James Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would never expand to the borders of Russia (in return for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR). Yet, that is exactly what occurred. Then followed the “color revolutions”/coups d’etats in Tbilisi, Kiev, etc., with the instrumentality and complicity of American international finance and agents on the ground (read Victoria Nuland, etc.) which only intensified legitimate Russian mistrust and hostility.

The watershed moment for Russia was the ouster of a legitimately-elected Russia-friendly Ukrainian president by an American-fomented coup d’etat in Kiev in February 2014 and his replacement by a hand-picked American minion, followed by the intensification of widespread Ukrainian government persecution of the Russian majority in the Donbas eastern regions…followed by a dramatic uptick in that anti-Russian persecution in the Donbas in late 2021 and early 2022.

Author Ben Abelow has succinctly outlined what followed in his excellent primer, How the West Brought War to Ukraine. That brief volume is strongly endorsed by such authorities as Profs. John Mearsheimer and Paul Robinson, Ambassador Jack Matlock, and others, and remains a superb text on the conflict.

Certainly, a case can be made that the Russian incursion into Ukraine was a strategic mistake, ironically, because it was exactly what our foreign policy elites desired…an opportunity to take on the Russians directly by military means, using Ukraine as a helpless proxy, and perhaps effecting regime change in Moscow, or at least eliminating Russia as an obstacle to American global suzerainty. Still, President Putin believed, arguably, he had no other option. Nevertheless, it played into the hands of the War Party.

Over the past two decades our nation has shown an almost complete unwillingness to pursue any kind of negotiations with Russia about peace in Ukraine (e.g., the repeated torpedoing by the US of Minsk I and II). War serves OUR foreign policy purposes, and we managed to maneuver the Russians into making the first major offensive action.

Who, then, are these four forces that have pushed us dangerously into a conflict we should have never engaged in? What are the real reasons behind their hysterical and limitless advocacy, such that dozens of media outlets and most of our political leaders appear to have lost any scintilla of rational judgment?

First, perhaps the least visible but most effective force is what President Dwight Eisenhower termed more than sixty years ago “the military/industrial complex,” that is, the immensely powerful and influential military contractors and their complex web of control and influence, both in and out of the halls of power in DC, in our armed services, and in our politics. Each year billions of dollars in profits are generated for Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, Goldman Sachs, and other supra-nationals. War in Ukraine has been an incredible financial boon for them—missiles, tanks, armaments and equipment of all kinds. They must be built and purchased (usually at inflated and exorbitant prices). And the pockets of our politicians are always ready for a fat share, not to mention the opened pockets of the corrupt thuggery who currently run Ukraine (and dozens of other American client states).

Then there is the zealous opposition of the fanatical Left to what they perceive is the rise of a Neo-Tsarist Christian populism and neo-fascism (anti-LGBTQ, etc.) in Moscow. Russia under Putin has become for them the locus of opposition to their universalist program of a New World Order, opposition to a global world reset, involving NATO, the USA, the EU, and the World Economic Forum. In a moment of candor Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) summarized (October 25, 2022) the official (if unspoken) American and globalist stance on the conflict and the real issues involved:

“Moscow right now is a hub of corrupt tyranny, censorship, authoritarian repression, police violence, propaganda, government lies and disinformation, and planning for war crimes. It is a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export. In supporting Ukraine, we are opposing these fascist views, and supporting the urgent principles of democratic pluralism.”

Raskin is a far Leftist and Jewish, and his message is often just as frenzied and fanatical as that of any member of the Squad in Congress.  With one major difference: he’s highly placed and well connected, a part of the Democrat leadership establishment. So when he speaks, he speaks with some authority for the party and its leadership. But not only for the Democratic Party, but for those forces internationally who understand fully that Russia and its president stand athwart their path to a form of post-Marxist global hegemony, far worse than anything Joseph Stalin ever dreamed up.

Next, there are the Neoconservatives and their frenzied hatred for Russia (many of the Neocons have a Trotskyite and Labor Zionist genealogy which recalls the anti-semitism of Imperial Russia in the Pale of Settlement). It is the Neocons who have advocated never-ending war whether in Ukraine, or Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Bosnia, etc., in their zealous quest to impose what they conceive of as “liberal democracy” worldwide (what my mentor Russell Kirk once called disdainfully a “pax Americana”). It is not uncommon to see a Brian Kilmeade on Fox or read a Rich Lowry in the pages of the once-admirable National Review, espouse this viewpoint expressed with unrestrained vigor.

Joined to these forces are what we could call the “ground troops”—the vast majority of those who support American policies in Ukraine: those not-too-well-read, or simply dependent on the establishment media, which is completely one-sided on the conflict, for their information. Their views may well be based on a receptivity to continuing “anti-Russian” sentiment left over from the Cold War (similar to the anti-German sentiment which survived WW II) which many Americans partake of.

These forces have fueled an extremely dangerous cocktail. If someone opposes it, he is immediately shouted down as a “Putin apologist” or a supporter of “the new Hitler”: all of which is rubbish. But, sad to say, it seems to be working. I asked in my columns more than once, “Are there no grown-ups in the room? Or, are we fated to drift onward to a conflagration of terrible proportions?”

In St. John of Patmos’s Book of the Apocalypse he recounts that in a dream the Lamb of God summons and reveals to him four creatures that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses. Over the centuries these Four Horsemen have been variously identified in Christian eschatology as harbingers of the Last Judgment and End Times. The first horseman in St. John’s revelation, riding a white horse and carrying a bow, has been seen to symbolize and invoke conquest, pestilence or perhaps even the coming of the Antichrist. The second horseman, riding upon a blood red horse, carries a sword and is seen to be creator of war, conflict, and anarchy. The rider on the third horse is viewed as a merchant and rides a black horse symbolizing famine. Lastly, the final rider upon the pale horse represents Death and the powers of Hell. And as the Evangelist tells us:  “They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth.”

The Military/Industrial complex, with its extensive and foul tentacles, may be seen symbolically to ride the black horse of greed, financial domination, and famine. The Neocons and their epigones can be represented by a rider seated on a red horse, zealously advancing conflict, anarchy, and fratricidal war.

The pale horse, whose rider symbolizes death and enthrallment by the powers of Hell, could well represent the mass of humanity, beguiled and woefully misled by the first three horsemen, and whose headlong movement like lemmings will result in the destruction and the collapse of the world—and of civilization—as we have known it. It is not hard to visualize such figures as Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell prominent in this group.

Finally, the unleashed and fanatical Left rides the white horse of conquest, pestilence, and heralding of the Antichrist, proclaiming the end of Christian civilization and the triumph of what Irish poet William Butler Yeats calls the “Rough Beast” (in his eschatological poem from 1919, “The Second Coming”): the return of a triumphant Satan, once held in check for twenty centuries by a “Rocking Cradle” but now loosed upon the world.

It is not too esoteric to suggest that the USA and the world now find themselves in a situation where, to follow Yeats again,

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity….”

Are there voices yet who would sound the clarion call and their warnings be heeded? Indeed, are there any grand figures like the prophets of the Old Testament who could plead successfully for us to turn away from war, criminality, and evil? Or, has our civilization become so infected and decayed that it has run its course?

That question, for the moment, remains unanswered.

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~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music. Dive into Dr. Cathey’s Barely A Blog archive and latest Hard Truth interview. Boyd blogs at My Corner.

U.S. Biowarfare Labs In Ukraine Confirmed: What Else Is Russia Right About?

America, Democracy, Europe, Foreign Policy, Government, Neoconservatism, UN, War, WMD

ON HARD TRUTH, prerecorded today, March 9, out tomorrow, my partner, David Vance, confronted me with the news about the now-confirmed claims, first made by the Russians, that  “Washington was operating biowarfare labs in Ukraine.

American sources, liars to the core, had called the claims “‘laughable,’ suggesting Moscow may be laying the groundwork to use a chemical or biological weapon.” Out came the story-lines about conspiracy, the CCP and QAnon.

It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the United States and its scurrilous, insidious and invidious enablers—in media and state; stateside and abroad—lie.

The Dishonrable Victoria Nuland, who, as I documented in February of 2014, was taped plotting to “midwife a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government,” told the truth for once, today.

Glenn Greenwald reports:

Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”

Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland, thus providing further “proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did something completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for senior U.S. foreign policy officials: for some reason, she told a version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be “100% sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.

But Rubio’s clean-up act came too late. When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,” Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead — with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities.” Any hope to depict such “facilities” as benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach” — [interruption by Sen. Rubio]:

These biowarfare Ukrainian laboratories are located near Russian borders.

The point I made on Hard Truth (you can hear it tomorrow) was the only one, in my opinion, relevant in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Plainly put, this, first, is a reminded of the extent, the depth and the gravity of American lies. The Americans have been arming Ukraine for years. “American special forces have even been training potential partisans in eastern Ukraine.” Unless you are telling me the Russians should trust us (LOL); The Russians had reason to be worried existentially.

UPDATED (3/4): NEW COLUMN: Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik & The West’s Failure

America, Bush, Europe, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Iraq, Morality, UN, War

NEW COLUMN, “Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik & The West’s Failure,” is now on WND.COM , The Unz Review and The New American, my new home. MY FAVORITE LINE IN IT has been retained only for the Unz Review:

If Putin belongs in the Hague’s International Court of Justice, so do Genghis Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and their countless culprits. Colin Powell is already in the Hadean afterworld for his role in the invasion of Iraq.

Excerpt:

… There is something utterly obscene—as rudely shocking as the front-row viewing of the “Shock and Awe” visited on Iraq—about watching the displacement of people and the destruction of innocent lives in real time, on television, without lending a hand.

And I don’t mean a military hand.

Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky—who is the toast of the town simply because he did not skedaddle from the mess in which he mired his country—to this ass with ears goes a special award for recklessness. Not fleeing a situation largely of your making does not a hero make. Curiously, we Americans have offered Zelensky the coward’s way out, when we ought to have forced him to sit down with his foes.

Granted, America, as British paleolibertarian Sean Gabb quips, is “some kind of zombie apocalypse plus nuclear weapons that might not yet be past its use-by date. It has not won a war against an equally-matched power since it defeated itself in 1865.” However degraded, the onus is on the USA, the only so-called responsible superpower, to calmly negotiate with Putin on behalf of his innocent, weak victims. Instead, world leaders watch the suffering on TV and bemoan the fate of the sufferers. Both sides are a disgrace and a failure to have brought us thus far. Ditto NATO and the EU.

This is precisely what President Joe Biden should be shamed into doing now: talk to Putin; thrash out a cease-fire, ASAP; haggle for the lives of the population under siege because led by imbeciles. …

… Ukrainians, for their part, are tireless and wily lobbyists in Washington, way more cunning than their American counterparts. To all intents and purposes, Zelensky, head of the corrupt American client statelet that is Ukraine, had tethered the fate of his country to America, NATO and the EU, constantly trying to bend these foolish and feckless entities to his will; too much of a clown to look out for his countrymen’s safety, rather than his own popularity in the West.  …

… Having sat out the ‘67 and ‘73 wars in Israeli bomb shelters—I still remember what old-school diplomacy and statesmanship—realpolitik—sounded like. Diplomatic tools like substantive talks, a cease-fire, and an agreement between warring sides, however, have been absent from the repertoire of the two tools, Presidents Biden and Zelensky. …

… READ Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik & The West’s Failure,” is now on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American, my new home.

UPDATE (3/4): follyofwar says on the Unz Review:

Ms. Mercer is a top-notch intellect and excellent writer. I am ashamed of my country and disgusted by the Euro weenies who refuse to extricate themselves from America’s “Iron Heel,” (a novel by Jack London).  

HERE.

Thanks, Martin on Twitter:

Lebanese have Had It With Syrian Refugees

IMMIGRATION, Lebanon, Media, Middle East, Nationhood, UN

When in doubt, malign them as “nativists”: The reference here is to those Lebanese who’re not keen on having a disruptive number of refugees flood their already fractious and divided communities.

Those doing the labeling and libeling are the virtuous media. In this case, The Economist, according to which there are an estimated 1m-1.5m Syrian refugees in Lebanon (so, it’s not like the Lebanese have not been welcoming).

Lebanon has more refugees relative to its population than any other country. (Half of Mexico could settle in the United States and Lebanon would still come first.)

In fact, by 2015, the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon reached “about a quarter of the population,” whereupon “the government told the United Nations to stop registering new asylum cases.” Wise, for you don’t wish to encourage the parasitic, self-perpetuating refugee industry.

“Politicians are stoking anti-refugee sentiment in Lebanon”:

… Over the past few months the Lebanese government has deported hundreds of them and tightened restrictions on those who remain. Politicians have blamed them for a raft of economic problems. Spurred on by incendiary reports in the press, vigilantes have attacked camps and harassed Syrians in the streets. …

… the recent campaign [against refugees] is more intense. The charge has been led by the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a Maronite Christian party that rules in alliance with Hizbullah, a Shia militia-cum-party. Gebran Bassil, the foreign minister and son-in-law of President Michel Aoun, alarmed many when he tweeted about the positive “genetic” qualities of Lebanese in June amid a crackdown on foreign labour. …

Bassil has been called the Trump of Lebanon.

… According to Lebanon’s main intelligence agency, more than 170,000 refugees have already returned since the end of 2017, either on their own or with the help of the agency’s “voluntary return” scheme, which buses ostensibly consenting refugees back to Syria. In April Lebanon’s top defence council issued orders to start deporting Syrians who cross into Lebanon illegally. Hundreds of Syrians, including army defectors, have since been deported without due process, according to aid groups. “This is a red line that has been crossed,” says Ghida Frangieh, a lawyer with Legal Agenda, a local advocacy group.

One thing is crystal clear: Syria is a war zone, so the plight of refugees from that country is not exaggerated. The plight of Syrian refugees highlights the flimsy case for asylum mounted by Central Americans swamping America’s south-west border. Yet their cases are hyped without investigation by moron media.

the influx into  Officials say refugees strain roads, hospitals, schools and electricity and water supplies, while crowding Lebanese out of jobs. They suspect that many Syrians cross the border just for the handouts, and that aid workers are exaggerating the crisis to justify their jobs. …

… Syrians do compete with Lebanese for low-skilled jobs.

… MORE: “Politicians are stoking anti-refugee sentiment in Lebanon”

* The image is of members of the Maronite Free Patriotic Movement Of Lebanon.