MY ONDERVINDING MET ExpatShop

 From: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>
Date: 2014-04-22 9:36 GMT+02:00
Subject: order 5160
To: potgieter.petrus@gmail.com

Hi Petrus

Thanks for your order.

Please can you confirm that you have in fact contacted your customs to see if you are allowed to receive so much alcohol? 

Please join our Facebook Group: 

DOC ASSIST for South Africans worldwide https://www.facebook.com/groups/docassist/

and feel free to post a comment re our service delivery to you.

Kind regards 

Machelle Munro 

Skype id: infoatexpatshop
Tel and fax: +27218555258

www.docassist.co.za - for all document requirements 

• Unabridged documentation - Marriage/Birth/Death certificates
• Abridged  documentation - Marriage/Birth/death certificates
• Vault copies - marriage and birth certificates
• Police Clearance Certificates
• Legalisation / Verification  / Apostille of documentation as required 
• Obtaining an International Driver’s License from South Africa
• Letter of no impediment 
• Visa applications 
• Residency certificates
• Transcripts of university academic records
• Apostille of degrees

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From: Petrus Potgieter <potgieter.petrus@gmail.com>
Date: 2014-04-22 10:09 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: order 5160
To: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>

Beste Machelle Munro

Ek kan nié bevestig dat ek in kontak was met die doeane nie, want ek dink nie dis nodig nie - dit gaan tog oor nét sewe bottels alkoholiese drank, waarvan ses OB's is, wat eintlik koeldrank is ;-)

Ek benodig nog julle bankbesonderhede vir die elektroniese betaling.

Groete

Petrus Potgieter

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From: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>
Date: 2014-04-22 10:25 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: order 5160
To: Petrus Potgieter <potgieter.petrus@gmail.com>

HI Petrus

Bank Name: Standard Bank

Branch: Helderberg

Branch Code: 033012

Account number: 072444916

Account Name: Silvermoon Investments 263 CC

Swift code: SBZ AZA JJ 

Please note: with any items ordered - please ensure that any items ordered do not contravene the customs of the country the parcel is being sent to. We have no liability if any items are confiscated due to a contravention on the customs regulations.

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From: Petrus Potgieter <potgieter.petrus@gmail.com>
Date: 2014-04-22 10:33 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: order 5160
To: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>

Beste Machelle Munro

Dankie vir die bankbesonderhede - wat is die totale bedrag wat ek na julle rekening moet oorplaas?

Petrus Potgieter

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From: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>
Date: 2014-04-22 11:49 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: order 5160
To: Petrus Potgieter <potgieter.petrus@gmail.com>

R3259.00

5160 2014/04/21 10:51:00 AM		- Select an Action -  ---------------------------  Edit Order  Send Status by Email  Send Drop Shipper Email  ---------------------------  Receive Payment  Mark Unpaid  Mark Paid  ---------------------------  Ship Items  Mark Part. Shipped  Mark Shipped  ---------------------------  Edit Order  Mark On Hold  Mark Completed  Mark As Problem  ---------------------------  Print Packing Slip  Print Invoice  Print Admin Receipt
Sold To Petrus Potgieter ... potgieter.petrus@gmail.com	Authorised/Unshipped	Payment Info Pay By: Fax Total: R 3,259.00 Received: R 0.00 Refunded: R 0.00 Remaining: R 3,259.00
Ship To Petrus Potgieter ... SKU Item Unit Price Qty Subtotal Shipped Returned 8M19 Guronsan C 10 effervescent tablets R 75.00 6 R 450.00 0 0 1FM25 Droe Wors 100g R 31.00 3 R 93.00 0 0 1FM20 Farmers Market BEEF Biltong sliced 200g R 79.00 5 R 395.00 0 0 BILTONG1 Woolworths Sliced Beef Biltong 150g R 109.00 1 R 109.00 0 0 DROEWORS1 Woolworths Droe Wors 150g R 75.00 1 R 75.00 0 0 4gms2 Premier Traditional Coarse Braaipap 2.5kg R 29.00 3 R 87.00 0 0 5BI41A Ouma Buttermilk Rusks 1kg R 69.00 2 R 138.00 0 0 WILSONS TOFFEES Wilsons Champion Original Toffees 150g R 18.00 1 R 18.00 0 0 KWVBRANDY Kwv 5Yr Old Brandy 750 ML R 195.00 1 R 195.00 0 0 OLD Old Brown Sherry 750ml (OBS) R 53.00 6 R 318.00 0 0
Customer's Instructions: none	Codes Used: none	SubTotal: R 1,878.00 Tax: R 0.00 Shipping: Surface Mail-by ship (read shipping policy for full info)EU,UK, Russia (D) R 1,342.00 Handling: R 39.00 Gift Wrap: R 0.00 Order Total: R 3,259.00

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From: Petrus Potgieter <potgieter.petrus@gmail.com>
Date: 2014-04-22 12:01 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: order 5160
To: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>

Hi Machalle Munro

What about Order 5161 which I requested to be added to Order 5060 and shipped together?

Regards

Petrus Potgieter

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From: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>
Date: 2014-04-22 12:04 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: order 5160
To: Petrus Potgieter <potgieter.petrus@gmail.com>

Hi Petrus

I never received another email with that request that I can find.

No problem the total is then

5160 R3259.00 + 5161 R343.00 = R3602.00

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From: Petrus Potgieter <potgieter.petrus@gmail.com>
Date: 2014-04-23 8:41 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: order 5160
To: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>

Hi Machelle Munro

I would like Order 5161 to be added and shipped with Order 5160.

I take it that the "Handling" & "Shipping" in the amount of R238.00 for Order 5161 will consequently fall away leaving a grand total of R3364.00 payable by me - please confirm.

Regards

Petrus Potgieter 

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From: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>
Date: 2014-04-23 9:01 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: order 5160
To: Petrus Potgieter <potgieter.petrus@gmail.com>

HI Petrus

No it will not - there is shipping that needs to be paid for each order as the parcels go by weight

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From: Petrus Potgieter <potgieter.petrus@gmail.com>
Date: 2014-04-23 9:08 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: order 5160
To: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>

In daardie geval kanselleer ek beide Bestelling 5160 én Bestelling 5161.

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From: Doc Assist Machelle <info@docassist.co.za>
Date: 2014-04-23 9:17 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: order 5160
To: Petrus Potgieter <potgieter.petrus@gmail.com>

No problem - done

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OPMERKING: Bestelling 5161 was vir 3 pakkies rooibostee wat ek vergeet het met Bestelling 5160.

DOODDO(E)N(N)ER

THE MAN HAS A POINT…… I WOULD SAY

The author of this article is 
right on the money. The fact is nobody owes
blacks anything. This is from a 
comment on a News24 site.

Please explain the term "PREVIOUSLY 
DISADVANTAGED"
Kindly make special reference to following:

1. Who 
"disadvantaged" the black people of the interior Southern Africa
before the 
(supposed) 'belligerent' white settlers moved inland in the
mid-19th century? 
What the settlers found was not hugely advanced
infrastructures -- deep 
mines, hospitals, vast libraries of written
knowledge, imposing institutions 
of learning, etc. No, as little as 170
years ago they found masses of black 
people (indigenous to the Southern tip
of Africa) living on the fringes of 
the Stone Age.
Primitive beings dressed in skins, wielding sticks, living in 
primitive
dwellings, dragging- and carrying their meager possessions around, 
since
they had not been introduced to the benefits of the wheel 
yet!

2. Ethiopia - a country that was NEVER colonised is today one of the 
most
desolate places on the planet! Who "disadvantaged" the people of 
Ethiopia?

3. Compare Zimbabwe and Germany with each other and please 
explain the
differences. In 1945 Germany was, for all intents and purposes, 
flattened to
ground and torn in half. Fifteen years later, West Germany was 
described as
an "Economic Wonder". Around the same time as the end of 
apartheid, Germany
was re-unified. It yanked the now-unified Germany back 
four centuries in
time.

Yet, in about fifteen years (for the second 
time within a few decades) it
built another 'economic wonder'. Today it is 
fast becoming a global leader
in almost every field!
On the the flip side 
- Zimbabwe's people were handed one of the wealthiest
countries in the WORLD 
(for eg: a currency that was stronger than the US
dollar!). What is the 
situation today? Competing with Ethiopia as the most
desolate hellhole on the 
planet? Please explain...

I can carry on for days -- but let that be 
enough for now.
Just one more request: please, pretty please, kindly respect 
the intellect
of our audience and refrain from cheap (ANC-like) red herrings 
for e.g.
calling people racists. Just answer the questions directly and with 
tangible
substance.
In parting, I would suggest the following: The term 
"Previously
Disadvantaged' is as much a fantasy as is the delusional lunacy 
that
threatens voters with the revenge of the ancestors. The same 
delusional
insanity that claims the words "KILL THE BOER" really, only means, 
"Come
over to my mansion for tea and cookies."

You cannot take 
something from somebody WHO NEVER HAD IT in the first place!
In fact, what is 
it that white people, specifically white men, are supposed
to "give back" to 
black people? Can someone PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE explain
to me what it is 
that white men took from blacks?

LAND? Blacks NEVER owned any land. Any 
form of formal ownership is a Western
concept. The black tribes of the 
mid-19th century haphazardly SETTLED in an
ad hoc manner -- effectively 
governed by tribal savagery - in other words,
the most savage ruled the land 
(a bit like Hillbrow today). They simply ran
away until they could not run 
any more -- not having ANY grasp of the
concept of a horizon or for that 
matter any measure of finite land mass -
for eg. The boundaries -- that is 
the fundamental concept of ownership.

MINERALS? More hallucinations aside 
-- eg ancient gold mines - a little bit
like the Zimbabwe Ruins (the 
Pyramids, etc) -- next to the magnificent
structure, the indigenous people 
built stone-age dwellings out of dirt and
sticks (at best emulating the 
birds). Minerals beneficiation is an entirely
Imperialist/Western concept -- 
in fact, in many ways it saw some of the most
tangible advances, by WHITE 
SOUTH AFRICAN MEN -- just peruse some of the
academic papers at Wits' 
Engineering Library.

WEALTH? Money, capital and the pivotal mechanisms of 
the wealth that allows
you to breathe, eat, have children, live a rather 
healthy productive and
fulfilling life, but also allowed the cognitive 
development that leads you
to make your daft comments here -- it is ALL of 
Western origins.
In fact, the key advancements in modern finance and 
economics were made by
the DUTCH. Why do you think New York's financial 
center is called 'Wall
Street'?
It was initially called 'Waal Straat'.when 
the settlement was under Dutch
control Yes, my dear, the Dutch took their 
cognitive substance there as
well.
The same Dutch that were the most 
direct descendants of the people who
landed at the Cape in 1652. In fact, the 
modern 'WEALTH system' was
originated by the Dutch and it funded the 
explorations around the tip of
Africa.

Perhaps we robbed the 
'disadvantaged' blacks of their private jets, their
Breitling watches, their 
Italian designer suits, or their German luxury
limousines, their Blue Light 
Brigades or perhaps their space shuttles?
Mmmm... I just hate the implicit 
assumption that whites stole from blacks

...ÓÓK IN EUROPA

Freedom Rider: Democracy is Dead

Tue, 04/22/2014 - 23:26 — Margaret Kimberley

A new study confirms the obvious: the will of the people carries no weight in the United States. Within the nation’s borders democracy is everywhere proclaimed but nowhere to be found. These truths we hold to be self-evident: “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.”

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“The notion that this country is a democracy has become openly farcical.”

Too many Americans love to boast that the United States is a democracy. That idea is accepted uncritically and celebrated as proof of this country’s superiority. Every public activity and event is an opportunity for the false narrative to be repeated and indulged. Events as disparate as elections, holiday celebrations, advertisements, school commencements and religious worship are all used to propagandize and create false belief about the degree of power the average citizen has vis a vis their government.

Of course all evidence shows that this narrative is and always was a lie. Dictionaries define democracy as government representing the citizens through elected representatives, or as majority rule, or a society which provides equal rights to all. The history of this country has rarely lived up to any of those descriptions but in the recent past the notion that this country is a democracy has become openly farcical. We have nothing but meaningless trappings and any power exercised by the people is sadly in short supply.

This state of affairs has been obvious to anyone who has been paying close attention. Americans not only don’t get what they want from the political system, they actually get the opposite of what they want. The pace of the oligarchic state has quickened lately but the dynamic has been evident for quite some time.

“Money talks and those without money have no voice.”

Even elite academia is taking notice and has given official imprimatur to a conversation that had been ignored. Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University are the authors of the study “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” While their work does not as news stories suggest use of the word oligarchy, the authors are quite clear about their findings. Professor Gilens gave this brief summary of their conclusions:

“I'd say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States [italics mine]. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups – of economic elites and of organized interests.”

While this study has however briefly changed public discourse, it is important to note that the disregard of popular will is obvious for all to see. If this were not true, the minimum wage would be higher, there would be no cuts to entitlement programs, and Americans would have a single payer health care system. There would be no NAFTA or TPP free trade agreements which force a race to the bottom for workers, destroy entire eco-systems and violate national and popular sovereignty. If this country were truly democratic, the city of Detroit would not have filed for bankruptcy for the simple reason that voters in Detroit and in the state of Michigan voted to repeal the emergency manager law which brought bankruptcy into being.

Americans don’t want the increasingly frequent interventions abroad forced upon by them by president after president yet that is what they get. We want to address the problems created by human made climate change. We don’t want hydraulic fracturing, or the pollution or earthquakes that come with it, but that is what we have. We don’t want rich people to control the political process but the Supreme Court has said time and again that money equals speech and those decisions prove the point of the study. Simply put, money talks and those without money have no voice.

“If the average person had any say in the matter, the big time banksters would now be behind bars.”

If that were not the case, American workers would not be poorer than their counterparts in the rest of the world. The so-called middle class workers in this country had the distinction of being better off than their peers around the world. That is no longer the case with stagnating wages and job loss and a country that does not practice income distribution that would keep people out of poverty. In a democratic country, Walmart and its low wages would not be the largest employer. The manufacturing that once dominated the economic landscape would still employ the bulk of the work force with its higher wages and other benefits that provide economic security.

In a democracy, the financial services industry that created the worldwide economic meltdown would not have been bailed out. Workers would be bailed out. Corporations wouldn’t get tax breaks and other government subsidies. Workers would get them. And if the average person had any say in the matter, the big time banksters would now be behind bars.

The myth of American democracy is just one of many that are cherished out of ignorance and suspension of disbelief but that is not a reason to continue the confusion and self-delusion. The only time we get any taste of democracy is when we proclaim that we don’t have it but assert plainly and loudly that we intend to get it.

The phony narrative wears thin as the quality of life diminishes. The United States of America is not a democratic nation if the only right that citizens have is to go to a polling place every few years. It is time to stop fetishizing what clearly does not work for the majority of people and start talking about something new. After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. The only result we have to show is rule by the elites and if that is acceptable then the people have gone truly insane.

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

BROEDERVERNEUKERS

SKAAKSPEL

The Strangelove effect - or how we are hoodwinked into accepting a new world war

18 April 2014

I watched Dr. Strangelove the other day. I have seen it perhaps a dozen times; it makes sense of senseless news. When Major T.J. 'King' Kong goes "toe to toe with the Rooskies" and flies his rogue B52 nuclear bomber to a target in Russia, it's left to General 'Buck' Turgidson to reassure the President. Strike first, says the general, and "you got no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops."

President Merkin Muffley: "I will not go down in history as the greatest mass-murderer since Adolf Hitler."

General Turgidson: "Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books."

The genius of Stanley Kubrick's film is that it accurately represents the cold war's lunacy and dangers. Most of the characters are based on real people and real maniacs. There is no equivalent to Strangelove today, because popular culture is directed almost entirely at our interior lives, as if identity is the moral zeitgeist and true satire is redundant; yet the dangers are the same. The nuclear clock has remained at five minutes to midnight; the same false flags are hoisted above the same targets by the same "invisible government", as Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations, described modern propaganda.

In 1964, the year Strangelove was made, "the missile gap" was the false flag. In order to build more and bigger nuclear weapons and pursue an undeclared policy of domination, President John Kennedy approved the CIA's propaganda that the Soviet Union was well ahead of the US in the production of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. This filled front pages as the "Russian threat". In fact, the Americans were so far ahead in the production of ICBMs, the Russians never approached them. The cold war was based largely on this lie.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its "Nato Enlargement Project". Reneging a US promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand "one inch to the east", Nato has all but taken over eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucuses, Nato's military build-up is the most extensive since the second world war.    

In February, the United States mounted one of its proxy "colour" coups against the elected government of Ukraine; the shock troops were fascists. For the first time since 1945, a pro-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital. No Western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism on the border of Russia. Some 30 million Russians died in the invasion of their country by Hitler's Nazis, who were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, responsible for numerous Jewish and Polish massacres. The UPA was the military wing, inspiring today's Svoboda party.  

Since Washington's putsch in Kiev - and Moscow's inevitable response in Russian Crimea, to protect its Black Sea Fleet - the provocation and isolation of Russia have been inverted in the news to the "Russian threat". This is fossilised propaganda. The US Air Force general who runs Nato forces in Europe - General Breedlove, no less - claimed more than two weeks ago to have pictures showing 40,000 Russian troops "massing" on the border with Ukraine. So did Colin Powell claim to have pictures of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. What is certain is that Obama's rapacious, reckless coup in Ukraine has ignited a civil war and Vladimir Putin is being lured into a trap.

Following a 13-year rampage that began in stricken Afghanistan well after Osama bin Laden had fled, then destroyed Iraq beneath a false flag, then invented a "nuclear rogue" in Iran, dispatched Libya to a Hobbesian anarchy and backed jihadists in Syria, the US finally has a new cold war to supplement its worldwide campaign of murder and terror by drone. 

A Nato Membership Action Plan or MAP - straight from the war room of Strangelove - is General Breedlove's gift to the new dictatorship in Ukraine. "Rapid Trident" will put US troops on Ukraine's Russian border and "Sea Breeze" will put US warships within sight of Russian ports. At the same time, Nato war games throughout eastern Europe are designed to intimidate Russia. Imagine the response if this madness was reversed and happened on America's borders. Cue General 'Buck' Turgidson.

And there is China. On 24 April, President Obama will begin a tour of Asia to promote his "Pivot to China". The aim is to convince his "allies" in the region, principally Japan, to re-arm and prepare for the eventual possibility of war with China. By 2020, almost two-thirds of all US naval forces in the world will be transferred to the Asia-Pacific area. This is the greatest military concentration in that vast region since the second world war. 

In an arc extending from Australia to Japan, China will face US missiles and nuclear-armed bombers. A strategic naval base is being built on the Korean island of Jeju less than 400 miles from the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai and the industrial heartland of the only country whose economic power is likely to surpass that of the US.  Obama's "pivot" is designed to undermine China's influence in its region. It is as if world war has begun by other means.

This is not a Strangelove fantasy. Obama's defence secretary, Charles "Chuck" Hagel, was in Beijing last week to deliver a menacing warning that China, like Russia, could face isolation and war if it did not bow to US demands. He compared the annexation of Crimea with China's complex territorial dispute with Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. "You cannot go around the world," said Hagel with a straight face, "and violate the sovereignty of nations by force, coercion or intimidation". As for America's massive movement of naval forces and nuclear weapons to Asia, that is "a sign of the humanitarian assistance the US military can provide".

Obama is currently seeking a greater budget for nuclear weapons than the historical peak during the cold war, the era of Strangelove. The United States is pursuing its longstanding ambition to dominate the Eurasian landmass, stretching from China to Europe: a "manifest destiny" made right by might. 

This article first appeared in the Guardian, UK

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

LEES EN WORD WYS...

Inventing a ‘Russian Threat’: Washington’s Full-Spectrum Subversion

APRIL 28, 2014 

Mark Hackard
21st Century Wire

What do postmodern exhibitionists, Islamic holy warriors and marauding ultra-nationalists share in common?
Seemingly little, aside from the fact that these bizarre bedfellows are the star assets of US policy in Eurasia. And despite their use of very different tactics, they all are tasked with the same mission: to undermine Russia, the only great power consistently opposed to American hegemony.

The Sochi Diversion

Today East and West contemplate the possibility of war over the fate of Ukraine, but the popular narrative was tailored for just such a standoff well in advance. Any attentive reader of Western press sources over recent months will have noticed that a dramatic upswing of negative Russia coverage began after Vladimir Putin thwarted Washington’s planned assault on Syria last summer. For just one example of the establishment’s dissemination of absurd Russophobia, look no further than the recent spy film Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which features Kremlin-directed Orthodox Christian suicide bombers attacking Mammonism’s Holy of Holies, the New York Stock Exchange. 

As the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics got underway, executives at the six US media giants plus their counterparts at the BBC and elsewhere had a green light to inflict maximum damage. Journalists were looking to fan the flames of any possible scandal at the games, but the stories didn’t add up to their hype.

A number of issues were used to paint Russia in an unflattering light, one at times approaching caricature. Was there some amount of corruption, mismanagement and inefficiency in constructing the new Olympic village in Sochi? Few Russians would doubt it, yet were American reporters really so insular as to expect nothing less than Switzerland? Exposure of bribery and fraud, lest we forget, featured as the epilogue to squeaky-clean Salt Lake City’s 2002 Winter Games. Meanwhile, threats by Islamic terrorists – the same Mujahedin operatives serving as proxies of US policy from Libya and Syria to Kosovo and Chechnya – against the Black Sea resort were amplified considerably with helpful leaks from “concerned” officials in Washington, to the point of convincing American Olympians’ families to stay home in fear[i]. But where were such warnings before two Chechens with connections to US intelligence allegedly bombed the Boston Marathon in April of 2013?

The media’s favorite manufactured controversy at the Olympics, moreover, had nothing at all to do with winter sports. Western audiences were led to believe that Russia’s laws banning the promotion of sodomy to children had cast a sinister pall over the games; in an expression of unfeigned displeasure, President Barack Obama skipped attendance (Killing Pashtun and Yemeni villagers with drone-launched Hellfire missiles is praiseworthy – upholding any measure of traditional morality is not[ii]). Try as they might, the press corps could find no evidence of “oppression” of homosexuals at Sochi, with the gay American skater Johnny Weir stating that he was treated “fantastically” by the Russian people during his stay. Even State Department-sponsored provocateurs from the cultural Marxist outfit Pussy Riot, famous for previous acts of obscenity and sacrilege, made a sorry attempt at spectacle before beating a hasty retreat. Unfazed, the Russian national team would go on to win first place for both gold medals and the overall count.

Flashpoint: Ukraine

Western vitriol over the Sochi Olympics represents one component of an information campaign, itself part of a wider US-led geopolitical offensive against Moscow. A variety of policy instruments are used for the objective of “containment,” from NATO expansion and power projection to sanctions against Russian companies. Yet by far the most economical means in the quest to weaken and demoralize Russia has been covert action, operations run under plausible deniability and comprising a broad range of activities. From the years of the Cold War, the Trans-Atlantic establishment has built an entire covert-action apparatus that encompasses not only intelligence services and special units of the military, but also nationalist paramilitaries, crime syndicates, transnational terror networks and a host of well-funded NGOs deeply intertwined with academia, major corporations and the media. In other words, an arsenal for full-spectrum subversion[iii].

Secret wars are waged just as intensively as the overt ones, and on multiple fronts. All the commotion over the Olympics amounted to a distraction from the central theater of action – Ukraine. As the curtain closed on Sochi, political unrest in Kiev climaxed with the overthrow of the undoubtedly corrupt but still legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych by pro-Western forces on February 22^nd. The liberal-nationalist coalition that took power through mass protests and street fighting enjoyed extensive support – both public and clandestine – from the United States government. Timed for precisely the moment when Russia’s leadership was absorbed with showcasing its Olympics to the world, the coup’s main objective was to finally incorporate Ukraine as an EU/NATO satrapy.  The Washington-Wall Street agenda envisions stripping the country of its agricultural and industrial wealth and the deployment of US missile defense architecture just a day’s drive from Red Square.

What the events of early 2014 show is how quickly “soft power” can transition to the hard variant; subversion makes inroads for aggression. Washington spent two decades and $5 billion to make Ukraine safe for Chevron and Exxon-Mobil, but now it is reaping far more than it anticipated. Moscow has moved decisively to secure its vital interests in the region, leading to Crimea and the key naval base of Sevastopol being reunited with Russia after 60 years of estrangement. And the Russian-oriented south and east of Ukraine are also rising against an illegitimate regime resolved on virtually giving away strategic assets to multinationals – while sending ultra-nationalist militias to enforce the sales[iv]. From the port of Odessa to the Don River Basin, both Russians and Ukrainians share one thousand years of a unified Eastern Slavic civilization, an ideal that endures in blood and spirit; this reality will long outlive predatory IMF “structural adjustments” and the deformed chauvinism on offer from the current junta in Kiev.

After twenty years of eastward encroachment, the US push into Ukraine is the logical application of a policy to cripple Russia’s recovery and attain unchallenged dominance over the Eurasian heartland and its natural resources. Several consecutive rounds of NATO enlargement, the criminal bombardment of Serbia and subsequent overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, a string of CIA-orchestrated color revolutions in the former Soviet space and the 2008 Georgia War – far from isolated occurrences, these events show an ever-tightening ring of encirclement. For Kremlin strategists, the Maidan takeover in Kiev proved the point of no return; they’ve seen that the Pax Americana plays for keeps. With their very future on the line, the Russians are fighting back.

Targeted for destabilization, Russia has demonstrated the will to use force in order to protect its people and interests. Short of outright military action, it possesses formidable covert capabilities. The ruthless Cheka-KGB pioneered the practice of human intelligence, and we should remember that most of Ukrainian territory was once the arena of unrelenting partisan campaigns during the Second World War. Given Ukraine’s importance to Russia’s overall geopolitical position, it’s a safe assumption that the contemporary FSB and GRU have developed robust agent networks and operational infrastructure for just the sort of contingency that Moscow confronts today. At the same time, the West’s feverish search for spetsnaz troops in the country is wholly beside the point; resistance in the pro-Russian southeast is organic and growing.

Russia is perhaps the one nation preventing the United States from becoming the last empire, the progenitor of a tyrannical world-state; it is therefore positioned squarely on the front line of a sustained twilight struggle. Globalist oligarchs, the actual controllers of the liberal order, employ multiple vectors of subversion in their ferocious attack on faith, sovereignty and identity. Whether our telescreens depict jihadists wreaking destruction from the Levant to the Caucasus, cells of NGO “activists” waging psychological warfare through the propagation of deviance, or deranged Ukrainian nationalists bent on fratricide, we are assured that all are heroes marching in the grand cause of democracy.

Though retaining effective deterrence is essential for any independent state, the ultimate strength of a Third Rome resurgent lies in its eternal tradition, that ancient Christianity once adopted by a rough-hewn Viking ruler from Kiev. When the Russian lands were threatened by ideological aggression from the West some eight centuries ago, soldier-prince Aleksandr Nevsky defended his people with spirit and sword:

From Adam to the flood, from the flood to the division of tongues, from the mixing of tongues to the beginning of Abraham, from Abraham until Israel’s passing through the Red Sea, from Israel’s Exodus to the death of Tsar David, from the beginning of Solomon’s reign to Tsar Augustus, from the beginning of Augustus to Christ’s Birth, from Christ’s birth unto the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord, from His Resurrection to His Ascension into heaven, from His Ascension into heaven until the reign of Constantine, from the beginning of Constantine’s reign to the First Council, from the First Council until the Seventh – all of this we know well, and from you we accept no doctrine.

In our age Russia is accused by American officialdom of “betraying the New World Order” when the New World Order is betrayal itself, the very crowning of modern apostasy. Let the words ofAleksandr Nevsky be the answer of every free and noble people to the masters of subversion:From you we accept no doctrine.

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[i] Dmitro Yarosh, the leader of Ukraine’s fascist Right Sector, called upon the Chechen militant Doku Umarov to carry out terror attacks in Russia just weeks before the latter was killed in March by an FSB special unit. Ukrainian nationalists are known to have fought on the side of Chechen rebels during the 1990s and 2000s. One such figure, the now-deceased Oleksandr Muzychko, “Sashko Biliy,” tortured and murdered at least 20 captured Russian soldiers.

[ii] Coincidentally or otherwise, the top financial donors for the Human Rights Campaign, America’s premiere homosexual lobbying organization, are drone manufacturers from the military-industrial complex.

[iii] Many are unaware that the CIA is far from a simple intelligence service; like Britain’s MI5 and MI6, its business has been social engineering both at home and abroad. Under the guidance of tax-exempt foundations, its programs have included funding and promoting not just jihadists and nationalist paramilitaries, but control of the media, feminism, the arts, the psychedelic revolution and narcotics trade. This is only a short rendering of cases of dialectics in action, giving one nonetheless a more definite sense of the aims of the “New World Order.”

[iv] Another odd partnership forged on the Maidan against Moscow has been that of Right Sector and Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, the head of the European Jewish Congress and a prominent patron of Zionist causes.

Author Mark Hackard is an independent foreign policy analyst. He earned a BA in Russian Language from Georgetown University and an MA in Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies from Stanford University. He studies the intersection of political culture, religion and strategic issues, which he approaches from a traditionalist-conservative position. Some of his major influences are Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortes, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rene Guenon and Fr. Seraphim Rose.