RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18926/russia-influence-latin-america

Of particular concern is that Russia has not only been strengthening its relations with old Latin American partners — such as Cuba and Nicaragua, hailing back to the Cold War, and with Venezuela — but that it is now forging new and stronger relationships with countries that were traditionally oriented towards the US, such as Brazil and Argentina.

“Recent demonstrations of Russia’s hostile intent toward the U.S. and our partners in the Western Hemisphere include Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov’s January 2022 suggestion that Russia might deploy military forces to Venezuela or Cuba… and Nicaragua’s June 2022 re-authorization for limited numbers of Russian troops and equipment to enter the country for training missions and other forms of support.” — Dr. Evan Ellis, research professor of Latin American studies at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and senior associate at the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, July 20, 2022.

Russia’s actions in Latin America have been significantly deteriorating the security situation there, as well as enabling China to gain influence.

In June, Putin and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro confirmed their intention to strengthen their strategic partnership.

“In 2020, Russia Today (RT)’s Spanish-language media outlets more than doubled their social media followers from 7 million to over 18 million. These disinformation campaigns are just one part of Russia’s broader efforts to influence national elections throughout the region this year. Russia’s relationship with its key regional partners— Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua—allow Moscow to expand its air and sea access to project military power throughout the region.” — General Laura Richardson, Commander of U.S. Southern Command, testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, March 8, 2022.

“Agreements with Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Brazil allow Russian warships to make port calls on short notice. Russia doubled its naval deployments in this region, increasing from five (2008-2014), to 11 (2015- 2020). Russia seeks inroads in the hemisphere by providing security training through $2.3 billion in weapons and military equipment sales in the last 10 years, to include direct sales to Venezuela.” — Gen. Laura Richardson, testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, March 8, 2022.

While 21 Latin American and Caribbean countries have signed onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Biden’s Build Back Better World, launched in June 2021 to counter China, has not even taken off yet. Unlike the BRI, financed by the People’s Republic of China, Build Back Better has to rely on private investors’ willingness to take risks.

So far, Biden has nothing to show… while Russia and China continue to consolidate their gains.

Russia has been seeking to expand its influence in Latin America, especially since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and Russia’s subsequent international isolation.

Russia’s way of enlarging its influence in Latin America is comparable to its tactics in Africa, where it has primarily sought influence through arms deals, the use of its mercenaries, election interference, and disinformation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18944/erdogan-threatens-greece

“We have only one sentence for Greece: Do not forget Izmir [the city of Smyrna]. Your occupying the [Aegean] islands will not stop us; we will do what is necessary when the time comes. You know what we say: ‘Unexpectedly one night we shall come to [conquer] you.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, sondakika.com, September 4, 2022.

“The final years of the Ottoman Empire were catastrophic for its non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities. From 1913 to 1923, its rulers deported, killed, or otherwise persecuted staggering numbers of men, women and children in an attempt to preserve ‘Turkey for the Turks,’ setting a modern precedent for how a regime can commit genocide against its own citizens in pursuit of political ends, while largely escaping accountability.” — George N. Shirinian, Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913-1923.

The Turkish attacks against the Greeks and Armenians of Smyrna began [in 1922] with looting, rapes and massacres, and ended with a fire that destroyed the Christian districts of the city.

“In September 1922, the richest city of the Mediterranean was burned, and countless numbers of Christian refugees killed. The city was Smyrna, and the event was the final episode of the 20th Century’s first genocide — the slaughter of three million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians by the Ottoman Empire. The slaughter at Smyrna occurred as warships of the great powers stood by — the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy.” — Lou Ureneck, Smyrna, September 1922.

The Republic of Turkey actually boasts of its genocide.

Since the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, no factual information has been taught to Turkish schoolchildren about the extreme brutality, massacres, rapes, pillaging and other atrocities that indigenous Greeks and Armenians of Smyrna were subjected to at the hands of the Turks. The truth about the identity of the arsonists is categorically denied. For the past 100 years, Turkey has blamed the victims of the genocide for their own extermination.

September 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of the genocide in Smyrna. Although the Turkish government still takes pride in its slaughter, everyone else would do well to remember and honor the memories of the victims and prevent further Turkish aggression. One way for Western governments to do this is officially to recognize the 1913-23 genocide, but above all, stop Erdogan’s continued threats against Greece.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/29/can-the-eu-survive-europes-conservative-election-wave/

 The European Union, no bastion of political tolerance to begin with, is letting it be known: It will not tolerate conservative parties sweeping into power among its members. Good luck with that. With each new national election the EU’s power looks weaker and weaker.

The latest example of this come from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, a passionate partisan of God, family, culture, and life, whose right-leaning coalition won Italy’s national election in a landslide, despite threats from the EU.

“If things go in a difficult direction, I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have tools,” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said, in what can only be called a threat.

“We have tools”? This is an election in a sovereign country of which von der Leyen is not a citizen. Her remarks amount to interference with a sovereign nation’s democratic election.

As a warning to others, the EU recently suspended 7.5 billion euros in funding to conservative Viktor Orban’s Hungary due to alleged “corruption,” even though, by the EU’s own data, Hungary is nowhere near the most corrupt country in Europe.

It’s not as if Meloni’s victory came from nowhere. The EU’s leftist bureaucrats have been losing their grip over the continent they once ruled for some time now, but they don’t seem to realize it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-islamic-republic-shaken-to-its-core/

On September 13, in Tehran, Iran, the Morality Police took Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, into custody for incorrectly tying her hijab. Eyewitnesses said they saw her being beaten with a baton as she was shoved into a van. Three days later, she was dead. The police announced that she had died of a heart attack; her family was quick to say that Amini was in perfect health. At once protests prompted by her death began in Tehran and in the Kurdish cities, led by women who pulled off, and then ripped up or burned, their hated hijabs, and symbolically cut off their hair. And the protests that began with fury over the Morality Police have spread, and new grievances have been added.

Those protests quickly spread to more than two dozen other cities, including Mashhad and Isfahan, in twenty provinces across the country. The police have tried to quell them, deploying at first tear gas and water cannon, and then birdshot and metal pellets, but for several days now they have been using live fire. Nearly 80 people, among the protesters, have now been killed by the police. And there are reports that dozens of police, too, have been killed or wounded. The protesters have become increasingly violent, burning cars, busses, and fire engines, and destroying billboards showing the Supreme Leader. They have set fire to a base of the feared Basij militia on Ferdowsi Street in downtown Tehran. A police commander has been killed by the protesters, and dozens of other police wounded by them.

The government has ended Internet service in parts in Tehran, and ended access to WhatsApp and Telegram. Despite this, the protesters still manage somehow to meet up and come out in force, and in ever larger numbers, across the country.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-months-second-electoral-earthquake-in-europe/

EXCERPT

Like the Sweden Democrats (SD), who triumphed at the polls on September 11, the Brothers of Italy, who won big last Sunday, have been described in the international media as “far-right,” “hard right,” “extremist,” and even “fascist.” Party boss Giorgia Meloni, warned the New York Times after the election, is “poised to be the country’s first far-right leader since Mussolini.” Or, as the Guardian put it, “Italy will now have its most rightwing prime minister since 1945.”

The day before the Italian election, anxious journalists sought comment from Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission, who reassured them that if things didn’t go “in the right direction” in Italy, she had “tools” with which to respond. In other words, an unelected technocrat – a woman whose extraordinary power over the lives of 450 million people has never been subjected to the vote of a single ordinary citizen – was threatening reprisal if the citizens of a sovereign country chose leaders she didn’t like.

Of course, von der Leyen’s idea of “the right direction” means rule by globalists – the greatest menace to which is government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Hence the need to smear champions of liberty as fascists. (Just ask Hillary Clinton, who the other day, apparently having decided that “deplorables” wasn’t quite strong enough, likened Trump supporters to Nazis.)

To be sure, like SD, the Brothers of Italy have dicey roots. That’s not uncommon in Europe. Meloni herself, when she started her career, was pretty far to the right; she’s since moderated her views. Yet many in the media pretend otherwise. For example, although she fervently supports Ukraine in the current war (“a proud nation that is teaching the world what it is to fight for freedom”), she’s routinely depicted as being cozy with Putin.

Then again, Trump got painted with the same brush. And just as he boiled his cause down to “America First” and SD’s platform essentially amounts to “Sweden First,” Meloni, if you listen to her speeches, is obviously all in for “Italy First.” Like SD, her party is pro-NATO and anti-EU. Like SD, it firmly opposes mass Muslim immigration. After Sunday’s election, an Italian voter explained his support for Meloni to a CBS News reporter in three words: “Too many immigrants.” (Which was followed immediately, on the evening news broadcast, with clips of Mussolini –  who, the reporter told us, originated Meloni’s motto, “God, Fatherland, and Family.”)

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/26/italians-have-dealt-another-blow-to-the-establishment/

Here I was thinking the populist revolt was over. After all, the neoliberal elites said it was. They pronounce populism dead every six months or so – seemingly convinced that one election result or external event has finally finished it off for good. Covid was supposed to kill populism, by reminding the supposedly ignorant oiks of the importance of experts. Then Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was supposed to kill populism, by reminding ‘nativist’ voters of the importance of international cooperation and the folly of authoritarian strongmen – something they are supposedly enamoured of. And yet those pesky voters just keep on electing the ‘wrong’ governments. If the triumph of the Sweden Democrats in supposedly sensible Sweden earlier this month wasn’t symbolic enough, Italy has just made the right-wing, anti-immigration Brothers of Italy the largest party, paving the way for what the media breathlessly call the ‘most right-wing government since Mussolini’.

After the elections yesterday, Meloni’s party is projected to win 26 per cent of the vote. The right-wing coalition she leads, along with Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, looks primed to take control of both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, with around 44 per cent of the vote. The centre-left coalition, led by Enrico Letta’s establishment Democratic Party, came a distant second. The surge in support for Meloni’s party specifically was stunning, securing its position as the anti-establishment choice. At the 2018 election, Brothers of Italy won just four per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Five Star Movement (M5S), which came top at the last election, has had its support cut in half this time around. And even then that was a better-than-expected result. The League – Meloni’s populist-right coalition partner, which formed a government with M5S after the 2018 election – was polling in the high 30s a few years ago, but got less than nine per cent of the vote yesterday.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/iranian-women-cast-off-their-hijabs/

The death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, has ignited nationwide protests across Iran. Amini was beaten to death by the mullahs’ morality police after she was detained in Tehran on 13 September, after failing to comply with the regime’s strict hijab (headscarf) rules. Women in Iran have been treated as second-class citizens by the mullahs for more than four decades. The misogynist lunacy of the clerical regime has even extended to a demand by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that cartoon character women must wear the hijab. Now, in Iran, even animated female characters in cartoons cannot reveal their hair!

Women’s dress codes are under constant scrutiny. They must wear the hijab and ‘morality police’ are on relentless patrol to enforce the law. Women, particularly young women, are singled out for brutal attacks for the ‘crime’ of mal veiling. Girls who were deemed to be improperly dressed in the street have suffered horrific acid attacks and stabbings, in assaults openly condoned by the mullahs. Teenage girls, arrested for the offence of posting videos of themselves dancing or singing on social media, have been publicly flogged. Young female students attending end-of-term parties have been fined and beaten. This is what gender equality looks like in Iran today.

The toll of women executed in Iran’s medieval prisons continues to rise. Most of these women were executed for killing an abusive husband or partner. But this is another example of how the regime fails women, because they are mostly victims of domestic abuse who kill in defence of themselves or their children, because they have no legal recourse to end a violently cruel marriage. These killings often occur after women have suffered years of humiliation, insults, beatings and even torture, by abusive husbands, from whom they have no escape…no right to divorce.  In other countries, they would be granted leniency based on their circumstances, but not in Iran. And this, of course, does not even touch upon those executed for crimes that are not capital offences under international law, like drug offences, or for non-crimes, like political activism.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18886/china-massive-threat

“The most game-changing challenge we face comes from the Chinese Communist Party.” – Ken McCullum, MI5 Director General, Joint Address by the heads MI5 and FBI, July 6, 2022.

Both directors emphasized that one of the greatest challenges to Western economies is China’s theft of Western technology through a variety of means….

China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) uses its regional bureaus to “key in specifically on the innovation of certain Western companies it wants to ransack…. companies everywhere from big cities to small towns — from Fortune 100s to start-ups…. We’ve even caught people affiliated with Chinese companies out in the U.S. heartland, sneaking into fields to dig up proprietary, genetically modified seeds, which would have cost them nearly a decade and billions in research to develop themselves.” — Christopher Wray, FBI Director, address to London business leaders on National Security Threats Posed by the People’s Republic of China, MI5 HQ, July 6, 2022.

Wray emphasized that effectively all Chinese companies are in the pockets of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)… those [companies] that aren’t owned outright are effectively beholden to the government all the same, as Chinese companies of any size are required to host a Communist Party cell to keep them in line…. almost like silent partners.”

Wray unconditionally warned businesses against partnering with Chinese companies. “Maintaining a technological edge may do more to increase a company’s value than would partnering with a Chinese company to sell into that huge Chinese market, only to find the Chinese government, and your ‘partner,’ stealing and copying your innovation, setting up a Chinese competitor, backed by its government, that is soon undercutting you — not just in China, but everywhere.” — Christopher Wray, July 6, 2022.

The deal [to purchase farmland near a military base in North Dakota] has caused concerns that the purchased land could be used to spy on the base, as China most likely has done on other bases.

Additionally, there is widespread Chinese theft and spying in academia…. European scientists have been empowering China’s military by sharing “militarily sensitive knowledge with the Chinese army on a large scale.” Out of an astounding 353,000 scientific collaborations between Europe and China around 3,000 had taken place with the Chinese military, defined as “studies where scientists from Western European universities collaborated with Chinese colleagues directly linked to an institute that is part of the Chinese army.”

Despite the massive threat that China poses, the Biden administration nevertheless ended the Department of Justice’s “China Initiative” in February 2022. That same month, the head of the FBI said in an interview that Chinese spying had become so prevalent in the US that on average, the FBI was opening on average two counterintelligence investigations a day, with more than 2,000 such cases already underway.

Instead of the China Initiative, “the administration would be using a “broader approach one that looks across all of these threats [from China, Russia, and Iran; ed.] and uses all of our authorities to combat them.” — Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen, Politico, February 23, 2022.

All right. Where is it? No need to shut down the China Initiative; just increase investigations of other threats, which the US should presumably be doing anyway.

The unmistakable signal that the Biden administration sent to China by closing down the China Initiative was one of weakness — again — this time, underscoring that the US does not consider countering China a priority at a time when China, according to two international prominent intelligence directors — is unquestionably the greatest threat to US interests.

Could there be a signal to an intransigent adversary more dangerous than that?

In an unprecedented move, the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, and the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, the MI5, Ken McCallum, came together in July to warn against the “massive” threat that both intelligence services consider China presents.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/09/25/the-trudeau-dynasty-a-political-reset-in-the-making-n1632016

Political dynasties are inherently problematic and ambiguous. When politics becomes a family business, enabling bloodline clans and generational households to occupy the seat of power, we have what will often amount to the very antithesis of responsible political function. Indeed, countries like Indonesia have passed laws prohibiting relatives from immediately succeeding each other in public office.

As Siddhartha George argues in a paper on the descendant effects of political dynasties, employing “regression discontinuity design” (RDD), if political capital is heritable, that is, deriving from a prominent name or a powerful network, “dynastic politics may render elections less effective at selecting good leaders and disciplining them in office.” One of the factors involved in the likelihood of negative effects is, in his term, “moral hazard.” Descendants face moral hazard, he explains, “because they inherit voters loyal to their family predecessor (typically a father), dampening incentives to exert effort and perform well in office”—the common problem of the epigone. 

This is especially true in the economic realm. Dynastic politics tend to issue in a “reversal of fortune,” that is, “a standard deviation decrease in wealth percentile rank.” Inherited political capital, George concludes, “allows descendants to persist in power even when they underperform,” as well as weakens “the ability of elections to select talented leaders.”

Dynastic families are a predictable feature of despotic regimes, such as the Kims in North Korea. They can be prominent in secular patristic regimes, such as the Peróns in Argentina or the Abes in Japan. Dynastic families readily assume office in democratic countries through name recognition and the accumulation of powerful resources, consisting of politically acquired wealth, long-haul expertise and extensive influence. One thinks of the Pitt family in Britain, the Adams and Roosevelt families in the U.S., and the Papandreous in Greece, each having produced two national leaders. One notes three generations of Nehru/Ghandi relations in India and the Bush family in the U.S. that enjoyed three terms in the White House, with indifferent results. The Clintons, for their part, almost achieved a regime by marriage.