STRATEGICALLY GIFTED

Why is Argentina a country without a destiny of its own?

 

By Sidney Hey

If the capitals in some way reflect the general situation in their countries, when you arrive in Buenos Aires there is no doubt that you can sense a situation that could be seen in Central America in the late seventies and mid-eighties, when political and economic instability was mixed with guerrilla violence. It is true, there does not seem to be such political violence here, although insecurity due to the absence of authoritative leadership and lack of direction and the penetration of drug trafficking seems to be looming large.

What has happened to Argentina? The collapse of its economy can be felt in the streets. The capital city is less than a reflection of its former self. Walking through the streets of the Retiro neighbourhood, the closed businesses, the squalor of the settlements in front of its bus terminal and the rampant crime that lurks around Plaza San Martin and the English Clock, paints a sepia-coloured picture.

There I understood why many businessmen and commercial representatives from other countries were arriving, which I happened to spot when I arrived at Ezeiza after my little holiday with mates in “Horbat”. It's not that I think it's wrong or that I have the moral high ground for this criticism, it's just that it looked like a flock of vultures circling a dying prey; when I saw the situation with my own eyes I understood why.

All this reflects a political weakness that (and let no one doubt it) will be exploited by speculators and the local financial sectors and those who are coming to the country to buy everything for a handful of dollars. I think Argentines have already seen this and it was not so long ago. Those who are over forty years old know this very well. The so-called “Menemist” era of the 1990s, characterised by the hasty and indiscriminate opening up to foreign capital, making Argentines believe that privatisation was the panacea to solve all problems, was a demonstration of what should not be repeated.

But this is a country of stark political contrasts and of course they are not spontaneous. Here one day there is a nationalist movement and the next day its referents have become as liberal as the Lib Dems of London themselves and all depending on where the money comes from. The same is true of their geopolitical positioning.

What we will certainly not find here are British socialist liberals such as Jeremy Corbin or Irish politicians such as former Foreign Minister Simon Coveney, who are honouring intellectual honesty even against the most dangerous interests. On the contrary, in Argentina, those who call themselves liberals and democrats support aberrations such as Israeli apartheid and Washington's unjustifiable hegemonist policies, and it is these same people who have been encouraging Israel to be taken as a model to imitate.   

The ideological contradiction was in moving from an elephantine welfare state in the middle of the last century that had been created by Peronism itself to a failed attempt to shrink that state by handing over important strategic sectors to foreign hands. Certainly, the Americans, British and Germans can be very grateful to the Peronist Carlos Menem, because thanks to his privatisation bungling, seconded by the economy minister Domingo Cavallo, they pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in just a couple of years without making risky, let alone lasting, investments.

On that occasion Argentina did not change its geopolitical weight at all and continued to decline.

Peronism masked in new rags returned alternately in 2003 and 2019, but the problems not only remain the same, but have worsened. The myth that “Peronists know how to manage real power” is now seen to have been just that, a myth. Your president is not a genetic Peronist (even if he claims to be one), although he is not the only one of his kind. Those who claim to be pure Peronist leaders are not pure Peronists either, as they should be almost a hundred years old, and what is least convenient for a country in crisis is a gerontocracy of corrupt first-timers.

It is safe to say that what is called “Peronism” is an empty cardboard box. What can you find inside an empty box? Some direct their Peronist hopes to the one they call “boss”, Mrs Cristina Fernández, but in the prospect of social reality, her followers are much less than some pollsters report. Looking at it from a bird's eye view you can only see a motley crew of “superstars” or “divas” more concerned with the attention they seek to arouse in others than with addressing the severe problems afflicting their country. Such is the degree of atomisation and ideological mutations in this (dissociated) society that it would be very difficult to make a study of anthropogeography. If I were asked for an opinion, I would say that they have no future as an option to be considered.

I do not agree with those who say that several of its exponents, especially the “PRO” of former president Macri and some candidates of progressive radicalism are the “bishops” of some embassies in Buenos Aires, mainly from the USA, Great Britain and in some cases Israel. Indistinctly those who represent the "libertarians" and even the old-smelling classical liberals are intertwined, or better said, threaded with the same thread. There is no doubt that all of them -to different degrees and nuances- have an affinity with each of these foreign actors, but to believe that the governments of these countries designate them as their political agents to operate within the country is a little more difficult to believe. This does not mean that Washington in particular is concerned about the power vacuum that is emerging, especially when the Brazilian government of Lula Da Silva has given clear signs of its geopolitical positioning in favour of the BRICS, and this translates into China and Russia.

Argentina's is just like door frame. Current reality shows an institutional weakness that should not surprise us since the state's foundations are so corroded by decades of degradation that they resemble a necrotic state.

Geopolitically, Argentina is an invisible entity, it is like a big hole in the Southern Cone and today, in several foreign capitals, they are planning to take its place, to inject it with financial funds that in appearance will revive the republic; but it will not be for free. As I was leaving this wonderful country for my quarters on the great island of “Oz”, I said to myself in the form of a question: “See you forever?”

 

 

RESOURCES

BLOODY

A video of an alleged beheading of a Ukrainian soldier could be something much more than revenge in a vicious war Are gory proxy productions making a comeback?

 

By Sidney Hey

When the US media broadcast a video showing alleged PMC Wagner soldiers cutting off the head of a Ukrainian soldier, I could not help but be reminded of the horrible image of Iraq in 2004, when similar videos began to spread of the beheading of the unfortunate (never American) at the hands of alleged “insurgents” or “Al Qaeda” Islamists, which ten years later “ISIS” would make a central part of its propaganda. That was nothing more than a hoax by Anglo-American intelligence proxies that, while real in the execution itself, was not executed by those it purported to show.

Ordinary citizens have matured and the passage of time has taught them how far their government can go to manipulate them. Beheadings were presented -very conveniently and deliberately- by the Anglo-American media as the hallmark of “Islamist terrorism”. That, in addition to being an excuse to maintain the occupation, was the most important and Machiavellian rehearsal of what we know today as “hybrid warfare”. I have no doubt that here we are in something similar to what was done repeatedly in Iraq (with the ISIS hoax) and then tried to be replicated in Syria; the only thing that changes is the scenario, nothing else.

But is the sudden appearance of this video a coincidence, or is it rather a response to key events played out by PMC Wagner? Without mincing words, the mercenaries of this private Russian company are a pain in the ass for the AFU, let alone the foreign mercenaries recruited by the CIA and MI-6. The announcement by the leader of this group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, of the capture of the administrative centre of the city of Artemovsk by placing flags of the group and of the Russian Federation was a devastating blow to the morale of the AFU and also to the Atlanticist advisors who closely follow the operations on the ground. But the bad news does not stop there. The Wagner PMCs are also advancing relentlessly along the entire Donetsk Oblaz line, one of the latest strategic conquests being the Zaliznyanskoye settlement. How could they try to turn this situation around?

The staging and realism would be explained by the duplication of uniforms and insignia depicting PMC men played by foreign butchers posing as experienced Russians (from Iraq and Syria). Added to this, the impossibility of observing identifying features on these supposed Russian soldiers raises many suspicions about who these killers really are. If we look back a few years we see several similar hoaxes in which intelligence agencies produced audio-visual hoaxes such as the videos of a supposed Osama Bin Laden dubbed by impostors and the grand theatrical operation of his “assassination in Abbottabad, Pakistan” in may 2011. And that's where the more interesting questions begin. Why couldn't these guys be ISIS assets hired for these gruesome productions? To answer who their contractors are, for those who know where this fake Islamist franchise came from, would be redundant.

The release of this video does not seem coincidental. Even looking at the context of the place where it took place, it seems to show a very different season than the current one; more precisely, this vile act would have been carried out in spring or perhaps last summer (2022), so why is it being published now? Let's leave aside the supposed concern for brutality and inhumanity that the media like CNN, the BBC and the whole spectrum of media outlets that depend on Wall Street and the City of London. It's that the cheque has to come in every month if you want a story tailored to the government.

If we give a vote of confidence to these discredited media we must ask them where are the videos showing similar crimes carried out by Ukrainian Nazi extremists against Russian soldiers or even those carried out against pregnant Russian-speaking Ukrainian women in the Donbass? As the sense of humanity is very peculiar and random for liberal democracies, I anticipate that they will not want to give an answer.

The impact of seeing a human being beheaded is significantly horrifying, but also, its impact is psychologically exploitable for those who seek to demonise their enemy. Undoubtedly the image of PMC Wagner is being discredited. Because it has proven to be an important and effective backbone of Russian forces. When the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney needed to cling to power amidst great questioning over the inconsistencies shown by the occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the losses from resistance operations, the CIA and military intelligence battalions under then General David Petraeus digitised counter-intelligence actions involving the actions of fake Islamists including “Al Qaeda-Iraq” and its successor in the charade, the “Islamic State of Iraq”. In the same muck was aligned the smiling Tony Blair who gladly and unscrupulously allowed the same dirty tactics to develop that would look like a bloody and indiscriminate insurgency that if not contained could leap into Europe.

Unlike Afghanistan and Iraq which had been hushed up, Russia can not only stand up to the dirty tricks and media censorship of the West but also gather evidence and bring it to the attention of international bodies which in turn have demonstrated a shocking opacity if we can in any way describe their incompetence.

What this video shows is perhaps one of thousands of episodes of the brutality of war or the falsification of a crime intended to sully the face of PMC Wagner, an outstanding tactical revelation on the battlefield that has shattered the expectations of NATO's masterminds.

The logic of this is clear and the message it conveys is “the Russians are evil and only the Russians are evil” and thus takes the other crimes committed by both regular army units and neo-Nazi groups led by NATO advisors out of the picture.

 

UNA SALVACION MULTILATERAL

Solamente con el respeto a las soberanías de los estados y terminar con los odiosos excepcionalismos será posible una paz global basada en la equidad y la justicia ¿Quién realmente persigue este objetivo?

 

Por Javier B. Dal

Así como dice el dicho de que sin romper huevos no se puede hacer una tortilla, sin la actual crisis global no sería posible allanar el camino para el sendero del multilateralismo. Es una evidencia irrebatible ver como EEUU está fracasando en su cruzada neoconservadora por extender su hegemonismo hasta las fronteras de la Federación rusa. Ucrania es la prueba de esto. Lo peor de todo es que son los ucranianos quienes ponen su sangre para esta empresa fallida y no falta mucho para que definitivamente abran los ojos y se den cuenta quien es realmente el enemigo.

Los últimos acontecimientos revelan una cierta anarquía en el estrato político de Washington dejando entrever que la administración de Biden no controla el curso de los eventos y es por ello que muchos se están cuestionando ¿Y ahora qué?

Las máscaras se han caído y el verdadero rostro de la “democracia liberal” angloestadounidense queda desnuda a la luz del día. No importa cuantas cumbres “por la democracia” organice Biden ni los obsecuentes medios operen con propaganda rusofoba, todo está expuesto a la vista de quien quiera verlo. A las mentiras y los engaños develados, se suman las medidas que Biden ha ordenado para mitigar esta ola de revelaciones que abochorna a los mismos estadounidenses y a sus socios europeos. El fracaso de la “operación censura” sobre los medios y los ciudadanos rusos fue el primer golpe al hígado de los neoconservadores estadounidenses quienes desde hace tres décadas manejan la agenda exterior de La Casa Blanca.

Bajo la apariencia de luchar contra amenazas “autocráticas” y proteger a la democracia la administración Biden a comienzos del mes de marzo lanzo un nuevo “programa de Ciberseguridad” (con un presupuesto previsto para 2024 de 13.5 mil millones de dólares) que en realidad busca amplificar el intento por censurar a los medios que el Departamento de Estado considera como “pro-rusos” por el solo hecho de contradecir a La Casa Blanca. Del mismo modo, esa estructura sin dudas será utilizada para lanzar devastadores ciberataques sobre Rusia, China, Irán y Corea del norte como parte de las medidas “democráticas” que Washington articula contra sus enemigos.

Antes de que el 24 de febrero del 2022 Rusia entrara en Ucrania, Washington subestimo la capacidad de decisión política de Moscú y a la vez, armo, asesoro y envalentono al régimen segregacionista de Kiev, sabiendo que ello era una amenaza a las legítimas preocupaciones de seguridad estratégica de Moscú. Durante años y más puntualmente desde el 2014 el Kremlin busco establecer pautas claras y consensuadas con sus socios bajo el respeto de las decisiones soberanas y bajo ese marco intento por todas las vías diplomáticas que las agresiones de Kiev sobre los pobladores del Donbass tuvieran un final.

Pese a ello, Washington se dedicó a vacilar las iniciativas de Moscú profundizando al mismo tiempo, el apoyo a los grupos filo nazis ucranianos.

Fue necesaria la guerra para que tanto los ucranianos como los europeos vieran la realidad de los intereses norteamericanos. El primero de todos y como venía siendo desde 1991 era extender el dominio de la OTAN sobre toda Eurasia y así, cercar desde el continente a China, el objetivo más importante para Washington. Concretado ello y sobre la base de las ruinas, ofrecerían ayuda financiera para reconstruir las ciudades que ellos mismos ayudaron destruir. Así lo han hecho con cada guerra que han promovido y Ucrania no va a ser la excepción. En este sentido Volodymyr Zelensky demuestra su amateurismo político ya que incluso si fuese un convencido partidario de los ideales angloestadounidenses, su costo recae sobre su gente. Negocios en base a la guerra y nada más, así de cínica y nefasta ha sido la fórmula de la prosperidad democrática estadounidense que desde 1945 hasta el presente han implementado y quien no este de acuerdo, será considerado enemigo.

Rusia ha roto esa diabólica lógica y le ha demostrado al resto del mundo que las ilegales políticas extorsivas (denominadas sanciones) de Washington no solo no le han dañado, sino que son posibles de superar. A la “bomba financiera” de Washington, Vladimir Putin opuso una política de abandono del dólar como moneda obligada de comercio internacional, estableciendo al rublo como la única moneda de intercambio para la adquisición de sus productos en especial el petróleo y el gas ¿Y saben qué? Funcionó y lejos de lo esperado por Anthony Blinken y sus asesores, Rusia no se ve afectado por esas sanciones draconianas, sino que ha ampliado su mercado.

El mundo ha tomado nota de este triunfo político y ya se han empezado a oír en América Latina voces que por fuera de los gobiernos enfrentados a EEUU, propugnan por el respeto a la soberanía y la adopción del multilateralismo algo que hasta antes de la guerra en Ucrania era impensado. 

De esta manera, Vladimir Putin y su gobierno le ha demostrado al mundo que es posible soltarse de ese hegemonismo extorsivo que se disfraza de democracia y que tiene como único trasfondo, negocios multimillonarios para las grandes corporaciones privadas y por supuesto, para la elite política de Washington, una verdadera oligarquía que le allana el camino para que puedan negociar.

El 31 de marzo pasado el presidente Vladimir Putin en videoconferencia con el Consejo de Seguridad de Rusia promulgó la vigencia actualizada del “Concepto de Política Exterior de la Federación Rusa” donde se exponen los puntos y el papel de Rusia en la construcción del mundo multipolar. Allí se reconsideran los puntos de vista estratégicos y los aportes históricos de Rusia al respeto por el derecho internacional dejando bien en claro la desigualdad que el mundo anglosajón ha propiciado con sus interferencias ilegales para un desarrollo económico equitativo y acorde con los intereses de cada nación.

Los anglosajones han fabricado una historia de progreso económico propio a base de crear las desigualdades en otras partes del globo y para ello se apoyaron en la agresión, las guerras, las intervenciones (golpes de estado, revoluciones de color) y la aplicación unilateral (y sin legitimidad alguna) de medidas coercitivas que solo reconocen ellos mismos. Considerando esto último ¿Qué legalidad pueden tener estas acciones dentro del derecho internacional contemporáneo? ¿Podemos pasar por alto las grandes tragedias humanitarias contemporáneas como Iraq, Libia, Yemen?

Ese mismo unilateralismo que durante décadas se impuso en todo el occidente y que en los últimos treinta años ha aplastado naciones con las irreversibles consecuencias humanitarias que (como son los desplazados y los refugiados) incluso siguen impactando en la Unión Europea donde también (y dentro del impulso multilateral) ya están cayendo en cuenta que es hora de tomar decisiones por ellos mismos.  

En consideración con estos elementos, el desencadenamiento de la Operación Militar Especial fue instigada y propiciada desde La Casa Blanca y a pesar de que por estas horas ya ha quedo claro que no lograran torcer el curso de los acontecimientos, apuesta a tratar de perpetrar las hostilidades por todos los medios posibles. Pero esto último ¿Implicaría intervenir directamente o falsificar un ataque QBN?