The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
The Ron Paul Peace and Prosperity Institute
Subscribe to the Institute View Us on YouTube Follow Us On Twitter Join Us on Facebook Join Us at Google Plus

Search Results

for:

Russia

Just Imagine... If Russia Had Toppled the Canadian Government

Wednesday May 21, 2014

Donetskflag

Just imagine if the democratically-elected government of Canada had been toppled in a Russian-financed coup, in which far-right extremists and neo-Nazis played a prominent role.

That the new unelected 'government' in Ottawa cancelled the law giving the French language official status, appointed a billionaire oligarch to run Quebec and signed an association agreement with a Russian-led trade bloc.

Just imagine…

If Russia had spent $5 billion on regime change in Canada and then a leading Canadian energy firm had appointed to its board of directors the son of a top Russian government politician.

Just imagine…

If the Syrian government had hosted a meeting in Damascus of the "Friends of Britain" — a group of countries who supported the violent overthrow of David Cameron's government.
read on...

To Understand Or Not to Understand Putin

Thursday May 8, 2014

Putinosce

In Germany these days, very many citizens object to the endless Russia-bashing of the NATO-oriented mainstream media. They may point out that the U.S.-backed regime change in Kiev, putting in power an ultra-right transitional government eager to join NATO, posed an urgent threat to preservation of Russia’s only warm water naval base in Crimea. Under the circumstances, and inasmuch as the Crimean population overwhelmingly approved, reinstating Crimea in the Russian federation was a necessary defensive move.

In Germany, anyone who says thing like that can be denigrated as a “Putinversteher” (a Putin understander).

That says it all. We are not supposed to understand. We are supposed to hate. The media are there to see to that.

While the West doggedly refuses to understand Putin and Russia, Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, seems to understand things pretty well.

He seems to understand that he and his nation are being systematically lured into a death trap by an enemy which excels in the contemporary art of “communication”. In a war situation, NATO communication means that it doesn’t matter who does what. The only thing that matters is who tells the story. The Western media are telling the story in a way which depends on not understanding Russia, and not understanding Putin. Putin and Russia become fictional villains in the Western version, just the latest reincarnation of Hitler and Nazi Germany.
read on...

CIA Terror Chief Pulls Rank in Kiev

Wednesday April 16, 2014

Brennan

There could hardly be an American official more sinister than CIA director John Brennan, yet when his mysterious visit to Kiev at the weekend is exposed in various news media the White House responded with vacuous naiveté and as if Russia is foolishly over-reacting.

It is not without good reason that Brennan is known unofficially as Obama’s “assassination and torture tsar”. The 58-year-old spymaster is the embodiment of how Washington has itself become a secret, unaccountable government that has set itself above the law in the running of torture and assassination programs by presidential command. Brennan is the “éminence grise” of the White House’s covert world of state terrorism. 

Following disclosure of Brennan’s weekend visit to the Ukrainian capital, the White House was evidently caught on the back foot. The Oval Office made the somewhat unconvincing attempt to portray it as a perfunctory meeting between security officials. Well, if it was merely a routine itinerary then why was the fact of the meeting such a closely guarded secret – up until the matter was leaked by parliamentary sources in Kiev?

The timing of Brennan’s sojourn in Kiev comes at a crucial juncture. The unelected Western-backed junta in Kiev is threatening a violent crackdown on pro-Russian protesters in the east and south of the country…
read on...

The American Spring

Saturday April 12, 2014

Cold War Interception

Many years after the end of the Cold War, when the United States government brings to power a neo-Nazi leader in Ukraine in order to hurt both Moscow and Europe, the world finds itself on the brink of nuclear war once again. This may sound like an oversimplified distillation of current headlines, but it is in fact a plot point in Norman Spinrad’s science-fiction novel "Russian Spring", published in 1991.

Written as the Cold War came to an end, Spinrad’s novel envisioned the USSR not falling apart, but embracing market capitalism and joining with "Common Europe" to develop a civilian space program. Meanwhile, the U.S. retreated across the Atlantic to play hegemon in Latin America and build the "Battlestar America" missile shield – until opportunity arose to destroy the USSR by sponsoring a foaming-at-the-mouth Ukrainian separatist.

In actual history, Washington first encouraged the breakup of the USSR, then used the Balkan Wars to reassert dominance in Europe, ensuring the EU would remain a toothless hanger-on. Rather than carving out an empire in Latin America, the US claimed the world. The US space program did devolve to a purely military one, but never got the fabled "missile shield" to actually work. Meanwhile, those who want to go to the International Space Station must use the Soviet-designed Soyuz, the only orbital spacecraft still in
read on...

Ron Paul Blasts US Ukraine Policy

Tuesday April 8, 2014

Speaking with RT's Sophie Shevardnadze, RPI Chairman and Founder Ron Paul presents a masterful, in-depth critique of the US government’s actions related to Ukraine. Among many matters discussed, Paul addresses the US government’s foolhardy imposition of sanctions as part of its Ukraine policy.
read on...

Ron Paul, Richard Cobden, and the Risks of Opposing War

Monday March 31, 2014

Crimeawar

Since at least as early as the eighteen century, classical liberalism, and its modern variant libertarianism, have opposed warfare except in cases of obvious self-defense. We see this anti-war position clearly among the anti-federalists of eighteenth-century America (who opposed all standing armies) and more famously within George Washington’s Farewell Address. Thomas Jefferson frequently inveighed against war, although in moves typical for Jefferson, he acted against his own professed ideology on a number of occasions.

On the other side of the Atlantic, liberalism finally made significant gains in Britain with the rise of the Anti-Corn Law League in the late 1830s. The head of the league, a radical liberal named Richard Cobden, rose to prominence throughout the 1840s and is notable today for his active defense of laissez-faire capitalism as a member of the House of Commons, and also for his staunch anti-interventionism in foreign affairs.

For a time, his political star rose quickly, but by the time the Crimean War ended, Cobden, had been cast aside by both a ruling class and a public enthusiastic for both empire and war.
read on...

The Danger of False Narrative

Friday March 28, 2014

Propagandaunclesam

The American people got a nasty taste of the danger that can come with false narrative when they were suckered into the Iraq War based on bogus claims that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction that he planned to share with al-Qaeda.

Nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers died in the conflict along with hundreds thousands of Iraqis. The war’s total financial cost probably exceeded $1 trillion, a vast sum that siphoned off America’s economic vitality and forced cutbacks in everything from education to road repair. Plus, the war ended up creating an Iraqi base for al-Qaeda terrorists that had not existed before.

But perhaps an even more dangerous problem coming out of the Iraq War was that almost no one in Official Washington who pushed the false narrative – whether in politics or in the press – was held accountable in any meaningful way. Many of the same pols and pundits remain in place today, pushing similar false narratives on new crises, from Ukraine to Syria to Iran.

Those false narratives – and their cumulative effect on policymaking – now represent a clear and present danger to the Republic and, indeed, to the world. The United States, after all, is the preeminent superpower with unprecedented means for delivering death and destruction. But almost nothing is being done to address this enduring American crisis of deception.
read on...

Kto Kogo?* The NATO Syndrome, the EU’s Eastern Partnership Program, and the EAU

Friday March 21, 2014

Whowhom

In 2009, Poland and Sweden, ever attentive to the US’s geostrategic goals of isolating Russia and gaining control of China thereafter, initiated the Eastern Partnership program, which its sponsors said was intended to tighten ties with former Soviet Republics, such as Moldova, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine. A trade pact is a part of the Partnership’s Association Agreement (AA) deal.

What the Russians saw in the EU initiative was a repeat of the “NATO Syndrome,” in that what was promised would soon be betrayed, i.e. no NATO expansion in exchange for a Soviet agreement to the reunification of Germany.

To Russian eyes, NATO’s 1999 expansion throughout Eastern Europe and the subsequent celebratory bombing campaign against Serbia, inaugurated just one month later, and the still later Albanian annexation of Serbia’s heartland province of Kosovo, were altogether the Clinton Administration’s triple-combo opening salvos in an American campaign to recreate the Versailles Treaty’s cordon sanitaire. And the 2009 Association Agreement is but a Trojan horse whose only practical purpose is to advance US and EU interests at the expense of the former Soviet republics’ naïve hopes and Russian security.
read on...

RPI's Laughland on the Crimea Referendum

Wednesday March 19, 2014

RPI Advisor John Laughland weighs in on the Crimea vote to rejoin Russia, the breathtaking hypocrisy of the western governments and the disconnect between US and EU citizens and their governments. Of course the secession is illegal, Laughland says, but that also means that even the US Declaration of Independence was, strictly speaking, illegal. Dr. Laughland also offers his forecast as to the two possible outcomes of the standoff between Russia and the US/EU over Ukraine and Crimea. (Transcript here).


read on...

Subscribe

Authors

Tags