Eve Ottenberg

The Empire Strikes Back, Against Slovakia and China

 

 

 

Eve Ottenberg

Tens of millions of Europeans died in World War II, making the European Union's most noble purpose and perhaps accomplishment the prevention of such slaughter ever happening on its territory again. However, the EU has its downside. Its leadership is insular, arrogant, given to featherbedding, frankly dictatorial and all too ready to project European aggression outward, via NATO – just look at the blatant provocation of Russia via Ukraine.

 

So while the EU's existence may ingeniously ensure Pax Europeana, that doesn't mean the EU as a whole, through NATO, won't ignite wars. Worse, to discipline its members, like Romania, or would-be members, such as Georgia and Ukraine, the EU, with CIA help, self-righteously stoops to foul tricks like cancelling elections and inciting coups and color revolutions. This is happening right now, and has been happening since January, in Slovakia, whose maverick leftist leader, Robert Fico, refused to die after a serious assassination attempt and, worse from the EU mandarin perspective, continues to promote peace with Russia.

 

Fico even – Oh horrors! – plans to attend Moscow's 80th World War II victory festivities in May. No matter that the Soviet Union won that war. As Soviet marshal Georgy Zhukov unforgettably said: "We liberated Europeans from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it." He hit the nail on the head, because indeed, they never did. Europeans just celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Auschwitz death camp liberation, pointedly not inviting the liberators who, most inconveniently, happened to be Russians in the Red Army, which was perhaps the most heroic military formation in human history.

 

Meanwhile, idiotic martial zeal combined with ferocious Russophobia infests the European political class like lice from the UK to Germany. One can only say, as Baltics deface memorial statues to World War II Soviet heroes and erect new ones to Nazis, that Zhukov was correct. Much of Europe's elite today officially prefers Nazis to Russians. How pathetic! How the mighty have fallen – into abject wickedness.

 

But not Fico. On January 24, he announced he would expel foreign instructors destabilizing Slovakia. This was after he warned on January 21 and 22 that the Slovak opposition was "preparing for a Maidan," as fruitlessly occurred a couple of months back in Georgia. The Slovak opposition would, Fico said, collaborate with foreign forces (indeed protestors were videoed waving American flags) and would seize government buildings. He singled out the foreign operatives linked to the recent attempted pro-EU coup in Georgia and to Ukraine's Maidan. Who are these foreign operatives? Well, Ukrainians, for one. Kiev's media not only supports the protests, because the Zelensky regime desperately wants to overthrow Fico, but also confessed involvement of Ukrainian groups in the protests.

 

Of course, the foreign-backed opposition calls for Fico to resign, but fortunately, he won't. Instead, he singled out Ukrainians January 25 "after Vladimir Zelensky endorsed the protests on social media," RT reported that day. Naturally foreign-supported NGOs fomented the demonstrations, composed of tens of thousands of protestors. "A third [of the protestors] are Ukrainians who are against the Slovak government," Fico said. And RT related how "he accused the organizers of spreading 'deceptive' claims that Slovakia is about to part ways with the EU."

 

So how could Ukraine finance these protests? Well, last I checked, the phenomenally corrupt Kiev government is awash in oceans of U.S. cash, courtesy of Joe "War Is My Legacy" Biden. Would it surprise anyone if the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) diverted a bundle of those dollars to overthrow European leaders it dislikes? Also, what about the CIA cutouts, the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID? Both have been quite active in Slovakia for years and, in other countries, were often implicated in color revolutions or attempted regime change operations. How else to explain all those American flags at those supposedly indigenous Slovak protests?

 

"Fico dismissed calls for his resignation," RT reports, "saying his cabinet is 'too seasoned and experienced' to be toppled by NGOs and activists, who he said are also active in Ukraine and Georgia." Fico, incidentally, back in 2023 blocked the previous Slovak "government's decision to send weapons to Kiev. He has since insisted the conflict should be resolved through diplomacy, and has criticized the EU's sanctions on Russia." No wonder Zelensky wants Fico out. What he would never dare try with a Donald Trump, he can attempt with smaller fry, namely European nations. The last days of the corrupt Kiev tyranny could get very ugly.

 

Slovakia isn't the only nation sporting a bullseye for western spooks' chicanery. On January 28 came news that, once again, Serbia is too. That's when so-called "anti-corruption" protests caused Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic to resign. While the New Left Review argued on February 7 that this is a homegrown uprising, it's hard not to regard it with a jaundiced eye. Long a locus for NATO hostility – I mean, the west BOMBED Yugoslavia in 1999, a final, belated act of revenge for wildly successful, intrepid Yugoslav partisans defeating WWII fascists and having the nerve to install partisan Josip Tito as premier for many decades  – Serbia's president Aleksander Vucic has lately held the title of persona non grata at EU headquarters in Brussels and among foreign policy honchos in Washington, for the simple reason that he insists on Serbian sovereignty and freedom to pursue its long-standing, historic friendship with Russia. That, of course, is a big no-no for the west, hence its continuous nastiness directed at Serbs. So once again, mass protests against the west's so-called "authoritarian" bogeyman du jour, namely the Vucic government. What a surprise!

 

This supposedly organic uprising occurred just one day after news of a prodigious cyber-attack on the new, magnificently cheap, effective, superior to any similar thing American, and open-source Chinese AI, DeepSeek. Well, of course there was an enormous attack; DeepSeek's arrival in the world caused U.S. chipmaker Nvidia's stock to tank immediately by a gargantuan $465 billion and overall U.S. tech stocks to lose $600 billion – all in one day; a record and not a good one for the decaying capitalist Empire.

 

And this was no measly little cyber-attack. "From the 25th to the 29th  [January] over 83 hours, the DeepSeek cluster server was subjected to over 230 million DDoS malicious requests per second," reported Teortaxes on X January 30, "with the total attack volume the equivalent to the total internet traffic of Europe for three days." As Chinahand noted on X the same day, the only group capable of such a malware assault, or rather cranking "a botnet" at this scale, outside China itself, is the NSA. Meanwhile without even a peep about this undoubtedly American mega-cyber revenge, CNBC quotes an "expert" February 2, Matt Pearl, former advisor to Biden's National Security Council, who had the brazen nerve to claim DeepSeek could launch a massive malware injection with just one update to the app. Who sez corporate media stopped feeding us a steaming pile of propaganda garbage just cuz the DNC's no longer chief of the disinfo dumpster?  

 

Incidentally, Zerohedge tweeted, also on January 30, that DeepSeek has been blocked in Italy by the privacy regulator. But far-right senator Josh Hawley outdid everyone, even the U.S. navy, which banned DeepSeek January 29 citing national security concerns, while NASA, Texas and Taiwan also banned the glamorous new Chinese AI. Hawley, however, blazed a trail into absolutist territory, introducing a bill the week DeepSeek debuted that "would ban exports or imports of AI technology from China, restrict U.S. companies from conducting R&D in China, and prohibit all investments in Chinese AI companies," reported Paul Triolo January 30.

 

However, Triolo adds: "China's AI sector is highly competitive, and firms are increasingly embracing open source/weight releases of advanced models and benchmarking them against industry leaders. In this context, the focus on DeepSeek may seem misplaced: U.S. regulators have not likely anticipated the rapid release of more Chinese open source models that are very capable, and likely to drive even further uptake in the U.S. on a wide range of platforms." In short, those in paranoid western agglomerations, who aim to limit or cripple one new Chinese AI model, miss the boat because there are many models, and they likely waste everyone's time with their hysteria over something that in fact is unambiguously broadly beneficial.

 

So full-on western assault on a winning competitor, because the one thing shady operations like the NSA won't tolerate is those commies potentially beating us at the money game. Naturally, Uncle Sam had to leap to defend techno-feudalism, since Washington had recently announced with much fanfare a $500 billion investment by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank in American AI, a venture yclept Stargate, and that money now looks like it might have been flushed down the toilet, because the Chinese did it cheaper – for $6 million – smarter, faster and to use an antiquated concept, socially and morally BETTER. How is it better? Well, DeepSeek is open source, anyone can use it once they download the app and um, it could kill much of the market for expensive Silicon Valley AI. In fact, the last week in January DeepSeek attained Numero Uno downloaded status on Apple's App store. In short, American techno-feudalism is losing the war for the future to smart, scrappy, communist innovation. Whodathunkit?

 

But don't expect our American oligarchs to go down without a fight. The west may not be able to win actual wars, but it's great at making trouble and sowing chaos, which is why the west versus the east and Global South has shaped up to be a frozen conflict for decades to come. Congressional nitwits and neo-con lunatics will try to make it a hot one. But honestly, wouldn't you prefer a cold war? What are a few abortive cyber-attacks and shameless and degraded attempted coups, measured against a world population either starving to death via nuclear winter or burnt to radioactive ash and glowing in the dark? That's the choice so recently on offer from the lunatic Biden regime, which pressed its thumb on the Atomic Armageddon side of the scale. You pick. Me, I'd take a cold war any day.

War With Iran Is a Lousy Idea

 

 

 

 

Eve Ottenberg

Generally speaking, starting a war out of the blue is a bad idea. This is the lesson, if such was needed, of the utterly unprovoked 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and one our rulers would do well not to forget – a war with millions of displaced Iraqis, hundreds of thousands of dead ones, tens of thousands of American soldiers KIA, a refugee crisis in Europe, and all for what? For nothing, that's what. For some grudge George Bush had against Saddam Hussein and for a hoax put over on the American people by Colin "Liar of the Decade" Powell at the UN regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. So that was a truly crappy idea, but make no mistake – a U.S. assault on Iran would be orders of magnitude worse.

 

War between the U.S. and Iran is not by any means a given. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu might like it to be, but we can hope Donald Trump has other ideas. Since he does know what a catastrophe such a conflict would be not just for the Middle East, but for the world, since it could go nuclear, dragging in Iran's ally Russia, and would also immediately tank the global economy – since Trump does know all this, there is reason to hope peace will prevail. Indeed, on February 5, right after his alarming Gaza-Riviera bombshell, Trump assured the world that he did not want combat with Iran and announced a maximum economic pressure campaign instead. There have also been heartening rumors of a confab between Trump and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian.

 

How would war with Iran blow up the global economy? Well, Tehran under attack would doubtless close the strait of Hormuz and large parts of the Persian Gulf, blocking the flow of much of the globe's oil. Energy prices would skyrocket. Just think how much economic damage the Houthis did – they held the U.S. navy at bay and shut down the Red Sea and Suez Canal. Multiply that by many hundreds, perhaps thousands, and you get the financial catastrophe a U.S. assault on Iran would kick off.

 

Also terrible, any American or American and Israeli war on Iran would doubtless convince the Persian elite that they need nuclear weapons, pronto. Despite the ayatollah's fatwa against the Bomb, bigwigs in the Iranian military want it and press their case. Exhibit A is Libya. Gaddafi gave up on nuclear weapons and look what happened to him, so the argument goes. However, in persuading Iran to remain non-nuclear, the U.S. has an unexpected ally: Russia. Fresh off signing a security pact with Tehran, Moscow would likely not eagerly embrace being an immediate party to nuclear proliferation and possibly war. The kremlin wants Middle East peace and knows very well any Iranian rush to get the bomb will ignite a regional perhaps global conflagration. Russia did not make a deal with Iran to become embroiled in a conflict, it made a deal to promote business, which implies PREVENTING a war.

 

Furthermore, Iran has now joined BRICS and did so for sound financial reasons: heavily sanctioned by the U.S., Tehran sees economic alternatives to the west in BRICS, an organization whose thrust is trade and development. However, it is not impossible that BRICS, like the European Union, could decide it needs a military component, maybe not full-fledged a la NATO, but something along those lines. BRICS is already THE international economic heavyweight, but with a military wing it would be frighteningly formidable. To prevent even the larval stage of such a military formation, one step would be Washington halting the threats and insults it habitually vomits up at Iran.

 

Instead, the Exceptional Empire could promote talks between the two arch-enemies, Iran and Israel. Preposterous, you say? Well, stranger things have happened. Look at the sudden Iran/Saudi Arabia détente that astounded the world in March 2023. In one swift swoop, Chinese diplomacy altered the allegiances and alignments of the Middle East, something it, perhaps in partnership with the U.S., could attempt vis a vis Iran and Israel. It's worth a try. Indeed, any stab at negotiations could defuse the standoff between Tehran and Jerusalem, a standoff that came after two Iranian missile barrages at Israel and one serious Israeli counterattack. This is not something any sane person wishes to see repeated. Again, a regional war would bust the world's economy and would very possibly go nuclear. Iran ain't going away. All the wishful thinking in Jerusalem won't change that. It's been around for 4000 years, and while the neo-cons are stupid enough to dream of banishing it, you and the rest of us don't have to be.

 

In this lull between hostilities, it's also worth noting that Iran finally has a president who, despite the required cant, is more amenable to peace than his predecessor, the very warlike Ebrahim Raisi, who, it's safe to say, looked at war with Israel in a "let's do it" manner. Pezeshkian may not covet the Bomb, either. Or at least that's what Trump declared February 4, when signing the maximum pressure memorandum. "There are many people at the top ranks of Iran that do not want to have a nuclear weapon," Trump announced. As Responsible Statecraft phrased it that day: "In one sentence, the president blows up decades of Washington dogma."

 

The article's author, Trita Parsi, went on: "I cannot recall any U.S. president ever deviating from the quasi-official American line that Tehran is dead set on getting nukes…The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran caused a major controversy for simply assessing that Iran did not have an active nuclear weapons program, even though it also concluded 'with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.'"

 

Well, there are likely lotsa nations keeping that option open. If the U.S. goes to war with all of them over that slim chance, we're looking at blowing up planet Earth. Of course, Israel's perspective differs. Having been on the receiving end of two (provoked) ferocious Iranian missile assaults, it's no surprise that the idea of nuclear-armed Tehran causes the jitters in Jerusalem. But that's all the more reasons for diplomacy and not doing things like bombing Iranian embassies or assassinating government guests in Tehran. Far better to transform an enemy into a peaceful neighbor than to incite a war that will then convince that enemy that yes indeed, he DOES need nukes.

 

For 25 years, Netanyahu has shrieked that Tehran will soon have a nuclear weapon and therefore the U.S. must preemptively bomb it. For 25 years this has been proved false. "And three former heads of the Mossad – Ephraim Halevi, Tamir Pardo and Meir Dagan – as well as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak," writes Parsi, "are all on the record rejecting the idea that Iran constitutes an existential threat to Israel." That supposed existential threat is Netanyahu's convenient and manipulative hallucination. It doesn't have to be ours. Indeed, it would be very nice to stop the U.S.-war-with-Iran hogwash from percolating through Washington, once and for all.