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The Unz Review •�An Alternative Media Selection$
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
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Quoting Mark Twain, President Vladimir Putin has made his first public statement on Syria during his Direct Line broadcast on Thursday. “Whoever wants to imagine Russia weakened…I want to recall the famous man and writer [Mark Twain], who once said: ‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’” During four and a half hours of... Read More
In the English-language media markets it is impossible for any journalist, editor, publisher or owner to be more corrupt, more of a liar, more of a fraud, and more of a success at selling all three than Rupert Murdoch. That was until the mass media at which Murdoch excelled were superseded and outread by the... Read More
President Vladimir Putin gave a party rally speech in Moscow on Saturday in which he omitted to mention seven of the eight domestic issues most troubling Russian voters – inflation; high interest-rate caused stagnation in the economy; corruption; low quality education; poor public health care; terrorism; and illegal immigrants. He made an exception for the... Read More
The illustration of power coming out of the barrel of a gun is from a comic book. Contemplating the reality of Russia’s position in Syria, no one in a position to know believes in cartoon captions, the credibility of the gun, or the direction in which the horse is now running. Military sources in Moscow... Read More
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The defeat of the Russian army in war discredits, not the soldiers who fought and died, but the commander-in-chief and the generals who were in command. Defeat on the battlefield also destroys Russian military honour as a political force in the country, just as its opposite, victory on the battlefield, threatens the civilian commander-in-chief with... Read More
When former president Dmitry Medvedev (leading image, left), deputy head of the Security Council; the Russian military bloggers and the GRU’s favoured journalist; are as silent on Russian military action in Syria as they are at the moment, the signal they are sending is unmistakeably loud. It is the sound of recriminations for President Vladimir... Read More
The head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), General Charles Brown (lead image, right), has just revealed by press leak that he and the chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, had talked by telephone last week, on November 27, and agreed not to disclose the contents of their call. If... Read More
There has never been a transition between US presidential administrations which has been so replete with new Washington-directed violence across the world. That’s to say, the escalation of wars already under way and the instigation of new ones to the furthest limits of the US empire’s reach. As the Pentagon war-gaming of the Reagan Administration... Read More
After Yulia Skripal has testified through her doctor that she was attacked with a poison spray in a restaurant minutes before she and her father, Sergei Skripal, collapsed on March 4, 2018, the British Government hearings on what happened have attempted to suppress her evidence. Yesterday, December 2, the hearings ended with a statement by... Read More
The Novichok show trial ended its public hearings last week in London with the revelation that it will not name the chemical constituents of the poison used in the attempted killing of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on March 4, 2018, and in the cause of death of Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018. By doing... Read More
In remarks to Russian journalists on Thursday evening, President Vladimir Putin confirmed that missile and drone strikes against the Ukraine’s military infrastructure and the electricity grid carried out on Thursday, and also earlier in the week, are the retaliation the Defense Ministry foreshadowed for the November 23-25 ATACMS strikes on Kursk. Detailed target and damage... Read More
Gorilla Radio Reviews the Coming Russian Message for the Trump Warfighters
On Tuesday afternoon, November 26, the Russian Defense Ministry issued an unusual bulletin revealing that since the Oreshnik strike on November 21, the US had launched two ATACMS attacks across the Ukrainian border on Russian military targets in the Kursk region. The first of these on an S-400 air defence unit on November 23 had... Read More
The story the British government began telling in March 2018 on the road to the war, which the British and their allies are now losing in the Ukraine, is that Russian assassins, on a mission approved by President Vladimir Putin, tried to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal with a poison weapon they left behind. As... Read More
President Vladimir Putin has announced that serial production of the new Oreshnik hypersonic, intermediate range, 36-warhead missile has commenced. He made this announcement at a special public meeting with Defense Ministry officials in the Kremlin on Friday, November 22. “There are no means of countering such a missile; no means of intercepting it exist in... Read More
This is the comic book version of what really happened, as revealed by the clumsiest judge in England – Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley, lead image, right). Even if all the evidence presented to Hughes and already endorsed by him is true – on the record of six and half years of British... Read More
On Sunday afternoon the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that a massive strike of air and sea-launched missiles and drones have struck and destroyed parts of the Ukrainian electricity grid in the western regions of the Ukraine, as well as in Odessa and Nikolaev in the southeast. The Mukachevo interconnector station in southwestern Ukraine has also... Read More
Yulia Skripal communicated from her bedside at Salisbury District Hospital on March 8, 2018, four days after she and her father Sergei Skripal collapsed from a poison attack, that the attacker used a spray; and that the attack took place when she and her father were eating at a restaurant just minutes before their collapse... Read More
Anthony Hughes, the retired judge (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley) directing the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry in London, opened the questioning of a senior British Government chemical warfare agent on Wednesday by telling him “you’re not bound by your statement, but by all means use it to refresh your recollection” — page 5. This is a... Read More
Vladimir Putin, September 5, 2024: “As for my preferences, it is not up to us to decide. After all, the American people will have to make their own choice. As I have already said, we favoured Mr Biden, the current President, but they took him out of the race. That said, he advised his supporters... Read More
To reflect upon, today’s Sabbath reading comes from two Russian texts. One was a prepared script followed by impromptu elaboration which took place in Sochi on November 7. The second text followed in Moscow after the notorious football match in Amsterdam which happened later on the same day. The first reading is from President Vladimir... Read More
The single most important witness in six years of investigations into the cause of Dawn Sturgess’s death, the pathologist appointed by the government to conduct her post-mortem, has testified that he failed to discover Novichok in his eleven-hour long autopsy. Instead, his official reports from 2018 reveal that he was told to find Novichok by... Read More
Forcing Sergei and Yulia Skripal into artificial coma, intubating them so that they could not speak, and barring them from public testimony are now revealed in the Novichok show trial under way in London. Resuscitating Dawn Sturgess from cardiac arrest and brain death in order to make her a victim of a Novichok attack delivered... Read More
The British Government’s narrative that Russian military agents, on orders from President Vladimir Putin, used Novichok in Salisbury in March 2018 continues to collapse. A secret chemical warfare agent revealed last week that two tests for Novichok, using special machines provided by the Porton Down chemical warfare laboratory, failed to confirm an organophosphate poison in... Read More
For more than two months now, President Vladimir Putin’s orders to the General Staff have been to shorten the range of the electric war campaign to the area east of Kiev and the Dnieper River, and west of the advancing line of Russian forces. The General Staff have responded by limiting their strikes to electricity... Read More
It’s a pity when a 760-page history of the Russian leadership’s thinking during the Cold War period, 1945 to 2022, earns consignment to the waste bin within the first nineteen pages, and in just three sentences. This ratio of toxicity to prolixity – 1 to 40 — is exceptional, although the price asked for it... Read More
The British Government was exposed in the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry this week as keeping Sergei and Yulia Skripal (lead image) unconscious to silence them. That was six years ago, when they were in Salisbury District Hospital in March 2018. Now, prevented from testifying in public at the public inquiry under way in London, they are... Read More
Ragpicking is a serious women’s business, extracting value from rubbish. Cheerleading is the unserious business of girls waving pompoms at football games. There are those who claim the Kazan Declaration is today’s equivalent of the Bretton Woods Final Act (1944) and Bandung Declaration (1955), or a “a huge manifesto”, or “victory for all decent freedom-loving... Read More
The British Government’s investigation of the alleged Novichok attacks against Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which they survived, and Dawn Sturgess, who died, has now run for six and half years. The public presentation of evidence and witnesses has completed its first week; the second week of hearings will begin next Monday, October 28. The hearings... Read More
A two-month delay in Russian missile strikes against Ukrainian electricity infrastructure west of the Dnieper River and secret talks on end-of-war terms by the Kremlin go-between Vladimir Medinsky (lead image, right) produced two signals from Kiev on Monday – one an offer by Vladimir Zelensky to reciprocate with a limit on Ukrainian missile and drone... Read More
The Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was murdered on October 20, 2011, and to mark the thirteenth anniversary of his death, the Russian Foreign Ministry received Qaddafi’s daughter, Aisha Qaddafi, in Moscow on Friday. This is the first open meeting in Russia between high-ranking Russian officials and the Qaddafi family. The political significance was buried in... Read More
According to the Russian Constitution amendments adopted in 2020, Vladimir Putin can run for re-election in 2030 and win another term until 2036, when he will be 84. The contest over the presidential succession may thus be postponed for another decade. Or else it is under way already. That’s one of the stakes in the... Read More
If you want to understand who is winning the American war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and also in the world’s commodity trade markets, you can start by calculating the life expectancy of a NATO-trained Ukrainian soldier on the front line, or of a NATO staff officer in a command bunker he thought was... Read More
Just days before Iran and Arab forces launched their October 1 operation to expose Israel’s military vulnerabilities, four Palestinian Americans launched the most serious threat to Israel’s survival in the economic war that is under way in parallel. On September 24 they filed an 89-page brief in a Florida state court to declare illegal US... Read More
As a rule, on these pages I (Gilbert Doctorow, lead image) do not write critiques or responses to the writings of others, but today will be an exception. A colleague in Germany sent me the link below to a remarkable essay by John Helmer which is too important to ignore. Then one reader of my... Read More
“The law is an ass” is an English expression of almost four hundred years of age. While credit for inventing the very first use of it has been argued over, there is no doubt that it was Charles Dickens in his Oliver Twist of 1838 who began the popularity of combining law and judges with... Read More
In the history of imperial conquest and rule of the Arabs – that’s Turkish, Italian, British, French, American, Israeli – decapitation of leaders has always been preferable to genocide of peoples because it’s much cheaper. Slavery, as the Portuguese empire first developed it, was the cost accountant’s solution to making genocide pay for itself –... Read More
A plea bargain for the Russian Telegram owner Pavel Durov (aka Paul Du Rove, lead image lower right)) has been arranged in Paris with President Emmanuel Macron (upper right) by their common friend, Xavier Niel (upper left), a French internet billionaire with a history of his own internet sex business, including paedophilia, which also ended... Read More
The last time an obscure official of junior rank named Vladimir Medinsky (lead image) was recorded officially as having words with President Vladimir Putin was on November 20, 2019. At the time Medinsky was the Minister of Culture, and he was briefing Putin on one of his portfolio activities, the St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum.... Read More
Presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeated his promise to end the Ukraine war the day after his re-election with a bribe for President Vladimir Putin and his two pro-American constituencies, the Central Bank of Russia and the Russian oligarchs. Applauded by an audience of New York lawyers and businessmen on Thursday afternoon, September 5, Trump... Read More
Sergei Kirienko, a former prime minister of Russia and currently the Number-2 man in charge of President Vladimir Putin’s staff, believes Russia can win the information war against the US and its allies. In his meetings behind closed doors at the Kremlin, Kirienko has revealed that he thinks Americans are so trusting in their press... Read More
Pavel Durov (lead image) aka Paul du Rove (“vagabond” in French) doesn’t put his money where his mouth is. This is because more than half the assets and almost half the revenues of Durov’s Telegram group of companies are digital units which Telegram itself programmes, stores, trades, values, and revalues, so the potential for concealment,... Read More
Remember the old adage — sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never harm me. In the war by the US and its Anglo-European allies to destroy Russia since 1945, the propaganda war has been lost by the Russians many times over. That war is still being lost. But for the first... Read More
Wherever you are, once you are in war, free speech doesn’t exist any longer. Truth telling is replaced by propaganda narratives enforced by censors and security services. Between the truth and the propaganda there is that burst of 280 characters – 40 to 70 words – which was first invented in 2006 and is known... Read More
Ignore the Anglo-American propaganda now circulating from Kiev that Russia’s military has suffered a grave military defeat in the Sahara desert, when Tuareg (Touareg) forces destroyed a Russian Wagner unit and Malian government forces in five days of battle at Tinzaouaten, on the desert border between Algeria and Mali. “Russia’s Wagner Group has suffered significant... Read More
On Mount Olympus, the ancient Greek one, there was no god of Hypocrisy. That’s because all of the gods were, starting with Zeus himself, the king of the gods. It is the same in Paris, as the organiser of the state ceremony of the Olympic Games has claimed the performance of a caricature of the... Read More
Combat losses of the Ukrainian armed forces along the front have accelerated to a current average of almost two thousand men a day, according to the Russian Defense Ministry’s daily briefing and bulletin. The damage or loss of weapons is also growing fast. In the first week of July a year ago, the average daily... Read More
There have always been Russians in the Kremlin who for reasons of imperialist or Orthodox ideology considered themselves exceptionalist in politics. That’s to say, as exceptional or more exceptional than the Americans in the White House. Since Mikhail Gorbachev ruled Russia forty years ago, there have also been Russian exceptionalists who have wanted, not to... Read More
Captain Obvious is an American cartoon hero. In Poland, however, he’s now being set up for prosecution on charges of treason for saying the obvious. That, according to the new Polish government and the US Ambassador in Warsaw, Mark Brzezinski, must not be allowed to be said. Instead, the Polish Captain O has said that... Read More
There have been many revolutions in the technology and the geography of global cargo transportation. The Portuguese design of caravels to cross the Atlantic and Indian Oceans from the 15th century; the replacement of wind with coal-fired steam in the shipping of the British empire which followed; and the invention of the petroleum engine for... Read More
The Jewish and Christian bibles got the idea down pat. “For this thing is from Israel,” said one of the writers whose compilation of warnings against worship of idols and competing gods is called the book of Hosea. “A craftsman made it, and it is not God. It will be broken to pieces, that calf... Read More
PastClassics
Analyzing the History of a Controversial Movement
The evidence is clear — but often ignored