Author: The Board

Ukrainians, please continue dying so that Americans can have good paying jobs

If you wanted to have an audio and visual illustration of the idiom a pack of lies, watch and listen to Undersecretary of state for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland that took place on February 22, 2024 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Taking her words for truth, you get the idea that Ukraine is winning the war, harming Russia enormously while improving its economy. You get the impression that the whole world supports Ukraine and very few irrelevant states are on Russia’s side. You also get the impression that (crushing, as she put it) sanctions imposed on Russia are bringing Moscow to its knees and Russia’s failure is a matter of time. You also learn that the many Ukrainian refugees are impatient to return the their country, which with the aid of the West will soon reform and rebuild. My goodness!

Do you still remember Madeleine Albright? Victoria Nuland resembles her physically and mentally. The same ugly face, the same stout body and the same thirst for blood.

Listening to Nuland’s speech and the following interview with Victoria Nuland, you could also notice her visceral hated of Vladimir Putin. She mentioned his surname almost every other sentence. The more she mentioned the president of Russia’s surname, the more you could see how helpless she felt in her anger. Putin, Putin, Putin, all the time Putin! Victoria Nuland is possessed – obsessed – fixated on Vladimir Putin. Putin has invaded her mind and is there to stay. She will spew out Putin, Putin, Putin even on her death bed. And no wonder. You see, Victoria Nuland thought Ukraine was hers for grabs and now she has found out that all her efforts has come to naught. Poor Victoria… Putin, Putin, Putin – all the time through the speech and the following interview. Putin, Putin, Putin! Victoria Nuland most likely has a doll representing Putin and she regularly pricks it with pins. I just dread to think what vocabulary she uses thinking about her nemesis – Putin – when not standing on ceremony.

Just as a broken clock is right twice a day, so was Victoria Nuland. She said, Most of the aid for Ukraine ended up in the United States, creating good paying jobs. Ukrainians, did you hear? Shed your blood, lose your hands and legs, die in the battlefield so that the Americans can have good paying jobs (and the American oligarchs can enrich themselves)! 

Two deaths so alike and yet so different

It was a few days ago that Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison. What a gift for the Western world, what a remarkable coincidence! With the fall of Avdiivka and the approaching presidential election in Russia, with the farmer protests that have shaken every other EU country, with the difficulties that the American president has getting yet another approval of by Congress for his financial aid for Ukraine, Alexei Navalny’s death is really a godsend. Of course all the media and commentators have shown themselves to be soothsayers: they all know for certain that Navalny was murdered. By Putin’s henchmen, no need to add. They all know it, the soothsayers that they are, no evidence is required. The consumers of the media, properly preconditioned for years, can only nod their heads in agreement.

In 2000, also in a prison, died Slobodan Milošević, Yugoslavia’s and then Serbia’s president. Nobody ever came up with the idea that he might have been murdered. God forbid! Slobodan Milošević was incarcerated in a democratic European Union, which honours human rights and is averse to deceit, violence, illegal methods of interrogation, injustice and the rest of it. Slobodan Milošević was justly brought to court because – unlike Navalny – he was the bad guy, who was responsible fully or partly as the case may be for no smaller a crime than genocide of Kosovars and Croats. Though Alexei Navalny according to his own words felt intense hatred towards non-Russians in Russia, which was familiar to anyone who only cared to listen to or read his statements, though because of that Alexei Navalny would have been termed as a white supremacist in the West, miraculously his controllers turned a blind eye to his political beliefs.

But then, do we wonder? Everything and anything is used – abused – misused – (choose the appropriate word) – to suit the managers of the world. Serbs needed to be bombed by NATO because they were reported to have murdered a number of Kosovars and Croats; Ukrainians, officially followers of the Stepan Bandera racist and chauvinist ideology need to be unconditionally supported by the collective West, which otherwise is oh so sensitive when other comes to nationalisms, racism, fascism and similar ideolo gies.

Alexei Navalny was a hugely inflated front man if ever there was one. Look up the English Wikipedia article about him and compare with that devoted to Vladimir Putin. Alexei Navalny, a man whose political popularity in Russia never exceeded 5% (five) enjoys a text of 78 PDF A4 pages, whereas Vladimir Putin, a recognized leader with huge popularity – 107. John Kennedy – one of the better known modern-age American presidents – has a mere 55 pages. Even John Paul II, the most popular and widely recognizable pope, is no match for Navalny: the Wiki article about him is 71 pages long.

Do you remember how Slobodan Milošević landed up in jail and how was Alexei Navalny imprisoned? The difference is striking and telling. Let us recall. Under the pressure from the collective West Slobodan Milošević, once he ceased performing the function of president of Serbia, was arrested by his own authorities, his own state and handed over to the Hague to stand trial there. How did Alexei Navalny end up in prison? Let us recall it. He happened to be in Russia where he was oh so unjustly prosecuted and persecuted, and one day he sank into a coma due to a poison administered to him by the notorious KGB (Russian equivalent of the American CIA), or at least that’s the official Western story. Navalny’s wife demanded that her husband be released to Germany for medical treatment and Vladimir Putin, the mad dictator that he is, let him leave Russia, knowing full well that his agents had bungled the operation of poisoning Navalny (obviously he was on the way of surviving) and knowing full well that German doctors – chemists – pharmacists – would find the traces of the substance that was to kill Navalny. Nevertheless the dissenter was released and cured of his poisoning in Germany, and of course German specialists found the traces of poison, didn’t they? Once cured, safe and sound, Alexei Navalny decided to return to Russia to be prosecuted and persecuted by the undemocratic regime. Why for heaven’s sake? To make things even more Hollywood-like, before returning to Russia, Navalny managed to produce a documentary which exposed Putin s a man who stashed away millions in order to build a palace for himself in the Crimea. Only after the film was made public and shown on YouTube did Alexei Navalny go back to Russia. What could he expect there? The really interesting question is: did Alexei Navalny really want to go back or was he made to? Did not the Russian authorities by letting him out of Russia show that they wanted to get rid of him rather than have him imprisoned? What was Navalny promised in return for agreeing to do time in prison? Who promised it?

You see, it was not so, as in Slobodan Milošević’s case, that the Russian government pressurized Germany to release Navalny. No. Navalny appears to have been a pawn in the hands of powerful players who traded his life for political benefits. He seemed to be useless in the West, but very useful inside Russia. A prisoner of conscience! Living evidence of the dictatorial and inhumane Kremlin authorities! That’s the message. That Navalny was sentenced for corruption and other acts of violating the law is not on the radar of the Western media. He was important as a card to be played and sacrificed if need be.

Slobodan Milošević was Serbia’s and formerly Yugoslavia’s patriot; Alexei Navalny was a traitor to Russia. Slobodan Milošević’s death was of course – how otherwise? – of natural causes; Alexei Navalny’s demise was of course – how otherwise? – murder in cold blood. End of story. 

Gefira 81: The indomitable spirit

It were the Mongols in the Middle Ages, it was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century, it was the Swedish King Charles XII at the beginning of the 18th century, it was Napoleon along with half of Europe at the beginning of the 19th century, it was Hitler along with half a Europe in mid 20th century, it is NATO now. They all wanted to conquer, subjugate, make dependent, carve up, destroy Russia and they all have failed, though at first they usually reported initial victories. Historians put the successful Russian resistance now to the vastness of Russia’s territory, now to climatic conditions, now to the stamina of the Russian soldier (Frederick the Great is reported to have said that it is not enough to shoot dead a Russian soldier to make him fall: you also need to knock him down.), now to the incompetence or arrogance or excessive self-assuredness of the aggressors. Be that as it may – certainly not one factor can explain a complex phenomenon like a big war with a big country – there is also something referred to as the Russian spirit. It is not without reason that historians, journalists or politicians around the globe like to warn potential conquerors against waking the Russian bear: the bear may seem calm, tamed or at times lethargic and downright weak, but woe to anyone who decides to poke the bear in the eye!

Gefira 81 takes a closer look at the Russian spirit. To be precise, we survey a number of popular songs and scan their lyrics with the aim of finding out about the morale in Russian society in the face of the ongoing war. There are a large number of new, popular, patriotic songs that are sung by young performers and usually accompanied by patriotic video content. All this can of course be denounced as sheer Kremlin propaganda, as anything that comes from Russia. Still, we believe the reader deserves to know. By way of comparison, Sergei Eisenstein’s movies Battleship Potemkin (Броненосец Потёмкин), Alexander Nevsky (Александр Невский) and Ivan the Terrible (Иван Грозный ) or Vladimir Mayakovsky’s revolutionary poems might be dismissed as Bolshevik propaganda (which they doubtless were), and yet at the same time the ardour, the passion along with the artistry and the imaginative skills show beyond a shadow of a doubt that at least the creators were fervent and ardent believers in the cause that they advocated in their art. If the creators were such ardent believers in the cause, so must have been millions of others, if only their followers in art. The same is certainly true in the case of the patriotic songs composed and sung in today’s Russia.

In the financial section of our bulletin, we briefly describe the situation in China ahead of the next plenum of the CCP and the associated opportunities for investors. We also provide a concise analysis of the situation on the metals market and the US stock market. Finally, we draw the attention of our readers and investors to new drugs and their producers in order to round off our recommendations.

 

Gefira Financial Bulletin #81 is available now

  • Why the West won’t conquer Russia
  • Brussels versus economic freedom
  • What is happening on the metals market
  • The US stock market rises like water in a narrow channel

Alternative to family or the downward spiral of the Western world

Remnants of the normal family, single mothers by the millions, polygamy, chosen families formed by homosexuals, cohabitation, patchwork family and finally(?) communities of responsibilities – that’s the diversity in full swing in Germany. You might as well part from the family model made up of a mum and dad, of a granny and grandpa, a family full of siblings. This is history.

Deutsche Welle (DW) is a German version of American CNN or British BBC in that the general views laid down in any of them are reflected in the other two, so what we learn from any of these media outlets reveals what the powers that be want the world to look like. Now on February 13, 2024 DW ran an article entitled German society seeks alternatives to family which is an insight into the future of the Western world in terms of the future of the family. The text is about “the German government plans to introduce a new legal mechanism to help people in non-romantic relationships to take responsibility for one another.” Gee… People in non-romantic relationship… It is stated as a matter of fact that the “way that people in Germany live, love, parent and age is changing”. Statistical data are appalling: “32% of people aged 65 and over in the EU (34% in Germany) lived alone in 2022 (…) Today, around 33% of children are born to unmarried parents in Germany, with the divorce rate at 39.9% in 2021.” Hence – as we learn – Germany stands in need of the “biggest family law reform in decades”, which – as we are assured – is agreed upon by “Germany’s coalition government of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP).” What does the reform consist in?

In the new legal concept of Community of Responsibility (Verantwortungsgemeinschaft). Such communities of responsibility would be made up of between two and six people who will be provided by the law with the right and obligation of responsibility for one another like they were members of a family. And you know what? These communities of responsibility are modelled on “chosen families” created by queer people. Wow! Enter the new family. Unrelated single seniors, single parents, single – you name them – who otherwise ought to be anchored in a family and be taken care of by the family’s members will make up “communities” and take responsibility for its members. It does not occur to the managers of Germany to advertise having families and children and good relationships within those families. No, by hell no! The only solution they can think of is to legally accelerate the downward death spiral of the German-cum-immigrant society into the abyss. Sure, there are dissenting opinions and they are voiced by Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and – yes, you guessed it right – “populist” AfD. (The more alert among us have long noticed that the classifier “populist” is supposed to turn us away from a party or a movement or a politician).

To make it manifestly clear: we are going to have remnants of the normal family, single mothers by the millions, polygamy (recognized by German law in the case of such marriages having been concluded abroad!), chosen families formed by homosexuals, cohabitation, patchwork families and finally(?) communities of responsibilities. Diversity at work also in this sphere of human life. When you begin to think that it cannot go any longer, they never stop to surprise you. Lonely and especially elderly individuals, middle-aged childless women duped by feminism to whose principles they have stuck most of their life spurning the idea of having a family make those people profoundly unhappy. What do the authorities and the ideologues do to handle this existential question? They chart a new social course, a course towards a society of atomized individuals lossely recombined in communities. It never occurs to them to answer the question of what accounts for the present state of the family, of why the family has been suffering these injuries for decades in the first place. If they had, they might have arrived at a different conclusion. Rather, they seem to be treating the society that they manage like disposable and replaceable chattel, like farm animals. Isn’t it perplexing to think that just as farm animals usually do not have families or but for a very short time, so, too, humans have placed themselves/have been placed in the same position? For years the family has been attacked wantonly, men and especially women have been dissuaded from getting married and having (especially many) children, divorce has been presented as an attainment of humanity and now we are faced with the outcome that was not all that difficult to foresee, or was it? Either the begetters of the communities of responsibility are incompetent regarding the human condition or they keep enacting laws right out of the playbook of the powers that be. The powers that be obviously tend to think that they can tweak the human nature – both its physique and psyche (Yuval Harari, Klaus Schwab) – and rather than cultivate the family, they experiment on it, trying to replace it with a number of knock-offs. They might want to be reminded of the fact that although we communicate via mobiles around the globe and have landed man on the moon, pregnancy still takes nine months while our lifespan is as limited as it used to be: the only difference being that thanks to better life conditions we have more octo- and nonagenarians. Yet, we do not live to be 120, do we? Contrary to what mad feminists may have said and written – family is a concentration camp for women (Betty Friedan) – family is no invention of the human mind but a biological – and evolutionary conditioned, if you please – fact. Why experiment on it rather than restore it? 

Farmers against the European Union

Over the past few weeks, we have heard almost daily about farmer protests and other countries where farmers have taken to the streets with their tractors. According to the latest news, protests have taken place in at least 14 European Union (EU) countries, and they all had a common goal. The fight against EU policies and regulations to be introduced with the Green Deal. According to interviews with European agricultural organizations, the main reason for the protests is the increase in production costs for farmers, while the community is flooded with products that do not have to meet certain quality requirements. Farmers are protesting against EU directives that have been damaging their businesses for years by imposing significant restrictions on them. This leads to a reduction in the competitiveness of domestic agricultural production in favor of products from third countries. Worse, the new plans being considered by the EU could make agricultural production in the European Union completely unprofitable.

According to the latest information, the farmers’ protests have already begun to have an effect. For the time being, the European Commission is withdrawing from one of the projects unfavorable to farmers, but this will certainly not be enough for the protesters.

We hope that the farmers will not give up so easily and that they will get their way. The European Union and the whole world have just recently learned the lesson of the end of the globalization of supply chains, and now something as important as food is supposed to come from outside Europe? The direction in which the European Union is heading, largely due to its insane pursuit of zero emissions, is downright incomprehensible. Soon there will be nothing left to eat, home heating will become a luxury, and we will all switch to horses… unless it turns out that this mode of transportation also produces too much CO2.

Enter Oleksandr Syrskyi or the latest stage of the Russo-Russian civil war

On February 2024, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, replaced Valerii Zaluzhnyi with Oleksandr Syrskyi as commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army. Who is General Oleksandr Syrskyi?

He is an ethnic Russian, born in central Russia to Russian parents with Russian relatives the length and breadth of his family. He graduated from a Soviet military academy and swore allegiance as a Soviet military officer to the Soviet Union. It so happened that during the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union Oleksandr Syrskyi served in Ukraine and was faced with a choice: either to relocate to Russia and serve in the Russian army or to stay in Ukraine and serve in the Ukrainian army. As it were, during the Yeltsin era, when Russia was afflicted with all kinds of crises – economic, social, political – its army was also in deep trouble. That explains why though Oleksandr Syrskyi with the aid of his father – a retired Soviet colonel – sought employment in the Russian armed forces he could only be offered a position that was much below his military rank. That made him reconsider. Since the Ukrainian army offered him a higher rank, he made his choice. In furtherance of his career.

Still, his parents and his brother has remained and continue to live in Russia, loyal to their country and President Putin, taking part in the annual Immortal Regiment marches.

Oleksandr Syrskyi was born in the Vladimir Oblast (region, province), some 200 km east of Moscow, in 1965. His paternal grandfather fought throughout the entire Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, and was awarded the medal For Bravery and the Order of the Red Star; his maternal grandfather went to the front as a volunteer and died in an ambush. Syrskyi has a Ukrainian wife and two sons of which one has been living in Australia for years and remains highly critical of his father’s disloyalty towards Russia.

The new commander-in-chief is said not to enjoy popularity in the army. Contrarily, he is nicknamed either a “Russian officer”, or “Soviet general”, or “Bakhmut butcher”. He earned the last of the nicknames after his inefficient command during the fight for Bakhmut, where it is said he did not particularly economize on the soldiers’ blood. Needless to say, Oleksandr Syrskyi needed to learn the Ukrainian language (just as President Zelenskyy) and speaks it with a Russian accent.


No wonder that President Putin describes the ongoing hostilities as civil war. Russians kill Russians just as Spaniards killed Spaniards during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, or Americans killed Americans during the War of Secession of 1861-65, or the English killed the English during the times of the English Civil War of 1642-51.

Towards the end of the interview that Tucker Carlson conducted with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin told a short story related to him from the front line in Ukraine. The story was about a Ukrainian unit that was encircled by the Russian troops with no chance of either winning the skirmish or making their way through the encirclement. The Russians proposed surrender to which the encircled Ukrainians replied – in Russian: Russians! never surrender. There you have it. 

Argentina’s President Milei successful against the Davos elites

In December last year, we wrote about Javier Milei – the recently elected President of Argentina. Now, with his recent speech in Davos, he has turned the bottom into the top.

To understand what happened and what Milei got himself into, you first need to comprehend what exactly the World Economic Forum (WEF) is and who makes it up. The WEF is the world’s elite: the CEOs of the world’s richest companies (only companies with billions in revenue are invited to the Forum), leading bankers and technology specialists, politicians, representatives of major business organizations, lobbyists, selected intellectuals, journalists and activists of all kinds. The WEF meetings are therefore full of people who use their connections and influence to try to steer the world in a direction that benefits them and not necessarily the majority of people. It’s about power and money, not about a better life for ordinary citizens.

The aforementioned elite meet every year in Davos to present their proposals on how they want to intervene in our lives. They negotiate agreements among themselves and exert pressure on the world’s most influential politicians. In the meantime, of course, there is a lot of empty talk and boring debates about the world’s social and economic problems. The founder of the forum is Klaus The-Great-Reset Schwab, who became known as an advocate of collectivism. He is credited with the famous saying: You will have nothing and be happy.

This is where Milei comes into play. In a place where the ideas of feminism, birth control and increased government intervention in the economy are supported year after year, where the foundations for Agenda 2030 and its associated eco-terrorism were laid, Milei looks the globalists in the eye and dismantles their propaganda simply and vividly by exposing the lies of the globalists.

In many of his interviews and speeches, Milei refers to the so-called culture war. In his view, the causes of Argentina’s decline are cultural problems and moral decay. Among other things, this gives rise to the deep belief that the state is the guarantor for the satisfaction of citizens’ needs. At the same time, the Argentinian president points out that state intervention is counterproductive, as it should only contribute to the opposite when trying to solve a problem.

Here we summarize the most important theses of his speech in Davos:

1. Capitalism creates prosperity and is moral

Socialism leads to impoverishment and is based on violence. Wherever socialism has been introduced, it has brought more harm than good.

“The West is in danger because it has opened itself up to socialist ideas. It was capitalism that liberated humanity from mass poverty and created unimaginable prosperity. (…) In the countries where we should be defending the values of the free market, private property and other institutions of libertarianism, parts of the political and economic establishment – some because of flaws in their theoretical approach, others out of a desire for power – are undermining the foundations of libertarianism by opening the door to socialism and potentially condemning us to poverty, misery and stagnation. It should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it has been tried. It has failed economically as well as socially and culturally. It has also contributed to the deaths of more than 100 million people.”

So capitalism, rather than today’s Western neo-Marxism, is the way to abolish poverty.

2. Socialism is a repressive and unjust system:

“(…) Social justice is neither fair nor beneficial to society. Quite the opposite. It is an inherently unjust idea because it is based on force. It is unjust because the state is financed by taxes and taxes are levied by force. Or would any of you say that you pay taxes of your own free will? In other words, the state finances itself through coercion, and the higher the tax burden, the greater the coercion and the less the freedom. Advocates of social justice assume that the entire economy is a cake that can be shared. Yet, this cake did not fall from the sky. It is wealth created by what Israel Kirzner, for example, calls the process of market discovery. If there is no demand for the goods produced by a company, that company will fail if it does not adapt to the demands of the market. If it produces a good quality product at an attractive price, then it will be successful and produce more because the market is a process of discovery in which the capitalist finds the right direction in the course of his actions. If the state, however, punishes the capitalist for his success and blocks him in this discovery process (through excessive regulation, as in the EU – author’s note), it destroys his motivation, and the result is that he produces less and the pie shrinks, which damages society as a whole. By inhibiting these processes of discovery and making it difficult to adopt what has been discovered, collectivism inhibits the entrepreneur and prevents him from flourishing.”

3. The fight for women’s rights or nature conservation is just a pretext:

“When the socialists realized that the workers were not getting poorer under capitalism, but richer, they changed their strategy. Today, the class struggle between capitalists and workers has been replaced by alleged conflicts between men and women or between man and nature. It is claimed that to save the environment, population growth must be controlled; abortion is promoted”.

4. Public opinion is the result of decades of “brainwashing” in the direction desired by the elites: 

“The neo-Marxists have changed public opinion in a long process of taking control of the media, the universities and even international organizations. As everyone here knows, the WEF is one of the latter. Socialist ideas must be fought frontally and vociferously.”

5. Socialists have more than one name:

“There are many varieties of socialism in the broadest sense. Socialists are not only those who call themselves socialists, but also social democrats, Christian democrats, communists, Keynesians, Nazis, nationalists and globalists. They all share a belief in regulation and the state”.

6. The real heroes are the entrepreneurs. The state, on the other hand, is only a threat to freedom:

“The real heroes of society are entrepreneurs. They are creators of wealth who can be proud of making profits by meeting the needs of others. They should not be allied with the state, not even through the WEF. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem. The state is a threat to freedom.”

Since Milei’s speech, the number of views of his video on the official WEF channel has exceeded half a million. Is that a lot? Just look at the other “great speakers” who have lagged far behind. The conversation with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for example, reached 56,000, the speech by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen 42,000, and the other speeches received even less attention. (As at the end of January 2024)

An interesting case is the speech by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who, as the country’s extreme socialist leader – i.e. in complete opposition to Milei – made a staid appearance and barely reached 12,000 views. In his speech, he talks about everything and nothing. He mentions the current problems and challenges, but offers no solutions. The Spanish Prime Minister’s speech was preceded by congratulations on Spain’s strong economic growth, which the Prime Minister himself also boasted about. So let us quote here the conclusions of one of Spain’s leading independent economists, Daniel Lacalle, who summarizes it as follows: ‘The reality in which Spain finds itself today is different from the one presented by the Spanish government under Pedro Sanchez. The ruling socialists are using the same techniques that the Greek socialists resorted to at the end of the 1990s. Namely, they are increasing public spending and debt to hide the fact that investment and consumption in the country have stalled and exports are falling. Taxes are being increased because/although tax revenues have been falling in recent years. The choice between because and although in the last sentence reveals what you think about the right economic policy.