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pettania · 2 years

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Nobel Lecture given by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 2022 Center for Civil Liberties / Центр Громадянських Свобод, delivered by Oleksandra Matviichuk , Oslo, 10 December 2022.

Time to take responsibility

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, dear members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of Ukraine and citizens of the world.

This year, the entire Ukrainian nation was waiting for the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize laureates. We see this Prize as a recognition of the efforts of the Ukrainian people, who have bravely stood up to the attempts to destroy peaceful development of Europe, as well as a celebration of the work being done by human rights activists in order to prevent military threat for the entire world. We are proud of having Ukrainian language heard during the official ceremony for the first time in history.

We are receiving the Nobel Peace Prize during the war started by Russia. This war has been going on for eight years, 9 months and 21 days. For millions of people, such words as shelling, torture, deportation, filtration camps have become commonplace. But there are no words which can express the pain of a mother who lost her newborn son in a shelling of the maternity ward. A moment ago, she was caressing her baby, calling him by his name, breastfeeding him, inhaling his smell – and the next moment a Russian missile destroyed her entire universe. And now her beloved and longed-for baby lies in the smallest coffin in the world.

There are no available solutions for the challenges we and the whole world are facing now. People from different countries are also fighting for their rights and freedoms in extremely difficult circumstances. So, today I will at least try to ask the right questions so that we could start looking for these solutions.

First. How can we make human rights meaningful again?

Survivors of the World War II are no longer around. And the new generations began to take rights and freedoms for granted. Even in developed democracies, forces questioning the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are on the rise. But human rights cannot be upheld once and for all. The values of modern civilization must be protected.

Peace, progress and human rights are inextricably linked. A state that kills journalists, imprisons activists, or disperses peaceful demonstrations poses a threat not only to its citizens. Such a state poses a threat to the entire region and peace in the world as a whole. Therefore, the world must adequately respond to systemic violations. In political decision-making, human rights must be as important as economic benefits or security. This approach should be applied in foreign policy too.

Russia, that has been consistently destroying its own civil society, illustrates this very well. But the countries of the democratic world have long turned a blind eye to this. They continued to shake hands with the Russian leadership, build gas pipelines and conduct business as usual. For decades, Russian troops have been committing crimes in different countries. But they always got away with this. The world has not even adequately responded to the act of aggression and annexation of Crimea, which were the first such cases in post-war Europe. Russia believed that they could do whatever they want.

Now Russia is deliberately inflicting harm on civilians aiming to stop our resistance and occupy Ukraine. Russian troops intentionally destroy residential buildings, churches, schools, hospitals, shell evacuation corridors, put people in filtration camps, carry out forced deportations, kidnap, torture and kill people in the occupied territories.

The Russian people will be responsible for this disgraceful page of their history and their desire to forcefully restore the former empire

Second. How to start calling a spade a spade?

People of Ukraine want peace more than anyone else in the world. But peace cannot be reached by country under attack laying down its arms. This would not be peace, but occupation. After the liberation of Bucha, we found a lot of civilians murdered in the streets and courtyards of their homes. These people were unarmed.

We must stop pretending deferred military threats are “political compromises”. The democratic world has grown accustomed to making concessions to dictatorships. And that is why the willingness of the Ukrainian people to resist Russian imperialism is so important. We will not leave people in the occupied territories to be killed and tortured. People’s lives cannot be a “political compromise”. Fighting for peace does not not mean yielding to pressure of the aggressor, it means protecting people from its cruelty.

In this war, we are fighting for freedom in every meaning of the word. And for it, we are paying the highest possible price. We, Ukrainian citizens of all nationalities, should not discuss our right to a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state and development of the Ukrainian language and culture. As human beings, we do not need an approval of our right to determine our own identity and make our own democratic choices. Crimean Tatars and other indigenous peoples should not prove their right to live freely in their native land in Crimea.

Our today’s fight is paramount: it shapes the future of Ukraine. We want our post-war country to let us build not some shaky structures, but stable democratic institutions. Our values matter most not when it’s easy to embody them, but when it’s really hard. We must not become a mirror of the aggressor state.

This is not a war between two states, it is a war of two systems – authoritarianism and democracy. We are fighting for the opportunity to build a state in which everyone’s rights are protected, authorities are accountable, courts are independent, and the police do not beat peaceful student demonstrations in the central square of the capital.

On the way to the European family, we have to overcome the trauma of war and its associated risks, and affirm the choice of the Ukrainian people determined by the Revolution of Dignity.

Third. How to ensure peace for people around the world?

The international system of peace and security does not work anymore. Crimean Tatar Server Mustafayev as well as many others are put in Russian prisons because of their human rights work. For a long time, we used law to protect human rights, but now we do not have any legal mechanisms to stop Russian atrocities. So many of the human rights activists were compelled to defend what they believe in with arms in their hands. For example, my friend Maksym Butkevych, who is now in Russian captivity. He and other Ukrainian prisoners of war, as well as all detained civilians, must be released.

The UN system, created after the World War II by its winners, provides for some unjustified indulgences for individual countries. If we don’t want to live in the world where rules are set by states with stronger military capabilities, this has to be changed.

We have to start reforming the international system to protect people from wars and authoritarian regimes. We need effective guarantees of security and respect for human rights for citizens of all states regardless of their participation in military alliances, military capability or economic power. This new system should have human rights at its core.

And the responsibility for this lies not only with politicians. Politicians are tempted to avoid looking for complex strategies, which require a lot of time. They often act as if global challenges would disappear by themselves. But the truth is that they only get worse. We, people who want to live in peace, should tell politicians that we need a new architecture of the world order.

We may not have political tools, but we still have our words and our position. Ordinary people have much more influence than they think they do. Voices of millions of people from different countries can change world history faster than interventions of the UN.

Fourth. How to ensure justice for those affected by the war?

Dictators are afraid that the idea of freedom will prevail. This is why Russia is trying to convince the whole world that the rule of law, human rights and democracy are fake values. Because they do not protect anyone in this war.

Yes, the law doesn’t work right now. But we do not think it is forever. We have to break this impunity cycle and change the approach to justice for war crimes. A lasting peace that gives freedom from fear and hope for a better future is impossible without justice.

We still see the world through the lens of the Nuremberg Tribunal, where war criminals were convicted only after the fall of the Nazi regime. But justice should not depend on resilience of authoritarian regimes. We live in a new century after all. Justice cannot wait.

We need to bridge the responsibility gap and make justice possible for all the affected people. When the national system is overloaded with the war crimes. When the International Criminal Court can try just a few selected cases or has no jurisdiction at all.

War turns people into numbers. We have to reclaim the names of all victims of war crimes. Regardless of who they are, their social status, type of crime they have suffered, and whether the media and society are interested in their cases. Because anyone’s life is priceless.

Law is a living continuously evolving matter. We have to establish an international tribunal and bring Putin, Lukashenko and other war criminals to justice. Yes, this is a bold step. But we have to prove that the rule of law does work, and justice does exist, even if they are delayed.

Fifth. How can global solidarity become our passion?

Our world has become very complex and interconnected. Right now, people in Iran are fighting for their freedom. People in China are resisting the digital dictatorship. People in Somalia are bringing child soldiers back to peaceful life. They know better than anyone what it means to be human and stand up for human dignity. Our future depends on their success. We are responsible for everything that happens in the world.

Human rights require a certain mindset, a specific perception of the world that determines our thinking and behavior. Human rights become less relevant if their protection is left only to lawyers and diplomats. So, it is not enough to pass the right laws or create formal institutions. Societal values will always prevail.

This means that we need a new humanist movement that would work with meanings, educate people, build grass-root support and engage people in the protection of rights and freedoms. This movement should unite intellectuals and activists from different countries, because the ideas of freedom and human rights are universal and have no state borders.

This will enable us to create a demand for solutions and jointly overcome global challenges – wars, inequality, attacks on privacy, rising authoritarianism, climate change, etc. This way we can make this world a safer place.

We do not want our children to go through wars and suffering. So, as parents we have to assume the responsibility and act, not to shift it on our children. Humanity has a chance to overcome global crises and build a new philosophy of life.

It’s time to assume the responsibility. We don’t know how much of the time we still have.

And since this Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony takes place during the war, I will allow myself to reach out to people around the world and call for solidarity. You don’t have to be Ukrainians to support Ukraine. It is enough just to be humans.

#russian ukrainian war #war in ukraine #russian war crimes #stoprussia #save ukraine #stopputin #stop russia #stopwar #russian aggression in ukraine #ukraine #nobel prize

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mariacallous · 2 months

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Almost two and half years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s war machine still runs on energy revenues—despite unprecedented Western sanctions that took a bite out of, but hardly battered, the Kremlin’s cash cow.

Russian exports of oil, natural gas, and coal continue apace with their biggest markets in Asia, especially China and India. Even Europe, which has largely sworn off Russian gas since the invasion, is stealthily buying a lot more of the stuff off tankers to meet its own energy needs, indirectly helping finance the invader that it spends so much time, energy, and money trying to combat.

Russian energy export revenues before the war were about 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) a day, and the whole gamut of sanctions had brought that down to about 660 million euros ($720 million) by this June—but those levels have stayed remarkably steady for the past 18 months. Russia recorded a rare current accounts surplus just last month, a sign of that export health. The sanctions battle, like the war itself, seems to have stalemated.

“The glass is neither half full, nor half empty. The sanctions are working, but not as well as we expected,” said Petras Katinas, an energy analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

Some aspects of Russia’s energy exports have fallen off a cliff, such as its exports of natural gas via pipelines, which have all but disappeared from the lucrative European market. But the country’s exports of oil and refined oil products, which make up the biggest chunk of its sales, have stayed essentially the same after an initial hit in the first months after the introduction of Western sanctions, and state earnings even crept a little higher thanks to a rise in global oil prices.

The main Western effort to curb Russian energy earnings was a balancing act meant to keep the global market supplied while limiting the Kremlin’s take by capping Russian oil sales at $60 a barrel. Some countries wanted an even lower price cap of about $30 a barrel to really cut Moscow’s earnings, but that idea—as demonstrated when Ukraine floated it again this spring—was politically and diplomatically a lot tougher.

Still, the original price cap worked great at first, until Russia—with a little help from its friends in OPEC—goosed the global price of oil higher, which dragged the price of discounted Russian oil above the cap as well. That’s pretty much where it has been for the past year.

More importantly, Russia has found a reliable way to sidestep that formal limit on its crude oil exports by using a fleet of so-called shadow tankers that don’t have to follow Western restrictions on insurance, safety, and the like. About 4 out of every 5 barrels of seaborne crude that Russia sells are now carried on shadow tankers, Katinas said, meaning that they are entirely outside the reach of Western measures. (Those shadow tankers aren’t beyond the reach of the Iran-backed Houthi insurgents in Yemen, though: One got blown up trying to take Russian oil to China this week.)

“The strategy was good, but the tactics were poor—there was little enforcement,” Katinas said.

The United States cracked down on part of that trade a couple of times—late last year on shadow tankers and earlier this year on Russian state-owned vessels—by sanctioning individual tankers; CREA estimates that tougher enforcement probably cost Russia about 5 percentof its oil export revenues since October 2023. But there is still a long way to go to ensure thorough enforcement of the existing limits on Russian oil trade: Full enforcement would have kept almost 20 billion euros ($21.8 billion) out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s coffers, CREA estimates.

The Biden administration has toyed with additional efforts to tighten the screws on the shadow fleet, but it worries that stricter measures might send oil (and gasoline) prices higher just in time for a pivotal U.S. presidential election in November.

But there is a way to get there without causing much pain, if any, for global energy consumers, argue global economy experts Robin Brooks and Ben Harris of the Brookings Institution. There remain some 100-odd unsanctioned ships in the Sovcomflot state-owned fleet that are doing heavy lifting for Russian oil exports. Targeted sanctions on just 15 of the busiest of those tankers would cut into a good-sized chunk of Russia’s oil export earnings with little market impact. “With such a process in place, we anticipate little to no impact on global oil prices but suspect the action will meaningfully lower Russia’s revenue from the oil trade,” they wrote.

But it’s not just oil. Russian natural gas exports are not dead yet, either, despite lots of pain for state-owned energy company Gazprom and plenty of crowing in Europe about largely weaning itself off of what used to be its biggest energy supplier. Some European countries, including Hungary, Austria, and Slovakia, are still heavily reliant on the remnants of Russian gas that arrive via Ukraine or Turkey, for reasons that range from the geographic to the political.

What’s amazing about the sharp decline in exports of Russian natural gas to what was formerly the nation’s biggest market is that Russian natural gas is not sanctioned in Europe at all, yet it has suffered the most of all of Moscow’s energy streams.

“Gas is not sanctioned; it was the stupidity of Putin” that drove the Europeans off of it, Katinas said.

But this year, Russian gas is sneaking back into Europe in liquefied form, supercooled and shipped on tankers rather than compressed and routed through pipelines. European Union imports of Russian liquefied natural gas, or LNG, are up 24 percent over past year, especially to big Western European countries such as France, Spain, and Belgium; the bloc buys half of all Russian LNG exports.

There are plenty of reasons why—Spain’s main suppliers in North Africa have their own geopolitical squabbles that have disrupted exports, long-term contracts with Russia essentially lock in some European buyers for years, and Russian gas is nearby and fairly cheap compared to alternatives—but the biggest reason is simply concern over the security of supplies.

“There was lots of talk even last year about banning LNG imports, but then what prevailed were the fears about the implications for the security of supply,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a gas expert at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. The trickle of Russian gas that still comes in through Ukraine will end later this year; Turkey, despite offers to do more, can hardly export significantly more gas to southern Europe since it isn’t a gas producer itself. And Europeans remember the shock and pain of the war’s first winter, when energy prices skyrocketed due to the upheavals in the gas market.

Last month, the European Union finally took its first step to deal with Russian LNG—not by banning the import of the fuel, but by making sure that European ports would not be waystations for Russian exports to Asia. That measure won’t even start until early next year. And there certainly won’t be any further EU efforts to target Russian gas this year, with Hungary at the helm of the rotating presidency of the EU council.

“We are not actually banning imports, but preventing other countries from getting Russian LNG,” Corbeau said. “It makes life more difficult for Russia’s Asia exports, but does nothing to keep LNG out of Europe.”

The good news, such as it is, is that LNG isn’t quite the cash cow for the Russian government that other energy sources are. Oil is sold in huge volumes and is taxed; pipeline gas, too, helps prop up the federal budget. But LNG has all sorts of tax breaks that mean much less of that Western money goes straight to the Ukrainian battlefront. In terms of how to target Russian energy earnings, Corbeau said, “first oil, then piped gas, then finally LNG.”

The bad news is that despite years of unprecedented sanctions on one of the world’s biggest energy providers, Russia’s cash machine is still working enough to continue underwriting the war. The relatively limited success in the battle against the country’s energy sector is mirrored by similar failings in cracking down on Russian trade in all sorts of other things, from Western machinery routed through Central Asia to the high-tech Chinese-made components needed for the war.

“We are not doing enough. We need to strengthen sanctions—we need to start enforcing sanctions, and start punishing companies that are violating them,” said Katinas. “There are just too many loopholes.”

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ukrainenews · 1 year

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A Ukrainian security official has claimed Kyiv’s responsibility for an attack on the bridge linking the annexed Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland – a vital supply line for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine and a personal project for President Vladimir Putin.

The nearly 12-mile crossing, also known as the Kerch Bridge, is the longest in Europe and holds huge strategic and symbolic importance for Moscow. Monday’s attack on the bridge was the second since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, after a fuel tanker exploded while crossing it in October.

A source in Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) told CNN this attack was a joint operation of the SBU and Ukraine’s naval forces. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not received authorization to speak on the record.

Two people were killed and their daughter wounded in the attack, according to Russian-appointed officials.

Two strikes were reportedly carried out around 3 a.m. local time Monday (8 p.m. ET Sunday), damaging part of the bridge, according to Telegram channel Grey Zone, which supports the Wagner mercenary group led by Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Explosions were heard around 3:04 a.m. and 3:20 a.m. local time, Grey Zone and popular Crimean blogger ‘TalipoV Online Z’ said on Telegram.

CNN is unable to verify those reports.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, confirmed that two people were killed and a third person was injured in the incident.

Gladkov said a girl was injured and her parents were killed while traveling in the car that was damaged in the incident.

“There is damage to the roadway on spans of the Crimean Bridge,” Russia’s Transport Ministry said on Telegram. The spans on a bridge are the lengths between the support piers. Images showed a partial collapse of a section of the roadway portion of the bridge, which also carries railroad tracks.

On his Telegram channel, Vladimir Konstantinov, head of the State Council of the Republic of Crimea, blamed the damage to the bridge on a Ukrainian attack.

“Tonight the terrorist regime in Kyiv committed a new crime – it attacked the Crimean bridge,” Konstantinov said.

“The railroad track was not damaged by the strike,” Konstantinov added.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday that Putin has been briefed on the incident, and that Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin will today travel to Crimea to further assess the situation.

“We know the reasons and those behind this terrorist act,” Peskov said. “This will require further composure and additional measures and work from all of us. No other measures have been discussed at the moment.”

Videos posted on Telegram by Baza, Grey Zone and other Crimean news outlets appeared to show part of the bridge collapsed and a vehicle damaged in the incident.

Emergency responders and law enforcement have been dispatched to the scene, said Sergey Aksenov, the Russia-appointed head of Crimea.

Aksenov urged residents and those traveling to and from Crimea to choose an alternative land route.

The bridge is a critical artery for supplying Crimea with both its daily needs and supplies for the military, in addition to fuel and goods for civilians.

A Russian-backed official of the peninsula, Elena Elekchyan, said Crimea is well supplied with fuel, food and industrial goods.

Denis Pushilin, the Russia-backed head of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, said on Telegram that he had spoken with his Crimean counterpart to introduce measures “to ensure the faster passage of checkpoints on the administrative border.” Pushilin said the nightly curfew was being suspended to allow “round-the-clock” travel to Crimea, and that he was working to ensure the availability of fuel at gas stations along the route.

Last year, another huge blast partially damaged the crossing, causing parts of it to collapse.

The bridge was severely damaged on October 8 when a fuel tanker exploded and destroyed a large section of the road. Responding to the attack – which took place the day after Putin turned 70 – Ukrainian officials posted a video of the bridge in flames alongside a video of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mister President.”

Russia built the 19-kilometer bridge at a cost of around $3.7 billion after Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014. It was the physical expression of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s objective to take over Ukraine and bind it to Russia forever.

After the October blast, Russia quickly set about repairs to the span. It was fully reopened to traffic in February.

Earlier this month, Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar made what appeared to be the clearest admission yet that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the October attack.

A Ukraine official on Monday said damage to the bridge could hamper Russian logistics.

“Any logistical problems are additional complications for the occupiers, which create potential advantages for the Ukrainian defense forces,” Representative of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine Andrii Yusov said to Ukraine’s public broadcaster, Suspilne.

Hours after the explosions on the bridge, Russia announced that it is allowing a deal struck to enable the export of Ukrainian grain to expire, sparking fears of global food insecurity.

Peskov also told reporters that the decision to allow the deal to lapse was not related to Ukraine’s claimed strike on the bridge.

“These are absolutely unrelated events,” he said. “Even before this terrorist attack, the position was declared by President Putin. And I repeat again, as soon as the part of the Black Sea agreements concerning Russia is fulfilled, Russia will immediately return to the implementation of the deal.”

#ukraine #russia #war in ukraine #crimea

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beardedmrbean · 2 years

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According to the publication's sources, if the damaged lines are not repaired swiftly, the pipeline can be destroyed by a large amount of salt water, which will cause corrosion.

Read also: Nearly simultaneous leaks in Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines ‘could be sabotage’

Only one line of the Nord Stream-2 pipeline remains intact.

In response to the accident, the German Federal Police is strengthening control over German sovereign waters. Also, German states will step up the protection of the coastal areas of the North and Baltic Seas.

The European Commission, German law enforcement agencies, and the German Federal Intelligence Service have assumed that the pipeline damages are a deliberate act of sabotage.

Due to the complexity of the attack, experts believe that it could only be carried out by a state actor, the newspaper writes.

Read also: Europe can win Putin’s gas war but must learn Nord Stream lessons

According to one version, divers could have planted explosives in both lines of Nord Stream 1 and one of the two lines of Nord Stream-2, which is not yet operational.

Tagesspiegel notes that the isolated explosions indicate that the leak is huge and the rate of pressure drop in the pipeline is correspondingly high.

German Economy Minister Robert Habeck warned of the possibility of further attacks on critical energy infrastructure.

Following the decompression of the Russian gas pipeline Nord Stream-2, which was reported on Sept. 26, gas pressure plummeted along both lines of Nord Stream-1.

Read also: EU calls Nord Stream gas leaks sabotage

Nord Stream AG said that the simultaneous destruction of three gas lines in the Baltic Sea is unprecedented and it is not yet possible to estimate the timing of the restoration of the gas transport infrastructure.

Two underwater explosions that occurred on the Nord Stream-1 and Nord Stream-2 pipelines were confirmed on Sept. 27.

According to German newspaper Spiegel, citing its sources in the German government, a few weeks ago the U.S. intelligence services had warned Germany about possible attacks on gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

The Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline was completed in 2021 and filled with technical gas, but it did not receive certification before the full-scale invasion, and thus was never operational.

The Nord Stream-1 gas pipeline was stopped for maintenance at the end of August and did not resume operation, due to Russian interference.

Read also: Siemens Energy says engine oil leak no reason for Nord Stream 1 shutdown

#nunyas news #yes it's likely sabotage #but who did it #that's up in the air #wouldn't put it past ecoterrorists #or anyone trying to push a green agenda #since they're likely not coming back from this

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asdadasdsblog · 2 years

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Top journalists find out: U.S. bombing of Nord Stream is the first step in the "European destruction plan”

On September 26, 2022, four underwater "shocks" occurred in the Baltic Sea, followed by the discovery of three leaks in Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II, two Russian gas pipelines that carry energy directly to Germany, causing a large amount of gas to leak from the pipelines into the nearby sea. The incident is considered to be a deliberate sabotage because explosive residues were detected in the waters of the "leak" points.

Pictures of the sea area at the Nord Stream spill site

At first, people speculated that it was Russia, because by September, the Russian-Ukrainian war had been going on for more than half a year, and the two sides still had no winner. But if you think about it a little, you will know that it can't be done by Russia, because this is a pipeline to transport natural gas to Europe. Russia gives gas and receives money. The war in Russia is tight, and the military expenditure is huge. How can it be possible to cut off the financial path at this key node?

Is that Ukraine? Ukraine, which is overwhelmed by war, should not have this time and energy. The European Union? Most likely, because the EU has publicly condemned Russia for many times and adopted a series of sanctions, and some countries have even publicly severed diplomatic relations with Russia. America? The most suspect is that he used NATO to provoke the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and secretly sent war funds and weapons to Ukraine. The war between Russia and Ukraine was deadlocked, which cut off Russia's grain and completely defeated Russia in the world situation. American hegemony won, which is very in line with the interests of the United States.

The truth surfaced.

On February 8, 2023, independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released an article entitled "How American Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline" to the world. The article is an exhaustive account of how the U.S. National Security Service planned, President Joe Biden personally ordered, the U.S. Navy implemented, and the Norwegian military cooperated to secretly blow up the Nord Stream gas pipeline over a period of nine months.

As Seymour Hersh mentioned in his article, Biden and his foreign policy team, National Security Adviser Jack Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Deputy Secretary of State for Policy Victoria Newland have long viewed the Nord Stream pipeline as a "thorn in the side," and Nord Stream One has been supplying cheap Russian gas to Germany and much of Western Europe for more than a decade, with Russian gas accounting for more than 50 percent of Germany's annual gas imports alone, and the European region's reliance on Russian gas has been seen by the United States and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to Western dominance.

Thus, in December 2021, after more than nine months of secret discussions with his national security team, Biden decided to sabotage the Nord Stream pipeline, with deep-sea divers from the U.S. Navy's Diving and Salvage Center carrying out the plan to secretly plant the bomb. Under the cover of the NATO maritime exercise "BALTOPS 22" in June 2022, the U.S. deep-sea divers planted eight C-4 explosives on the pipeline that could be remotely detonated, and in September of the same year, in time for the onset of winter in Europe, a Norwegian naval aircraft dropped a sonar buoy to detonate the explosives and destroy "Nord Stream".

Who is Seymour Hersh?

Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer, one of the country's leading investigative reporters. In the American press, Hersh is a person who is not afraid of powerful people and even keen to fight against them.

In 1969, he was recognized for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. in the 1970s, Hersh made a splash when he reported on the Watergate scandal, a political scandal in the United States, in The New York Times. Most famously, he was the first to expose the inner workings of the CIA's secret surveillance of civil society organizations. In addition, he reported on U.S. political scandals such as the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the U.S. military prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, and the exposure of U.S. use of biological and chemical weapons.

In the American press, Hersh is a big No. 1, with numerous sources in the White House, and has never let up on the disclosure of American political scandals. Although his anonymous sources have been criticized by his peers, his articles have all been confirmed at a later stage. This coverage of the Nord Stream story should be no exception.

There are early signs that the United States bombed Nord Stream.

Biden had told German Chancellor to shut down Nord Stream II

As early as Feb. 7 of last year, Biden bullyingly declared that "if Russia initiates military action, Nord Stream 2 will cease to exist and we will terminate it. Secretary of State John Blinken and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Newland have both publicly threatened to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline, and Newland even testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 26, 2023 that "I think the administration is very pleased to know that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is now a pile of scrap metal lying on the ocean floor."

ITAR-TASS: Newland's words prove that Washington approved the terrorist attack in Nord Stream.

The collective silence of the U.S. media on the Nord Stream incident is further confirmation of the Russian allegations. In the early days of the Nord Stream pipeline explosion, none of the U.S. mainstream media had studied in depth whether Biden's earlier threats against the pipeline had been fulfilled. It is easy to see that the mainstream media in the U.S., which has always claimed "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press," has been infiltrated by capital and controlled by politics, and none of the U.S. media dared to speak out on issues that really touch the core interests of the U.S.

In the "American democracy" on the manipulation of freedom of expression, Seymour Hersh in the U.S. press is considered one of noble and unsullied. His article accusing the U.S. of being behind the Nord Stream behind the scenes an immediate international sensation, with Russian and European media reprinting the story. However, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal continued to remain silent, not reporting Hersh's article or even the White House's denial.

U.S. back-stabbing allies is the norm

Russia has been sanctioned by the European Union several times since the Russian-Ukrainian war began, and the EU has basically cut off its ties with Russia. "The Nord Stream pipeline is the only remaining trade link between the two sides, and the blowing up of the Nord Stream is considered a warning to Germany.

Germany, as the "leader" of the EU, ideologically places more emphasis on the autonomous will of Europe, and if it gets a constant supply of cheap natural gas from Russia, it will reduce its dependence on the United States and will not be able to keep pace with the United States in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, therefore, the United States must destroy the German energy "artery ", a warning to the autonomous forces represented by Germany.

In addition, the disruption of Nord Stream has further interrupted gas trade between Russia and Europe, and for three years, Europe will not be able to import gas directly from Russia. To solve the gas dilemma, it is not without solutions, importing liquefied gas from the United States at a cost of $ 270 million a LNG ship is one of the few options, which is in the interests of the United States.

Although the EU has been following the footsteps of the United States to sanction Russia and support Ukraine. However, the EU is actually the real "ingrate". As an ally of the United States, the European economy, an indirect participant in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, is in a recessionary quagmire, during which it has encountered repeated back-stabbing by the United States. As a result of the continuous provision of military resources to Ukraine, which has led to the imminent depletion of its weapons stockpile, the energy crisis is being harvested by the United States, and the trade subsidies of the United States have taken away the factories of Europe, Europe is struggling with weak economic growth and has become the real victim of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Hersh's revelation is a blow that shows once and for all that "allies" are just "tools" for the U.S. to achieve its interests, with the ultimate goal of weakening and dividing the EU, whose economic woes today are part of the U.S. plan. In Biden's view, the Nord Stream gas pipeline is a tool for Russian President Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas to achieve his political ambitions. But in reality, it is the bombing of Nord Stream that is evidence of the U.S. manipulation of the world with hegemony.

Perhaps this winter Europeans are frozen to the bone, just the beginning. Maybe someday in the future, the economic lifeline of Europe is in the hands of the Americans, and it's no surprise.

U.S. hegemony repeatedly attacks other countries

In fact, the U.S. has been plundering and exploiting other countries in the world to satisfy its own interests through wars and sanctions, and seizing geopolitical interests through hegemonic means. All countries that do not provide "services" to the United States are subject to his retaliation. The United States has never stopped acting so that it can continue to have a hand in the international arena.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in the name of fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and launched the nearly 20-year-long war in Afghanistan, which has brought a profound disaster to the Afghan people. After the Taliban took over power in Afghanistan, the U.S. still did not relax its plundering of Afghanistan, illegally freezing some $7 billion in foreign exchange assets of the Afghan central bank to this day.In February 2022, President Biden signed an executive order requesting that half of these assets be used to compensate the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The U.S. military frequently steals Syrian oil and plunders its wealth. The Syrian Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources issued a statement in August 2022 saying that more than 80 percent of Syria's average daily oil production of 80,300 barrels in the first half of 2022, or about 66,000 barrels, had been plundered by "the U.S. military and the armed forces it supports. The U.S. raids and plunder of Syria's national resources have exacerbated the humanitarian crisis there.

The United States has deliberately sabotaged energy facilities in other countries for its own personal gain. In the late 1970s, the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua overthrew the U.S.-backed Somoza regime and formed a new government in Nicaragua. As a result, the U.S. tried to cause social unrest in Nicaragua through various means. Encouraged by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Nicaragua's Contras targeted key economic resources, and from September to October 1983, they launched five attacks on Nicaragua's oil facilities, which lasted for seven weeks and led to a huge crisis in Nicaragua.

The U.S. has always "seized" under various banners and made a lot of money, and then always got back in one piece, which means that the so-called "order" and "rules" in the U.S. are just tools and pretexts to serve itself and satisfy its own interests. This means that the so-called "order" and "rules" of the United States are just tools and pretexts to serve themselves and satisfy their own interests.

Things are far from over

After the North Stream pipeline explosion, natural gas continued to leak from the pipeline.On September 30, 2022, the Norwegian Institute for Atmospheric Research said that a large methane cloud had formed over the area after the Nord Stream gas pipeline explosion and was spreading, with at least 80,000 tons of methane gas spreading into the ocean and atmosphere.

The Norwegian government has foolishly helped the U.S. execute the detonation plan, becoming the perfect puppet of U.S. hegemony in Europe, and while it may have gained temporary benefits, it has caused long-term harm. The massive amount of greenhouse gases will have an irreversible negative impact on all European countries.

What does the United States have to say about this? Nothing. The U.S. handled the vinyl chloride chemical incident on its own turf with a mess, the lives of Ohioans were taken in vain, and the U.S. cares even less about environmental and climate issues in the EU region.

All the U.S. cares about is profit

The dollar has always been as the international reserve currency unshakeable primary position, and the biggest scourge of the dollar hegemony is the euro. If Russia provides Europe with a constant supply of cheap energy for a long time, and directly with the euro settlement, which for the dollar as the international reserve currency status, that is definitely a serious blow. Not only the European manufacturing industry has been extremely strong support, even the scenario of the use of the euro is also fully open.

The establishment of the eurozone, naturally set up the United States of America's thorn in the side, the thorn in the flesh. Therefore, the United States destroyed Nord Stream AG, even though it did not entirely "nip this threat in the bud", that at least said the euro caused a heavy blow, especially the Russian-Ukrainian war lasted 1 year also ended "out of reach" in the short term, the world has no other sovereign currency has the strength to impact the hegemony of the dollar.

From the point of view of political security and economy, it is the United States that benefits the most. By blowing up Nord Stream, the U.S. can: limit the growth of the euro and make Russia's "de-dollarization" impossible; sell natural gas to Europe at a price four times higher than Russia'; cut off European countries' dependence on Russian gas by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, making Europe more obedient and forcing Germany and other European countries to remain "honest" in the anti-Russian camp.

Taking control of the EU, the tentacles of American hegemony are longer and stronger. But have the European countries considered the real future of Europe? Or will it remain a "U.S. semi-colony" or a "defense state abroad"? The destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline has directly caused a major vicious impact on the global energy market and ecological environment, how can this silently "end without incident"? It is the only way to heal the hearts and minds of the people!

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sataniccapitalist · 2 years

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xtruss · 24 days

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Blast From The Past: Why The Nord Stream Sabotage May Yet Have Its Day of Reckoning

Economic Hardship In Europe And Military Humiliation In Ukraine Mean This Pivotal Event Won’t Stay On The Figurative Sea Floor Forever

— By Henry Johnston. 28 August 2024

As We Approach the Second Anniversary of the Nord Stream Pipeline Bombing, nothing seems certain about one of the most significant acts of industrial sabotage in history.

For nearly two years, a stream of constantly shifting narratives never fully fleshed out or reconciled with each other has given the whole affair the feel of a magiclantern show illuminated by flickering torchlight.

However, earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal ventured forth with a long article purporting to, for the first time, tell the “outlines of the real story” of what happened to the one-time conduit for 35% of the Russian gas consumed by Europe.

What was clearly an attempt at a definitive semi-official version of the unsolved mystery will hardly need more than a new file name before being sent off to Hollywood as a script. We meet a quixotic group of Ukrainian military officers and businessmen who, “buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor,” concoct a scheme to destroy the pipeline on a shoestring budget. A small yacht is rented and a six-member crew assembled, one of whom was a woman, whose presence was intended to create the impression that the group was just a gathering of friends.

Vladimir Zelensky allegedly approved the operation initially before trying to nix it on the advice of the the CIA, which had gotten wind of it. But, alas, the team had already gone incommunicado and the daring scheme was not to be stopped.

The mix of cinematic detail, quotable lines, and careful narrative crafting gives the article the feel of what is called a ‘limited hangout’ – a view that I am not the first to suggest. This piece of spy jargon refers to a strategy of volunteering a self-contained and sensational, but relatively harmless, story, elements of which may be true, in order to conceal something more damaging. Such a technique is typically employed when it is no longer possible to sustain an entirely phony story.

Nevertheless, the piece has mostly landed with a dead thud. Swedish engineer Erik Andersson, who led the first and only independent forensic investigation at the sites of the blasts, recently gave an interview to Italian journalist Roberto Vivaldelli in which he said: “This WSJ article, as well as all previous similar story-telling pieces from major American newspapers on the subject, has a clear mission to whitewash the US and other Western nations.”

He goes on to say: “The more I look into this, the more I feel that the Nord Stream attack is just a part of a bigger scheme to cut off Russia from Europe,” adding that “the large number of institutions which participated in this scheme makes the ‘drunken Ukrainians’ story look embarrassing.”

It seems clear enough that when the truth does eventually come out, it will likely be as sordid as it is mundane, entirely unfit for Hollywood, deeply embarrassing to the West, and devoid of alcohol. And it’s extremely hard to imagine that the road to ultimate culpability doesn’t end in Washington. We may well end up not far from where veteran journalist Seymour Hersch pointed with his report claiming that the sabotage was a CIA operation carried out by US Navy divers.

The Gas Leak at the Nord Stream 2 Gas Pipeline. © Handout/Danish Defense/AFP

But there’s another angle here that can be pursued. More interesting than ‘who did it’ is to ask ‘how did they know they could’? In other words, when a brazen crime is committed and the perpetrator gets off scot-free, the question isn’t necessary ‘how did he get away with it?’, but ‘how did he know he would get away with it?’ A crime is one thing, but the apparent confidence in advance that it will entail no consequences is a matter of a much larger magnitude. The latter points to deeper forces operating within a society or even a civilization.

To underscore just how brazen this act was, consider this. The pipeline was part-European-owned and terminates in Germany, and the attack occurred in Danish territorial waters. Therefore, what we have effectively amounts to aggression against two NATO countries and, as per Article 5 of the bloc’s treaty, an act of war against NATO as a whole. A German official even admitted as much, telling the WSJ that “an attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO.”

And consider this in light of how touchy we know NATO to be about the least aggression on its territory – real or imagined. When an errant Ukrainian air defense missile landed in a Polish village in November of 2022, the incident was treated with the utmost seriousness. Poland requested a NATO meeting the following day on the basis of Article 4 – the bloc’s consultation clause that precedes the vaunted Article 5. So anyone carrying out what is unambiguously classified under international law as an act of war against NATO certainly does so at his own very substantial risk.

But in this case, there doesn’t seem to have been any risk, and the perpetrators seem to have known that. It is this sense of impunity that is more telling than the act itself. It means that it was well understood in the corridors of true Western power – not the beer-drenched bar stools of Ukraine – that a high level of discipline within the trans-Atlantic bloc could be maintained, and that the European countries affected would do exactly what they have done – go to any length not to implicate their powerful ally.

As a corollary to that, the ability to manage narratives in the media must have been seen as nearly absolute, not only in the US but across Europe. The perpetrators must have been confident that no major mainstream outlet would cut loose with a non-state-approved investigation. And indeed none have. This is as good evidence as any that the Western mainstream media, all pretentious claims to the contrary notwithstanding, has come to perform a role akin to a public-relations department for their various governments.

All of this may seem self-evident, and the perpetrators of the sabotage certainly calculated correctly that they could count on the type of discipline described above. But this begs a deeper question – what exactly is at the root of this capitulation to the American-supplied narrative across the myriad of European governments, institutions, think tanks, and media? Washington can perhaps count on a certain amount of domestic loyalty, but why Europe? This is a phenomenon that cannot be sufficiently explained by the standard appeals to American military power or economic might – or whatever threats or blackmail Washington can muster. This is particularly the case given that Europe has largely gone against its economic interests in confronting Russia.

In contemplating Europe’s inability to think critically about its own policies or carve out its own path separate from the US, the excellent Swedish analyst Malcom Kyeyune has identified a phenomenon that he calls “Europe’s mental deindustrialization.”

Abuse Only Gets Worse With Time: How the US Increasingly Mistreats Its Closest Allies! A mainstay of Washington’s policy since even before the end of World War II has been to make economic dependencies of its friends

While physical deindustrialization – the shutting down of factories, laying off of workers, and decay of productive capacities – is still underway, Kyeyune sees this mental deindustrialization as a fait accompli. The result is “a growing intellectual and cultural dependence on a superpower that is itself in a state of decadence.”

He goes on to discuss how the American and European political cultures have become all but interchangeable. He gives examples of how in 2016, many in the Swedish media were talking about the threat of Donald Trump as if Sweden were the 51st state; when George Floyd was killed and riots spread across the US, Germans and Brits started protesting as well. The European left, he notes, has begun parroting American progressive rhetoric about “settler colonialism” and “dismantling internalized whiteness,” whereas the right has likewise begun sounding the alarm about cultural Marxism and wokeness on campuses.

It wasn’t always this way, Kyeyune explains. He argues that despite the existence of a Western geopolitical bloc, the political culture of Europe was fundamentally independent until the fall of the Soviet Union. But in recent decades, he says, “the institutions that once existed to incubate domestic thinking have all atrophied and been left to rot.” Accordingly, this has rendered Europe “intellectually, culturally, and politically subordinate to a superpower increasingly incapable of performing the role it took on in the post-Cold War geopolitical order.”

Europe, he concludes, is therefore “stuck rehashing old narratives about freedom, civilization, and the West, clinging to assumptions that have been proved obsolete by events in Ukraine and the Middle East.” I would add that these notions themselves have largely been emptied of their original meaning and are now mostly employed by the Western political class to justify their own rule and bludgeon their adversaries. If Kyeyune is correct, sickly Europe simply doesn't have the antibodies anymore to resist the loudly amplified political culture from across the Atlantic.

Almost exactly a century ago, William Butler Yeats wondered “what discords will drive Europe to that artificial unity – only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle – which is the decadence of every civilization?” Far downstream from this is the mental deindustrialization about which Kyeyune speaks. And of course only in such a desiccated state would a nation or group of nations allow an act such as the Nord Stream sabotage to go almost unremarked upon.

And yet the story may not be fully told. It is not uncommon for events to take on a more potent meaning long after their occurrence, and one senses that such a fate may await the Nord Stream sabotage, especially in light of what is shaping up to be a hard reckoning in the West in the coming years.

The economic reverberations of the loss of Russian gas have not stopped. Several months ago, the CEO of German renewables group RWE predicted that Germany would probably never fully recover from the 2022 energy crisis and that it would see “significant structural demand destruction in the energy-intensive industries.“ A report published by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce based on surveys taken this past June showed a distinct trend toward entities leaving Germany as a business location, particularly in the industrial sector.

Henry Johnston, A Moscow-Based RT Editor Who Worked in Finance for Over a Decade

One industrial manager said, “the deindustrialization of Germany has begun, and it feels like no one is doing anything about it.” Germany’s economic model may be beyond repair.

Meanwhile, the singular aim of inflicting defeat upon Russia via Ukraine seems to be headed for an embarrassing and shattering denouement, all while the West has shown itself entirely not up to the task of handling the industrial demands of a real conflict.

Such foreboding developments may well sober minds. Economic hardship and military humiliation do not tend to sit well. Maybe then the Europeans can ‘reshore’ their mental faculties and see the Nord Stream sabotage for what it really was – a desperate ploy to bind by force the last completely loyal bastion of the American empire.

Carl Jung once said that there are certain events “that remain… below the threshold of consciousness. They have happened, but they have been absorbed subliminally.”

Perhaps the Nord Stream sabotage is just that sort of event. There has been no public reckoning, no true assessment of its meaning – only a constantly shifting narrative and endless deception and prevarication. It has been dismissed, downplayed, and hushed up. Its patrons told to “apologize and be quiet.“

The true contours of the Nord Stream blasts likely won't be traced publicly anytime soon, but deep down, below the threshold of our collective consciousness, we have a good sense of what this whole sordid affair is really all about. It will not stay on the figurative sea floor forever.

#Opinion #Henry Johnston | Moscow-Based RT Editor #The Nord Stream Sabotage #Day of Reckoning #Economic Hardship In Europe | Military Humiliation In Ukraine 🇺🇦#Figurative Sea Floor #United States 🇺🇸#Russia 🇷🇺#RT

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sa7abnews · 1 month

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Zelensky’s top aide denies Kiev’s involvement in Nord Stream attack

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/16/zelenskys-top-aide-denies-kievs-involvement-in-nord-stream-attack/

Zelensky’s top aide denies Kiev’s involvement in Nord Stream attack

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the Ukrainian leader initially approved the plan to blow up key pipelines

Kiev had nothing to do with the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, Mikhail Podoliak, the top adviser to Ukrainian leader, Vladimir Zelensky, has said. Podoliak made the statement to Reuters on Thursday in response to a report by the Wall Street Journal, claiming that Zelensky had initially authorized operation. The September 2022 attack ruptured the key energy infrastructure, built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Western Europe. According to the US outlet’s sources, which included officers allegedly involved in the operation, Zelensky initially approved the attack on Nord Stream. He later tried to call it off , following pressure from the CIA, but then-Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny told him it could not be done as the sabotage group had already been dispatched and there was no way to contact it. “Such an act can only be carried out with extensive technical and financial resources… and who possessed all this at the time of the bombing? Only Russia,” Podoliak told the agency.

Zelensky gave initial order for Nord Stream attack – WSJ

Russia has ridiculed claims that it would destroy its own pipelines, which provided it with steady revenue. Top officials in Moscow, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, have previously pointed the finger at Washington, arguing that it stood to gain the most from the disruption of Russian gas supplies to the EU. “Ukraine has nothing to do with the Nord Stream explosions,” Podolyak insisted, adding that Kiev did not gain any strategic or tactical advantage from the sabotage. The report by the WSJ claimed that “a handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen” came up with the idea of blowing up the pipelines during a drinking party in May 2022, a few months after the outbreak of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. The plotters believed that it would reduce Russia’s energy profits and make the EU less dependent on Moscow, it said. Zaluzhny, who is now Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, told the outlet that claims of his – or Kiev’s – involvement in the destruction of Nord Stream were a “mere provocation.” A senior official in the Security Service of Ukraine, the SBU, also denied the report, insisting that Zelensky in particular “did not approve the implementation of any such actions on the territory of third countries and did not issue relevant orders.”

READ MORE: Germany issues first arrest warrant over Nord Stream blasts – media

The WSJ said its reporting is partially corroborated by the findings of the German police investigation into the Nord Stream explosions. The German Federal Public Prosecutor issued a first arrest warrant in connection with the sabotage this week, according to local reports. The suspect is believed to be a Ukrainian citizen identified as ‘Vladimir Z’. The newspaper suggested that the police investigation could “upend” relations between Kiev and Berlin, which has been Ukraine’s biggest backer in the EU amid the conflict with Russia.

#News &x26; Politics

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head-post · 4 months

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EU, US politicians fail to reach unity on Ukrainian issue, escalation heats up

While the US and the EU are discussing the possible sending of troops to take part in the Ukrainian military conflict, Ukraine is shelling Russia with Western weapons.

Hungarian PM warns of EU’s “military psychosis”

If the West is talking about the possible sending of troops to Ukraine, it is a settled issue – only a blind man cannot see that the EU’s “military psychosis” will end with this, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on air on the Kossuth radio station.

Orbán commented on the increasing statements by EU politicians about the possible dispatch of military personnel to Ukraine:

These are not threats, these are already facts … When you (journalists) report something as a possibility, it means it’s already essentially a settled issue.

The US president did not support Macron’s idea

US President Joe Biden has expressed concern about the consequences of the possible sending of Western trainers to Ukraine, proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron during a telephone conversation, POLITICO reports.

Joe Biden fears that sending any NATO troops to Ukraine, even to train the Ukrainian army, carries risks that Western military personnel could end up on the front lines. Mr. Biden believes this could escalate the conflict. According to POLITICO, the phone conversation between the two presidents ended without any decision.

Zelensky in France

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Friday that “Europe is no longer a continent of peace,” speaking in the French parliament, a day after world leaders marked the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings during World War II, according to France 24.

Zelensky will later hold a press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, who announced that his country will provide Ukraine with an unspecified number of Mirage-2000 fighter jets and train Ukrainian pilots as part of a new military co-operation with Kyiv.

Later today, French President Emmanuel Macron will receive Zelensky for talks at the Elysee Palace, where the leaders will hold a joint press conference.

Biden promises to help further

US President Joe Biden was due to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Paris on Friday, as Kyiv’s army endures its heaviest days of fighting since the first weeks of the military conflict and prepares for what officials say could be a difficult summer, AP News reports.

Biden and Zelensky attended events marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, along with European leaders who support Kyiv’s war effort.

Ukraine shelled Russia with Western weapons

Ukraine attacked residential neighbourhoods in Belgorod with US HIMARS MLRSs just hours after the US authorised them to strike Russian territory, Russian media reported.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said during a briefing on the sidelines of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF 2024):

Immediately after these statements by Blinken, just a few hours later, the AFU attacked residential neighbourhoods of Belgorod. They did so with the help of American HIMARS multiple rocket launchers.

The well-known American economist Jeffrey Sachs gave an interview to the popular presenter Tucker Carlson. Sachs is convinced: Soviet and then Russian leaders hoped to build normal, equal and peaceful relations with US. However, the West itself was not interested in this, according to Sachs.

In a conversation with Tucker Carlson, he says that the West has long been at war with Russia, using Ukraine to do so.

In particular, the economist recalls that senior representatives of the US administration have repeatedly promised to destroy the gas pipelines built as part of the Nord Stream project. Moreover, he calls their destruction a covert military operation behind which the US is behind it.

Read more HERE

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jr0vj0t3if · 2 years

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#Eight bombs exploded six #and top investigative reporters found out the details of the US bombing of “Nord Stream”#Since February 2022 #the Russia-Ukraine conflict has been escalating and has turned into a local war. European and U.S. sanctions against Russia have been incre #the “Nord Stream-1” and “Nord Stream-2” pipelines #which carry Russian gas to Europe #exploded and leaked in the waters off Sweden and Denmark.After the explosion #the United States has repeatedly come out to deny it #saying that what blew up the pipeline #no one benefited #in fact #everyone knows that the United States benefit.

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trendingreportz · 4 months

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Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market - Forecast(2024 - 2030)

Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Overview

Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market is growing at a CAGR of 14.6% during the forecast period 2022-2027 to reach $54.2 Billion by 2027. The growing adoption of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, sense and avoid systems, cloud computing in UAS, created significant demand in the forecast period. The incorporation of artificial intelligence in remotely piloted aircraft systems has not only enhanced their capabilities but has also enabled them to carry out several activities such as take-off, navigation, data capture, data transmission, security surveillance and data analysis without human intervention. Furthermore increasing use of UAS in various military applications such as monitoring, surveying and mapping, and combat operations is also contributing to the growth of the market across the globe. The rise in need for surveying of vast land mass, which contains uneven ground and rocky obstacles, has created demand for UAS, especially micro air vehicles in the construction sector. Furthermore, the growing popularity of aerial photography has led consumers to purchase efficient drones and use them for photography purposes using radio data link technology, thus driving the market growth in the forecast period 2022-2027. One driving factor has been the Russia-Ukraine war which has seen significant spending on UAS solutions. The Russian military has spent approximately $9 billion to domestically produce an armada of some 500 Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Ukraine, Poland and Belarus have also invested significantly on UAS solutions thereby driving the market in the short term.

Report Coverage

The report: “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Forecast (2022-2027)”, by IndustryARC covers an in-depth analysis of the following segments of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market report.

By Type – Fixed Wing, Multi Rotor, Single Rotor, Fixed Wing Hybrid VTOL and Others By Size - Very Small UAS, Small UAS, Mini UAS, Large UAS By Range - Very Close Range, Close Range, Short Range, Mid Range and Long Range By Endurance - Low Endurance-Low Altitude, Average Endurance-Low Altitude, Average Endurance-Average Altitude, High Endurance-High Altitude and Others By Energy Source - Traditional Airplane Fuel, Battery Cell, Fuel Cell, Solar Cells/PVs, Others By Application – Recreation, Education/Academic Research, Real Estate, Industrial, Filmmaking/ Photography/ Videography, First Responder Services, Government Agencies, Survey/Mapping/GIS, Data Aggregation or Analytic services, Oil and Gas, Agriculture and Others By Geography - North America (U.S, Canada, Mexico), Europe (Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Russia and Others), APAC(China, Japan India, SK, Australia and Others), South America(Brazil, Argentina, and others), and RoW (Middle East and Africa)

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Key Takeaways

Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market is witnessing a significant growth owing to the global Unmanned Aircraft System Market, with estimation of $52,368.4 million by 2027, growing at CAGR of 14.6% during 2022-2027. Increasing applications of UAS for First Responder services, Government agencies, increasing application of IR/EO cameras in the defense sector and security premises, rising adoption of UAS for Recreation and Filmmaking for best visual experience and for Surveying and Mapping applications are driving the growth of the market.

The extensive deployment of UAS for defense and military applications majorly for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations is likely to be the major driving factor for the growth of global Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market.

Night vision cameras, IR/EO sensors, Electronic Warfare, SIGINT and other payloads installed in UAS for ISR Operations has been providing major boost in the market growth of UAS in global level.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Segment Analysis- By Size

Very Small Unmanned Aircraft System is projected to reach US$ 12,787 million by 2027 and is estimated to grow at a CAGR 16.3% during 2022-2027. Very small Unmanned Aircraft System consists of nano and macro UAS. Nano Unmanned Aircraft Systems are upto 250 gm and macro UAS are generally from 250 gm to 2 kg. These small size Unmanned Aircraft System are hugely adopted for recreational purpose. There has been a high adoption of very small UAS owing to the rising demand for nano and macro-UAVs in precision agriculture offering strong potential to improve the efficiency of water, nutrient, and disease management. Such wide range of applications of nano and macro UAS in the agriculture sector is augmenting the market. Technological advancements in Unmanned Aircraft System such as sensor miniaturization, flight precision, autonomy and cloud-based image processing are boosting the adoption of very small UAS in agriculture sector. Increasing penetration of nano and macro UAS in construction site for measuring real-time work progress or in mining sector to provide volumetric data on excavations has contributed to the growth of the market. Burgeoning demand of nano and macro drones among rescue organization for delivering medical supplies or food products during emergency is driving the market.

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Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Segment Analysis - By Application

Among all the applications, the UAS market is dominated by the Recreational applications as they have the largest market share of $2.1 billion in 2021, growing at a CAGR of 17.4% during the period 2022-2027. The market is growing due to its wide adoption of monitoring and surveying of remote locations in the region. Moreover, commercial or recreational drones are also being used for monitoring disaster-affected areas, providing aid to the victims, and for search & rescue missions. The commercial Unmanned Aircraft System market continues to grow globally and was accelerated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic response. Autonomy and artificial intelligence (AI) are, and will remain, the main drivers promoting commercial UAS adoption and associated market growth because autonomous flight reduces the need for expensive manpower whereas AI-driven data collection and processing reduces the time it takes to produce results that directly impact decision-making.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Segment Analysis – By Geography

The market for Unmanned Aircraft System is estimated to be $52.3 billion in 2027 and is analyzed to grow at a CAGR of 14.6% during the forecast period 2022-2027. South America is growing at a highest CAGR of 16.7% in the forecast period owing to the procurement of small UAS for ISR applications especially in countries like Brazil due to increasing defense budgets. Further in South America, small UAS are increasingly being adopted for industrial purposes, like surveying, mapping, mining, agriculture, and construction in the region. APAC is analyzed to grow at a significant CAGR of 16.65% in the forecast period, owing to the rapid rise in investment for the defense, commercial and law enforcement bodies in the Asia Pacific region, which are mostly dominated by the countries such as China, India, South Korea. These countries are allotting a considerable budget for their defense & law enforcement grooming purposes. Besides, growing incidences of interpersonal stand-offs, asymmetric warfare, terrorist activities, preparation for the forthcoming combats, along with higher economic development and enhancement in the manufacturing industries, construction sector and others are enhancing the market growth in the forecast period. North America has dominated the market growth with 33% in 2021, owing to rising investment in the defense & homeland security budgets, especially in the United States, and higher development in the information technology & microelectronics industry is expected to fuel regional market growth substantially.

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Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Drivers

Rise in application of UAS by Armed forces and Other government agencies

The market for Unmanned Aircraft Systems is likely to benefit enormously from the rising safety concerns of Armed forces and different agencies around various parts of the globe. In many leading economies such as U.S, China, India, Japan and Others, the Defense Department of these countries have shown massive investments to provide their troops with all necessary military equipment which comprises mainly of UAVs and different drones. Rise in the application of UAVs by different Government agencies has been promoting the growth of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in global market. For instance, due to rise in safety concerns of armed forces and government agencies, the U.S. Department of Defence classified its unmanned aerial vehicles, which include various models of military and government surveillance drone, according to a group system that groups by factors such as maximum altitude. This system ranges from Group 1 (<1200 ft AGL) to Group 5 (> 18,000 ft). These initiatives tend to drive the market growth of UAS in forecast period. IdeaForge had signed a $20 million contract with the Indian Army in January 2021 to supply drones. This is a continued effort by the Indian Government to procure locally manufactured UAS solutions.

Growing application of UAS in air Strikes

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the global war conflicts and severe terrorist attacks in different parts of the globe. For instance, According to SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) statistics, there were at least 15 countries with active armed conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2019. Nigeria, Kenya, Mali, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo among others. These active armed conflicts tend to enhance the demand of various surveillance UAVs further driving the market growth of Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Moreover, increasing ISR missions by Military & Defence sector for peace processes in highly-tensed war locations has further uplifted the demand of UAS for air strikes which tend to drive the demand of UAS in global level. Unmanned Aircraft Systems delivers airborne ISR services to intelligence, defence and homeland security officials with collection, processing, analysis and dissemination of information across the full spectrum of the Department of Defence and Intelligence Community’s mission. These applications has brought major growth in the demand of UAS, further driving its market growth. According to data obtained by VOA, U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Somalia totaled 852 in 2021, which despite being a 42% fewer than in 2020 despite the proportion of drone strikes rising. This will drive market growth.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Challenges

Lack of skilled pilots and vulnerable to hackers

Various UAVs are used by different end-users for their respective applications. The pilots for UAVs in Military & Defense sector are well trained for their purpose. On the other hand, various commercial drones which are used for mapping, surveying and other applications in Real-Estate or Recreation sector lack skilled pilots. This tend to restrain the market growth of UAS in these sectors. Moreover, UAVs are controlled at remote area thus they require a data link with the base control. Hackers can intercept the data link network and access users control system. This can lead to disruption of privacy and can be very handy to people with wrong intentions. For instance, US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s RQ-170 Sentinel stealth UAS, a key weapon in the intelligence gathering arsenal got hacked during operation in Afghanistan. They first jammed its communications links, which disconnected it from ground controllers and made it switch to autopilot. The drone was forced to search for unencrypted GPS frequencies as they sent the UAS with wrong GPS coordinates, tricking it into believing that it was near its home base in Afghanistan.

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Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Landscape

Technology launches, acquisitions and R&D activities are key strategies adopted by players in the Semiconductors Market. The Unmanned Aircraft Systems top 10 companies include:

Parrot

Lockheed Martin

DJI

Northrop Grumman

Thales

IAI

Airbus

Boeing

BAE

Textron

Acquisitions/Technology Launches

In April 2021, DJI launched their new benchmark for high-grade flight performance and incredible imagery with the new DJI Air 2S. This portable camera drone is an all-in-one solution which is designed to offer robust flight performance, state-of-the-art camera upgrades and high-grade preprogrammed content creation tools.

In April 2021, Ehang entered into a partnership with Aeroports de Catalunya, a public company of the Generalitat de Catalunya. The partnership aimed to provide passenger transportation, aerial logistics, take-off and landing infrastructure, airspace management and regulatory certification, etc. The partnership will further promote safe, intelligent and eco-friendly autonomous aerial mobility solutions, which will promote the applications of UAS in Europe.

In May 2021, Northrop Grumman’s MQ-4C Triton autonomous system has been contracted by the U.S. Navy to make major changes such as reducing the risk of integrating sense and avoid SAA capabilities into the high-altitude and to offer long-endurance operations. This capability will allow the Triton to safely operate in shared airspace with manned aircraft.

#Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market #Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Share #Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Size #Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market forecast #Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Report #Unmanned Aircraft Systems Market Growth

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psychreviews2 · 6 months

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War Part 3 - Group Psychology - Freud and Beyond

Death toll

At the end of WWI the unimaginable losses piled up. Margaret MacMillan, in Paris 1919, lays out the historical aftermath. "Four years of war shook forever the supreme self-confidence that had carried Europe to world dominance. After the Western Front, Europeans could no longer talk of a civilizing mission to the world...Millions of combatants died in those four years: 1,800,000 Germans, 1,700,000 Russians, 1,384,000 French, 1,290,000 from Austria-Hungary, 935,000 from the British Empire...Children lost fathers, wives husbands, young women the chance of marriage. And Europe lost those who might have been its scientists, its poets and its leaders, and the children who might have been born to them. But the tally of deaths does not include those who were left with one leg, one arm or one eye, or those whose lungs had been scarred by poison gas or whose nerves never recovered." To add a bitter sting to the end of the war, the Spanish Influenza was estimated to have killed more people than in the Great War.

Sigmund Freud described very well the empty void people feel when the light of life is snuffed out by an invisible enemy, including his daughter Sophie. "This afternoon we received the news that our sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been snatched away by influenzal pneumonia, snatched away in the midst of glowing health, from a full and active life as a competent mother and loving wife, all in four or five days, as though she had never existed." When consoling Ludwig Binswanger, who was suffering from a similar loss: "We know that the acute sorrow we feel after such a loss will run its course, but also that we will remain inconsolable, and will never find a substitute. No matter what may come to take its place, even should it fill that place completely, it remains something else. And that is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating a love that we do not want to abandon."

Sophie Halberstadt-Freud: https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/halberstadt-freud-sophie-1893-1920

Group Psychology

After focusing so much on individual dynamics in psychology and healing from trauma, Freud found so many group dynamics that it became necessary to study the influence of groups separately. "In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent, and so from the very first Individual Psychology is at the same time Social Psychology." Humanity provides labels for all these individuals in our lives, but we also provide labels for groups. Whether it's our country, ethnicity, institution, or even a makeshift crowd that spontaneously gathers, labels for groups have emotional significance for us. One of the main ways to see how powerful this impact is, is to notice how one reacts when one is by oneself, and how that quickly changes when a person interacts with another person or a group. Freud surveyed the literature on group behaviour and quoted heavily from Gustave Le Bon, who viewed these behaviours as evidence of a collective mind. "'There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group.'" Here a collective mind has less to do with a shared brain, but more to do with a part of the mind that activates in certain ways when people are interacting in a group.

Le Bon believed our influences from others starts in our biological inheritance and those influences coming out of our unconscious. "'The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation. One of the changes we undergo when we move from individual to group life, is that we start to become more like others...What is heterogeneous is submerged in what is homogeneous.'" What worried Le Bon was the unconscious connection people had and some of their ill effects. "'...The individual forming part of a group acquires...a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would...have kept under restraint.'" The key for Le Bon, on what leads to bad individual behaviour in a group, is how he uses the words invincibility and anonymity. He viewed that individuals were much more responsible by themselves than when in a group. Modern examples of this would be anonymity in a chat room. A person can insult, or 'troll,' a person that they would never do face to face, because of anonymity. People behave differently when they don't fear social consequences, and not fearing consequences means they feel they can do anything, which is what I think Le Bon was getting at. The feeling of omnipotence or invincibility is the feeling that there are no consequences and one can do what one wants. There is pleasure and relief when social inhibitions are lifted. So here, the example is one type of group interaction, where group members condone bad behaviour, as opposed to the typical expectation of people being bad when they are alone, and good in public. Both situations, of course, exist in their own contexts, and as we will see later, will require leadership that steers the group more one way or another.

Le Bon viewed the unconscious as what was inherited and what gets unleashed in group behaviour. For Freud, he is more interested in what was imitated and repressed, than what was inherited. One way or another, there is a predisposition coming from the unconscious. "...In a group the individual is brought under conditions which allow him to throw off the repressions of his unconscious instincts. The apparently new characteristics which he then displays are in fact manifestations of this unconscious, in which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition. We can find no difficulty in understanding the disappearance of conscience or of a sense of responsibility in these circumstances. It has long been our contention that 'dread of society' is the essence of what is called conscience." What is curious is Freud's view of repression, which can create a super-ego of conscience, partially from a dread of social punishment, yet at the same, as can be seen in the Great War, society can condone the dark side of people's personality, so that it operates very different from a conscience per se, or a conscience that uses social excuses and reasons to condone sadistic behaviour.

Moving into the power of suggestion and hypnotism, Le Bon asserts that the mind switches from a personal interest to a collective interest when in a group, but he slips in a power differential between the hypnotized and the hypnotist. "'The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the [hypnotist].'" The power differential leads to reciprocal condoning that strengthens what is typically inhibited. "'Under the influence of suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of groups than in that of the hypnotized subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all individuals of the group, it gains in strength by reciprocity...He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will....Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian - that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.'"

Reading Le Bon, Freud sees his version of the Unconscious, in that it "may desire things passionately, yet this is never so for long, for it is incapable of perseverance. It cannot tolerate any delay between its desire and the fulfillment of what it desires. It has a sense of omnipotence; the notion of impossibility disappears for the individual in a group." As the rationality decreases to simple rationalization a collective unconscious can appear. "A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association (just as they arise with individuals in states of free imagination), and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable function. The feelings of the group are always very simple and very exaggerated. So that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty." Freud then describes what we see in ALL political parties where followers have to toe-the-line and follow the group objective, no matter the facts or the doubt. "[The group] goes directly to extremes; if a suspicion is expressed, it is instantly changed into an [established] certainty; a trace of [opposition] is turned into furious hatred." Freud characterizes group psychology as incapable of nuance. It is only moved by suggestions from others that "paint in the most forcible colours." There must be exaggeration and repetition to convince a group. If there is too much nuance, it naturally breaks down the cohesiveness of a group. I would add to Freud's theories by saying that a group has so many people with individual perspectives, that they will only agree on a small group of ideas. Any motivation in a group has to be influenced by simple, but also precise ideas, that many can gather around to agree on. If they agree on enough, they will be willing to let go of some of the disagreements because their core issues are agreed upon. Often politicians will defect parties because the core ideas of a political party have shifted so much that there is not enough in common to keep that individual identified with that group.

Freud then sees the eternal difficulty the individual has, especially one who is different, with new ideas, to make changes, and advancements in society as a whole. "Since a group is in no doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and is conscious, moreover, of its own great strength, it is as intolerant as it is obedient to authority. It respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of weakness. What it demands of its heroes is strength, or even violence. It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative, and it has a deep aversion from all innovations and advances and an unbounded respect for tradition." Now here one has to be careful of the term conservative, because this could apply to any group, including scientists. Once a new scientific theory gains strength it can be ossified by the group and turn into a dogma. The people who decried a lack of scientific rigor and open-mindedness, can turn into a theocrat attacking all newcomers. This ironically can be seen in psychology itself. If a financial well-being and the pleasure of positive attention is in danger, leaders of an old movement will feel threatened by new theories purely out of addiction. Losing what you enjoy is always a cold bath and painful. It brings up all the individual resistances that naturally motivate, those who have enough power, to scapegoat and oppress. To me this hints at a personal self-interest that hides in the collective interest. People are always monitoring a self-interest in a group, and as described above, there's plenty of repression of desire in groups, not just condoning. Individuals can support group goals that also support individual goals, a sense of harmony, but not all those goals are constructive.

Freud then describes this dichotomy of unleashing condoned desires, and restricting prohibited desires, pushing people into a collective super-ego. "...One must take into consideration the fact that when individuals come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification. But under the influence of suggestion groups are also capable of high achievements in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion to an ideal. While with isolated individuals personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely prominent. It is possible to speak of an individual having his moral standards raised by a group. Whereas the intellectual capacity of a group is always far below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as high above his as it may sink deep below it."

This is why looking at those in power in a group becomes essential. Leaders and followers. Here followers are described by the book as people who are looking for someone to take care of them. The words of the leader are "'considered as natural forces, as supernatural powers.'" It's so much easier to believe than to test. "They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true." For Freud, the followers have an unfulfilled wish that they hope will be fulfilled by the group or leadership. "...What neurotics are guided by is not ordinary objective reality but psychological reality...Just as in dreams and in hypnosis, in the mental operations of a group the function for testing the reality of things falls into the background in comparison with the strength of wishes with their [emotional investment.]" As can be seen in my Cult Psychology review, the wishes of the followers are so emotionally invested in their leaders, they often tolerate abuse and maltreatment at the hands of authorities, rather than to test reality and to find better environments to satisfy wishes in a realistic way. The internal super-ego can be masochistic and self-destructive when the follower moves into self-austerity and slavery, while the leader exploits. Followers with no willpower are at the mercy of leaders.

How leaders can attract followers is through the wishes of their followers by being a promise of satisfaction, an "idea...to awaken the group's faith...[Leaders] must possess a strong and imposing will, which the group, which has no will of its own, can accept..." Freud's two examples are religion and the army. Promises to satisfy wishes involve some form of love that followers sense from the leader "...who loves all the individuals in the group with an equal love. Everything depends upon this illusion; if it were to be dropped, then both Church and army would dissolve..."

Prestige

The danger of this abstract symbol of love can be seen how wishes appear in the minds of followers. In War Pt. 2, I briefly reviewed Freud's Project, and how hazy wishes appear in the mind. This abstract, unrealistic, hazy wish is looking for satisfaction in the real world, but the real world always seems to have imperfections that disappoint wishes, and sometimes devastatingly so. It's interesting how hazy, abstract and dreamy a lot of promises are that are made by leaders, or I would say seducers. They are designed to be appear as reality to the follower because they are displayed in the environment. The hazy dream matches the hazy symbol and feels motivated, and continues chasing it. This is often why we like art, which isn't real, except for being in the environment for us to view, because it can appear as an escape from the real. The abstractness can cover hyper-realistic flaws, but our craving lights up when we see few flaws or cannot find flaws. Virginia Postrel quotes, in The Power of Glamour, the fashion writer Alicia Drake: "Glamour offers 'the implicit promise of a life devoid of mediocrity.'" If a habit to chase these hazy symbols develops, an idealization, a person can move from one disappointing group, political party, cult, relationship, and product advertisement after another. The person may even ask for help from one group, after escaping another, only to be equally abused by their new saviour group. The hazy, abstract quality of promising symbols fools followers again and again because of how precisely they ignore important contradictory detail. Reality testing always looks for more detail than what is provided and doesn't shy away from disenchantment. Followers have to see their motivation to run away from reality to see what they are doing to themselves. Almost like a childhood playhouse with unrealistic exaggerated colours, we are trying to find an abstract heaven on earth.

La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_hfZoe9FHE

In these groups, the leader definitely exploits, but the follower is actually hurting themselves with their need to believe, or their hope. You can even imitate these abusers into your mind and have it abuse you inside of you with false abstract symbols and promises of happiness. The internal symbols become a dangerous Siren, "Greeks bearings gifts", a backstabber, a Fifth Column in your mind. A form of bodysnatching. The belief goes too far, because the emotional investment is so strong, and the embarrassment so powerful. It is often worth tolerating more abuse than to admit failure. When people get out of cults they feel like they've snapped out of a dream. In reality that's exactly what they did. They allowed healthy scientific doubt to add the detail that the wish didn't want to look at. Many wishes can't be satisfied, and no matter what your faith, political inclinations, scientific theoretical inclinations, relationship hopes are, reality is reality, and there is no group or person that has a monopoly on reality. We are all still trying to figure this thing out called existence. If someone on a podium says that they've figured it out, they at best are only partially correct.

This dangerous symbol was defined by Freud and Le Bon as Prestige. "Prestige is a sort of domination exercised over us by an individual, a work or an idea. It entirely paralyses our critical faculty, and fills us with astonishment and respect. It would seem to arouse a feeling like that of fascination in hypnosis...[but] all prestige is dependent upon success, and is lost in the event of failure." Prestige has to be earned, but is often only a hazy promise. Like in Totem and Taboo, when the followers are disappointed enough, they depose their leaders with hostility, because their entitlement was disappointed, like a child disappointed in their parent, or like an infatuated lover disappointed in their love object. The entitled follower can go from idealizing to scapegoating, all the while not seeing their complicity in trying desperately to avoid reality. This putting a leader on a pedestal and tearing them down can go on endlessly with constant new leaders that always disappoint, as can be seen in numerous dictatorships. It's also a learning process for people who are political junkies who find that responsibility is much harder than criticizing. There's a natural disappointment and disheartening that happens every time one actually succeeds in getting their politician in power. Deep down people know that they will be disappointed because their expectations were way too high. The healthy and peaceful mind can finally let go of the need to get excited with every new leader who makes a promise. Until those promises are fulfilled, there's no need to get emotionally invested. Peaceful minds also know that it's nice to take responsibility for oneself and there's a pleasure in taking credit for what one has contributed, instead of giving all credit to our favourite leaders. There is no soul-mate, one has to work at relationships and constantly negotiate. Reality becomes much more beautiful, despite the flaws, because at least it is real. The imperfect positive things in reality can now be appreciated. They don't have to be perfect, and reality testing can confirm their true value instead of chasing a carrot of promises.

The freedom that comes to the person who has a love of reality is partially painful because one now realizes that one has accumulated habits, tendencies and beliefs that steered the personality in a distorted direction. If one was more skeptical like a scientist, and demanded more proof before a decision was made, a lot of damage could have been avoided. Identification is just a series of imitations of suggestions from others, who have varying grasps of reality. "Why, therefore, do we invariably give way to this contagion when we are in a group? Once more we should have to say that what compels us to obey this tendency is imitation, and what induces the emotion in us is the group's suggestive influence." As in War Pt 2., Vittorio Gallese viewed the source of suggestion as imitation of goals and I naturally posit that goals are about what Freud described as The Pleasure Principle, The Reality Principle, and Freud's later welcoming of death, The Nirvana Principle. Those three general umbrellas include all of Freud's categories for desire including friendship, family, community, self-love and intimate partners. When leaders of a cult are wearing those abstract symbols of success in robes, in expensive accessories, and advertised lifestyles, we followers are partially wishing to be in their place, or we want them to be cooperative for our goals or lovers if we can't be them. When leaders show weakness, tensions escalate with those who are led, as they see opportunities to replace the leader with themselves, or so they hope. Followers can have desires for revenge, and in some cases it's achieved, and power shifts in the hierarchy. In some cases, leaders see the writing on the wall and work on a succession plan, or conflict increases until they are ousted.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle: https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

Bloodied Colonel Gaddafi filmed pleading with his captors before death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLLa8xDns04

Identification for Freud is a social psychology that is based on imitative desire, but it can have an aggression to it. "Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone's removal...The object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such. The cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint; he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond." Like in the Oedipus Complex, Freud looks at sexual organization as something that can have a sense of feeding, starting with desires to imitate parents. "In the first case one's father is what one would like to be, and in the second he is what one would like to have." In a way it depends on upon whether the feeding is a hostile and competitive one or a cooperative one. From an ancient logic, it makes sense that early humans would eat many different things and some of those good things would lead to an individual to feel better. Through basic thought association, it would be possible to believe that one could gain the qualities of what is eaten. One might then, by thought association, gain the qualities of a competitor in victory or preserve characteristics of a lost loved one, through eating their flesh. Whether it's a competitive or cooperative feeding, there's a desire to replace distinctive people or to have them as romantic partners, or friends. In the case of leaders and followers, the leader is someone to replace or to have. As the saying goes, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Or you can follow in their path. "The mechanism is that of identification based upon the possibility or desire of putting oneself in the same situation." In some cases one can see how people can flip between one or another mode unconsciously. For example, if a leader corners people by being a source of leverage, it's possible that the targets will have no chance but to be subservient. The secret of inhibition, is how people feel when the obstacles are too high so they can't put themselves in the same situation as the leader, or like when you desire someone who is "out of your league." That stress happens so quickly because the mind likes what it sees in the love-object, but instantly moves into stress and concern because of how love-objects can easily remove attention and presence. We become intimidated.

When in identification mode, chasing after a role model, there's always a desire to close the gap. The reward of success is to turn the tables with the old leader and to now be looked upon by others as a desired love-object. If the goal is too hard, or actually impossible, the goal changes for the imitator. The role model is viewed as a friend or a love interest. Either way, people are feeding socially, and the unconscious can quickly find replacement objectives if the initial ones fail.

Caniba - Issei Sagawa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEbzcqJ29uc

Emotional Feeding - Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://rumble.com/v1gqvl1-emotional-feeding-thanissaro-bhikkhu.html

Power and sexuality

As we have already explained, people can move into the powerful position to gain benefits or to give transference of prestige and regard to the leader to siphon off some of the benefits that way. Here Freud finally explains his male homosexual theory with a bit more detail, but it ended up being more applicable in many situations that have nothing to do with homosexuality, and can appear in any dominant and subservient posturing. For Freud, masculinity is being a master and useful. Femininity is being cooperative, but also paradoxically, needing help. "The genesis of male homosexuality in a large class of cases is as follows. A young man has been unusually long and intensely fixated upon his mother in the sense of the Oedipus complex. But at last, after the end of his puberty, the time comes for exchanging his mother for some other sexual object. Things take a sudden turn: the young man does not abandon his mother, but identifies himself with her; he transforms himself into her, and now looks about for objects which can replace his ego for him, and on which he can bestow such love and care as he has experienced from his mother....In this process the object itself is renounced." Freud uses an example of a child that identifies with a lost kitten, as if to preserve the lost qualities of the missing pet. This is what Freud calls an introjection. In the Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft describes how this mental model of a lost love object is introjected into the mind. One of it's motivations is to "diminish separation anxiety." Freud described introjection and projection as opposites, and again using the feeding model, the instincts make judgments that say "'I should like to eat this', or 'I should like to spit it out'; and, put more generally: 'I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.'" Like with the Dora review, we can reject influences we don't like about ourselves to outside targets [projection], and we can adore what we don't have and empathize with the lost loved object and introject it to maintain the loved presence. Introjection, the way it's described, is almost like a desperate need to remember and repeat something important so as to not forget it. It becomes a habit in us very quickly because of how important those details are to remember. We practice them so well in our minds that we can become skilled with the imitation.

Another type of identification is a love connection treated as a status symbol where we actually want to be in that position [identification], but instead of authentically liking that person, we choose a love object that provides positive social attention that we couldn't get otherwise. "We see that the object is being treated in the same way as our own ego, so that when we are in love a considerable amount of narcissistic libido overflows on to the object. It is even obvious, in many forms of love choice, that the object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own. We love it on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego, and which we should now like to procure in this roundabout way as a means of satisfying our narcissism."

On Narcissism - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtgdl-on-narcissism-sigmund-freud-narcissism-1-of-4.html

In these relationships Freud expands love to include pretty much all forms of desire. It embraces any power differentials you can see in the workplace, politics, and economics, that all have these dynamics. With introjection "the ego has enriched itself with the properties of the object...In the second case it is impoverished, it has surrendered itself to the object, it has substituted the object for its [ego.]" So like with being in love, or any other contracts, the master is developing ego skills, while at the same time wanting a companion that is willing to surrender their ego to rely on the master's ego instead, a form of dependency. The sexuality can then follow in some instances, or fawning, brown-nosing behaviour to curry favour. "From being in love to hypnosis is evidently only a short step. The respects in which the two agree are obvious. There is the same humble subjection, the same compliance, the same absence of criticism, towards the hypnotist just as towards the loved object." For Freud, there's always some love going on in the background when there's a sense of prestige. "The hypnotic relation is the devotion of someone in love to an unlimited degree but with sexual satisfaction excluded; whereas in the case of being in love this kind of satisfaction is only temporarily kept back, and remains in the background as a possible aim at some later time." With friendships and intimate partners Freud sees again, like in his Love trilogy, the love we have for friends and family has to be applied to our intimate partners to help us go beyond lust, which without tender love, will dangerously drain into boredom every time we satisfy it. "It is interesting to see that it is precisely those sexual tendencies that are inhibited in their aims which achieve such lasting ties between men. But this can easily be understood from the fact that they are not capable of complete satisfaction, while sexual tendencies which are uninhibited in their aims suffer an extraordinary reduction through the discharge of energy every time the sexual aim is attained. It is the fate of sensual love to become extinguished when it is satisfied; for it to be able to last, it must from the first be mixed with purely tender components..." Some insights appear with this explanation. Love and tenderness can become a useful template for comparing a loving introjection, imitation, or the enriching of our ego, to a reaction formation where a person is forcing themselves to be like others. In the later situation the motivation is not supported by love and tenderness but instead by stress. To truly take on details from others, inspiration essentially, one has to love those details and the skills involved. Until a person has repeated those skills with loving attention, it remains unsustainable. Similar to an "mmmmm" feeding, we have to get to the point that new skills are tasty and create an appetite in us to use them. A good sign that a new skill you are developing is finally something that you deeply love, is the stress and yearning that appears when you are away from those activities. For example, a creative person without a creative objective to feed on would likely fall apart emotionally.

Violence and the Sacred - René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html

Love - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html

Where'd You Go, Bernadette?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqnroADyAqQ

Relationships can work well enough when the master has enough skills to maintain the economics for the family, business, or department. If that fails or the dependent becomes bored and wants more, as in more rewards from the master's ego, the relationship can fall apart when needs aren't met. It's hard for the master to maintain prestige, or the façade of prestige, and the dependent is restricted in that their success and failure is tied to the master. Success allows sexuality to flourish, and failure the opposite. The man gives his ego-penis, so to say, and the woman receives it. It turns into a castration complex, or a sore spot in manhood if he cannot succeed in business, politics, or to raise a family. As an extension of his penis, the man symbolically gives love by giving a lifestyle. The women wants the lifestyle, and has the pressure of being attractive enough as the object of desire. The man is going through all these hoops and women have pressure to be "worth it!" This predicts Jacques Lacan's theory of the Phallus and the pressure both sexes are under, and the reaction formations [pretending] caused by the pressure to sell themselves. I remember a very crude example of that at an expensive restaurant. When the bill was brought out to this couple nearby the man literally looked at the bill, looked at the woman, and back and forth between her and and the bill as if he was thinking, "I paid that much, for you?!" The woman had that look of stress of not being good enough but doing her best to pretend, just as predicted. Men have to pretend that they are more successful than they are, and women have to pretend they are more beautiful and seductive than they are. Men have to dress stylish, like a God, as if their door-to-door photocopier salesman job is so lucrative, and women have to pressure themselves with extensive grooming and exercising to appear more fit and youthful than they actually are. The Façade eventually cracks if it's too inauthentic and there's relief when the burden is let go of. The realistic fear that remains for each side of a relationship implies the rejection: "You are not worth it!"

The signification of the phallus - Jacques Lacan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780415708029/

Worth It - Fifth Harmony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBHQbu5rbdQ

Work from Home - Fifth Harmony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GL9JoH4Sws

Just as there's conflict between love interests on who's pulling their weight and making the right decisions, groups have to encounter people who aren't as enamored with them as they would want them to be. If we love a particular group, it's quite easy to hate those who don't belong to it, and especially non-conformists who endanger it. Freud here showed some subtlety by not only picking on religious people for their "cruelty and intolerance...Personally, we ought not to reproach believers too severely on this account...If today that intolerance no longer shows itself so violent and cruel as in former centuries, we can scarcely conclude that there has been a softening in human manners. The cause is rather to be found in the undeniable weakening of religious feelings and the libidinal ties which depend upon them. If another group tie takes the place of the religious one--and the socialistic tie seems to be succeeding in doing so--, then there will be the same intolerance towards outsiders as in the age of the Wars of Religion; and if differences between scientific opinions could ever attain a similar significance for groups, the same result would again be repeated with this new motivation." We are all religious when we succumb to the naive imitation of suggestions of ideal leaders, experts, taste-makers, celebrities, and even "soul-mates." For all of us, this habit has already been developed since birth. Andrew N. Meltzoff in Mimesis and Science, describes this early development as "gaze following." It's a mother-baby-object triangle paradigm where the child follows the "mother's gaze to an external target in order to see what she is looking at. Such gaze following is not the duplication of exact bodily movements, but rather a taking into account that mother's behavior is directed toward (or “about”) an external target...Infants begin to pay attention to the fact that mothers do not always look at them, but also cast their gaze on external objects, siblings and spouses in the environment." The danger of this habit is a lack of reality testing. As a child, it makes sense that you would be aware of the intentions of others, and be dependent on their suggestions. Children don't have enough capability of reality testing, and rely on mimetics in order to learn, but adults need that capability. Yet the habit to follow suggestions blindly can be so strong. That sense of comfort in relying on the suggestions of strangers, is often on shaky ground, especially when we find out that the product wasn't that good, the romantic partner was a narcissist, the expert was wrong, or the con artist was duping us. Being in a position where we need people too much is a dangerous dependency because those in power can always withdraw their resources, attention, and they can also hurt us with their mistakes. At the extreme end of relying on suggestions, wouldn't it lead to a kind of self-brainwashing where one doesn't trust one's own reasoning and reality testing, or in Freud's description, not being able to rely on one's own ego? If there's a target for a predator, I can't think of a better one.

The freedom of letting go of chasing prestigious leaders, and following their suggestions, has it's difficult qualities, though. If one isn't used to it then it requires a lot of practice to pull off. There is a lack of comfort when the illusion is seen through, especially if a large section of moral imitation was coming from the leader's illusory belief system, and aping Nietzsche's death of God, Freud predicted that followers would release their inhibitions to extremes. Of course, all institutions are open to this kind of disillusionment that seems to sanction a letting go of restraint to the extreme opposite. When dependent followers have to drop their substitute ego, their empty void of skills to face the world can lead to regression to unskillful ways of living, or searches for a new leader. We can hurt ourselves when we don't have anyone to look to for guidance.

Just - Radiohead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIFLtNYI3Ls

Cult Psychology: https://rumble.com/v1gvih9-cult-psychology.html

Totem and Taboo - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html

The 'Wolfman' Part 2: Sergei Pankejeff: https://rumble.com/v1gug9n-case-studies-the-wolf-man-23-freud-and-beyond.html

The 'Wolfman' Part 3: Sergei Pankejeff: https://rumble.com/v1gulsf-case-studies-the-wolfman-33-freud-and-beyond.html

The Herd Instinct

How leaders and love interests are able to worm their way into power over us is how they can feel their sense of power by how we react. The way towards mastering another person is to have leverage to take away resources and attention. Prestige, "contains an additional element of paralysis derived from the relation between someone with superior power and someone who is without power and helpless--which may afford a transition to the hypnosis of terror which occurs in animals." Here Freud finally get's to the individual element of group psychology that adds onto Le Bon's work. The terror we feel around a love-object is their ability to be helpful to us and their power to remove their presence and resources. It's not just a group-mind. It's the same for an employer or political leader. Comparing power to hypnotism, Freud says that "the hypnotist awakens in the subject a portion of his archaic inheritance which had also made him compliant towards his parents and which had experienced an individual re-animation in his relation to his father; what is thus awakened is the idea of a paramount and dangerous personality, towards whom only a passive-masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one's will has to be surrendered,--while to be alone with him, 'to look him in the face', appears a hazardous enterprise."

Our brain senses this power and unless we gain independence, we are stuck feeling this danger. The other side of mastery is dependency. If the leader, or love-object needs us, we can be comforted by them. We can both loathe the lack of independence and love the benefits of someone taking responsibility for us. "The individual feels 'incomplete' if he is alone. The dread shown by small children would seem already to be an expression of this herd instinct." This explains well the rapt attention we give to those in power and our suggestibility. We would like their power, but because there are obstacles, we surrender and try to cooperate in order to gain a substitute power within the rest of the group. Freud starts this development with childhood. There's a rivalry with other siblings for their parents' attention which doesn't always have a clear winner. Then there's a surrender and each rival focuses on the other to prevent either from being a favourite. Fandom, worship, and infatuation can co-exist without the jealousy because the target has too many boundaries. So we can't be the celebrity, or have them, but we still like the products, services, art, and philanthropy they provide. In a way, this is a prescription for success, but also for isolation. Unless you are able to keep people from trying to pilfer your success you won't keep it. Freud describes a scene that is eerily similar to celebrity today. "We have only to think of the troop of women and girls, all of them in love in an enthusiastically sentimental way, who crowd round a singer or pianist after his performance. It would certainly be easy for each of them to be jealous of the rest; but, in face of their numbers and the consequent impossibility of their reaching the aim of their love, they renounce it, and, instead of pulling out one another's hair, they act as a united group, do homage to the hero of the occasion with their common actions, and would probably be glad to have a share of his flowing locks. Originally rivals, they have succeeded in identifying themselves with one another by means of a similar love for the same object." Freud's description of this phenomenon moves closely to a description of communism when talking about the herd instinct, starting with children. "What appears later on in society in the shape of 'group spirit', does not belie its derivation from what was originally envy. No one must want to put himself forward, every one must be the same and have the same. Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well, or, what is the same thing, may not be able to ask for them. This demand for equality is the root of social conscience and the sense of duty." The mentality almost says that if the love-object is forbidden to me then I will only feel better if it's forbidden to everyone else.

Isolation - John Lennon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8lOLNfnCBg

Now how about the leader? Freud, continuing with Nietzsche's tradition, places the leader into the template of ancient human groups as he does in Totem and Taboo, a narcissistic father. "...The father of the primal horde was free. His intellectual acts were strong and independent even in isolation, and his will needed no reinforcement from others. Consistency leads us to assume that his ego had few libidinal ties; he loved no one but himself, or other people only in so far as they served his needs. To objects his ego gave away no more than was barely necessary...He, at the very beginning of the history of mankind, was the Superman whom Nietzsche only expected from the future. Even today the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterly nature, absolutely narcissistic, but self-confident and independent. We know that love puts a check upon narcissism, and it would be possible to show how, by operating in this way, it became a factor of civilization." The early group, or family, would always want to succeed the father as a way to get out of the egalitarian envy of group psychology. This naturally spread to many different systems of government that we have seen. The independence that everyone seeks can be different in their goals, different businesses, or different government positions. Everyone is trying to seek their own path of independence, to escape, with all the struggles of envy and narcissism when people imitate and compete for rewards that can't be shared. Some of this need for independence comes from goading from abusive powerful people who feel omnipotent, and feel they can do anything they want to people they have leverage against. When people receive enough abuse, some will surrender, but many won't and will continue trying to gain power to satisfy revenge, but if that's not possible, then to gain revenge on targets who have less power and to vent their abuse on easy targets, as can be seen in War Pt. 2. Having powerful people in one's life who only care about themselves means they have no scruples with anyone else.

"I drink your milkshake!" There will be blood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX-9wXFQRgA

"Because I can."

The strongest knowledge —that of the total lack of freedom of the human will— is nonetheless the poorest in successes, for it always has the strongest opponent: human vanity. — Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The above lessons remind me of the all powerful ring in Lord of the Rings. The more power one has, the more desires can be satisfied. When a dictator, like Sauron, has unlimited power, they unleash desire associations that were thought about continually in relation to power. It's like spring waiting to be sprung in the right environment. If I achieve this power, then I can get all these goodies, and there may even be a feeling of entitlement for those things. "I should have these goodies." If one is indispensable, then one can demand as much as the unconscious wants. As John Bargh described, "by definition, power is the ability to attain one's desired goals, and so when one is in a position of power those goals are likely to be selected and pursued." As we gain power, what was filed away in unconscious memory starts to pop up. This is why we can point out corruption when others do it, especially when it damages us in some ways, but we have an unconsciousness about it in ourselves. "Situational power [automatically activates] those goals one has thought about and pursued in the past in situations where one is in a position of power. Over time, the connection between the mental representation of powerful situations and those goals becomes so strong that those goals become active and operate without the person consciously selecting those goals." If few people have little to no desire, then that means most people have large or indefinite sources of desire, but they are inhibited by obstacles and their safety, with a reduction of temptation, is what we are unconscious of and take for granted. Yet we don't have to be completely unconscious. One way is to notice what people do when they gain more money, or have less obstacles to power. Economists look at the rule that as people make more money they tend to spend more. With each of us having unlimited desires, it's quite easy to see how we could unconsciously be the same as those we accuse. The healthy admission, and also an admission that provides relief from perfectionism, is that everyone in a power position can be more or less guilty. Awareness and self-restraint become paramount when there's temptation. Doing the right thing, when one has power, may actually feel wrong.

The way to gain pleasure from doing the right thing, in Freud's estimation, is gaining pleasure in satisfying the ego-ideal by making it into a conscience, and this is especially true if the conscience is independent of a corrupt leader. "There is always a feeling of triumph when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal. And the sense of guilt (as well as the sense of inferiority) can also be understood as an expression of tension between the ego and the ego ideal."

Tullio Jappelli and Luigi Pistaferri, Fiscal Policy and MPC Heterogeneity, Published in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2014, vol. 6(4), October, pp. 107-36.

On War and Death - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv78n-on-war-and-death-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-13.html

Gandalf "Don't tempt me Frodo": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00Jjj6oI5fg

Boromir "It's a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHHaKtVdfa0

Galadriel "I pass the test": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3VOf3CBGvw

Bombshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2IsaFaB1iA

Disclosure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgEtlGdx_zo

Landlords are targeting vulnerable tenants to solicit sex in exchange for rent, advocates say: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/landlords-are-targeting-vulnerable-tenants-solicit-sex-exchange-rent-advocates-n1186416

The War to end all Wars?

Margaret MacMillan described in Paris 1919, all those attempts to create a satisfactory ideal to the end of the Great War, starting with President Wilson's 14 points, but the final Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919 wasn't able to satisfy all critics. "The Germans were horrified by the peace terms, which they saw as a betrayal of a pledge they felt they had received from the Allies at the time of the armistice: that the peace would be negotiated on the basis of Wilson's new diplomacy with no unjust retribution." As long as there are grievances and resentments, there's always room for war to rekindle again when new generations are energized and motivated. "The young Adolf Hitler was in Munich that June, taking congenial courses on the glories of German history and the evils of international Jewish capital. Already he was discovering his own talents as an ideologue and an orator."

The circumstances of the Great War showed how the future could hang on hairpin turns. Tim Cook in Vimy: The Battle and The Legend described the horrible twist of fate. "After recovering from an October 1916 wound to his upper leg (and possible loss of one testicle) on the Somme, [Corporal Adolf Hitler] had returned to the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, which was stationed on Vimy Ridge. But the unit was moved later that month about 15 km north to La Bassée, where the Sixth Army expected a British attack. Had his unit been on Vimy Ridge during the ramped-up Canadian artillery blitz, Adolf Hitler might have fallen victim to the shellfire, as did thousands of his German comrades, and world history might have turned out very differently."

By 1940 Hitler was able to return to Vimy Ridge and there was a photo taken of him at the memorial proving to the allies that he hadn't destroyed it as they had thought. The irony was that Hitler didn't demolish the monument because he enjoyed it's peaceful nature. The age of personality disordered leaders was reaching its apex.

The Sith Symphony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKYy4sT4pPM

Galactic Empire - Star Wars - The Imperial March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nohQReM7BpI

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Group Psychology - Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393007701/

Paris 1919 - Margaret MacMillan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780375760525/

A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis - Charles Rycroft: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780140513103/

The language of Psychoanalysis - Jean Laplanche: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780946439492/

The Use and Abuse of Power - Annette Y. Lee-Chai, John Bargh: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781841690230/

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54(7), 462–479.

Vimy: The Battle and the Legend - Tim Cook: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780735233164/

Mimesis and Science - Scott R. Garrels: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781611860238/

The Power of Glamour - Virginia I. Postrel: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781416561125/

"The Canadian Unknown Soldier." After the Battle. Battle of Britain Intl. Ltd. (109).

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

#group psychology #sigmund freud #war

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