Category: National Interest

RUSSIA’S BELLIGERENCE AND ITS IMPLICATION FOR OUR NATIONAL SECURITY

A Russian Su-24 buzzes the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea on April 12, 2016. (U.S. Navy)

CNN reported the other day that Homeland Security officials said that Russia tried to penetrate the US energy power grid, and left tracks to show its hackers had the ability to shut down the grid, but didn’t. That is to say that Russia literally have the ability to shut down our power grid, and by implication, our economy, and by implication, our defense infrastructure, and by implication, our way of life. But chooses not to do so.

Why?

Because this is not the right time for Vladimir Putin to do so? Maybe he’s preserving his cyberweapon for a time when his adventure in global disorder will be at crossroads with our core national interests. And when that time come and if the administration in power do not kowtow to his ambitions he will then deploy his weapon and cripple us. Could that be it? Just a maybe.

This is not the first time that Russia has so affronted us and got away with it. The history has existed of Russian aircrafts buzzing US spy plane in international airspace, buzzing our destroyer many times in the Black sea, and buzzing our warship in the Baltic sea. Early this year, a Russian spy ship was spotted 100 miles off the coast of North Carolina and based on historical precedents was predicted to be on a four-to-six-months deployment off the East Coast where it will be conducting intelligence operations near Cape Canaveral, King’s Bay, Norfolk and New London. Locations that are home to US naval installations.

These incidents do not seem to rattle our leaders in Washington and there has been no occasion where it was shown that any of these incidents have provoked President Obama and now President Trump to communicate to Russia in unequivocal terms that these sorts of behaviors will not be tolerated and cannot be allowed to repeat themselves without serious consequences or injury to the Russian federation.

Why?

I was not around during the Cold War but from literature that I have read and from movies that I have watched, our presidents during those trying times were clear in their message to Russia. President Kennedy couldn’t be more clear and direct with Chairman Khrushchev with the paragraphs below in his address to the nation during the Cuban missile crisis:

 

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. . . .

I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. . . . He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction. . .

 

Those were strong words coming from our Commander-in-Chief. And there was no doubt in the Kremlin that those words were gonna be matched with actions if need be. Eyeball to eyeball, the Russians blinked and we won the Cold War.

Since the days of Barack Obama however, courage has given way to appeasement. From President Obama asking Medvedev during the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Korea to communicate to Putin that his tough talk on Russia were just mere talk, solely for the purpose of winning a second term, to President Trump idolizing the same Putin, one is led to wonder what hold, if any, that Putin have on the national security of the United States. Since the days of Obama. Such that whenever the occupant of the Oval Office becomes privy to that information will have no choice than to defer to Putin? Or did the election of Barack Obama usher America into the era of electing to power our own Neville Chamberlains?

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Cry Africa

“Put $50,000 in the right hands and you can test battery acid as skin lotion.”

By Chinedu Ezeocha, for The Ezeocha Post

Updated 10:51 PM CT, Wed March 11, 2015

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“Put $50,000 in the right hands in this country and you can test battery acid on people as skin lotion.”

The 2005 movie The Constant Gardener details how European pharmaceutical companies exploit ignorant African populations, not only as guinea pigs to test the efficacy of their new drugs, but most importantly, the movie details how they (the pharmaceutical companies), under the pretense of providing vaccination for some seasonal sickness in their target country, deliberately infect naïve populations in that country with communicable diseases. Diseases that they invented in their laboratories for the sole purpose of making the target population sick. Once an epidemic-level status for the sickness they afflicted the people with is achieved, just as we saw in the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in 2014, the movie details how the pharmaceutical companies through their fifth columnists in the federal government(s) of their target country(ies), forces the hand of the government(s) to purchase from them (the pharmaceutical companies) the already-made antidote for the epidemic. And once that is achieved, walaaaa, their bank accounts grows fatter to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Corporate profiteering. But more accurately, greed.

Greed is the sole reason Africa is still underdeveloped.

The take away from The Constant Gardener is something that most people who are enlightened and in the know are pretty much aware of. Namely:

  1. Europe haven’t ceased from exploiting Africa and its resources even though the colonial days are over.
  2. Europe in the past used sheer brutality to loot Africa, but contemporarily their governments are using covert agents such as the British Council, Department for International Development (DFID), and Agence Française de Développement (AFD) to achieve this looting. Their corporations on the other hand seeks out the greedy and the unpatriotic among Africa’s lot and seduce them with money, weaponry, and the promise of power into partnering with them to impoverish their respective countries.
  3. European countries and corporations will kill anything and everything standing on their way, including their own citizens, if need be, in their single-minded objective of constant exploitation of Africa. The horrific murder of Mr. and Mrs. Quayle, a diplomat and his international activist wife in the movie buttresses this very fact.

I strongly recommend The Constant Gardener to all my readers. You can stream it on Netflix. You can watch it on Amazon Prime. And you can also watch it at so many other online movie streaming sites. It is as educating as it is true.

 

Now, of all of the 54 fully-recognized and the 2 partially-recognized African nations, none is a colony of a foreign country. All 56 of them are independent states.  Which means that they are all self-governed. Irrespective of whether they are governed by monarchs, despots, or by democratically elected leaders, they all are at the very least governed by the people of the land and not by foreigners. And even though the “government of the people by the people and for the people” mantra does not apply to all 56 African states, you are rest assured that “by the people” part of that mantra applies to all of them. They are all independent and self-governed.

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Hold your thought.

Independence means “not subject to control by others.” That’s as succinct as it can be.

Moving forward, almost all the nations in Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia, were colonized by Europe. And at different times in their history, each of these African nations fought and won their independence from their European oppressors.

Statesmen in each of these individual African countries that fought for their independence believed that they were capable of governing themselves. They believed they had, not only both the mental and intellectual capacities to fashion out sound policies and programs that can advance their respective countries, but also that they can actually implement those policies successfully for nation-building. They believed they were as competent as the colonialist civil and structural engineers in the building of bridges and rails. They believed they were as good as the colonialists in mining. They believed they can be as civil as the colonialist in having a great debate for national good within the democratic system of government. And most of all, they believed they were patriots and loved their respective countries exceedingly, and that when they gain their independence, that they will develop their countries better than whatever developmental plan their European dictators had in stock for them. Their love for their country and their strong desires for self-governance inspired their fight for their respective country’s independence. And they got it.

And so are they all, all independent and self-governing countries.

Continue reading “Cry Africa”

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