A MUST READ -- Eric Zuesse -- What U.S. Hegemony Is, How It Started, and When

What U.S. Hegemony Is, How It Started, and When

 

Eric Zuesse, July 14, 2022

 

 

 

An unquestioned assumption amongst America’s Establishment is that the global dominance that America inherited from having been the last of the major world powers to enter World War II, and from having suffered (by far) the least damage from that War, needs to continue in perpetuity, and that it needs to become total U.S. dominance over the entire planet, and especially dominance over the world’s largest nation, Russia, which is 1.77 times larger than America (the world’s third-largest country) is. (Russia is 1.74 times larger than Canada, the world’s second-largest country, is; and is 1.78 times larger than China, which is the world’s fourth-largest. It is 2.01 times larger than the 5th-largest, Brazil; and is 2.20 times larger than the 6th-largest, Australia. It is 5.20 times larger than the 7th-largest, India. So, there are only 6 giant countries: Russia, Canada, America, China, Brazil, and Australia.) The term that many scholars use to refer to this belief — this objective, that America’s dominance over the entire world would be good instead of bad — is “hegemony”. Here, this belief will be explained. 

 

Historically, any nation’s Establishment (its aristocracy and their employees and other agents) seeks to control as much of the world’s natural resources as possible, and this craving by them is the leading cause of wars. Russia, as the world’s largest nation, is also the world’s richest in natural resources. That is the main reason why the thousand-or-so people who control America (who mainly are America’s billionaires, America’s richest and best-connected individuals) want, more than anything else, to control Russia, which they don’t YET control. Their top mutually shared (virtually unanimous, if not 100% unanimous) assumption is that, however this is to be done, America needs to achieve control over Russia — that it is a good, instead of a bad, objective to pursue. If any member of America’s Establishment does NOT hold this objective, then that person would be shunned by all of his or her colleagues, and would consequently become targeted by all of them for defeat or conquest, destroying that person’s reputation and/or enterprises. Consequently, none comes forth publicly in opposition to this objective, which is called “U.S. hegemony” when it is not being labelled instead by benign-sounding ideological terms or phrases such as “democracy,” “freedom,” “the American way,” “the liberal international order,” or “the rules-based international order,” all of which presume that America’s continued and increased control over the world will help, instead of hinder, such alleged “values” — which really are global conquest, however that is to be achieved. So, the public join in: they (as workers for, or other agents of, those extremely wealthy individuals), likewise favor continued, and increased, U.S. global rule, hegemony. This goal is accepted by America’s public, as-if it were the very meaning of being an American ‘patriot’, and to oppose it is thus ‘unpatriotic’. This belief, in the virtuousness of extending yet further the American empire, is also the reason why the highest-respected of all institutions in America is “the military.”

 

Prior to 1898, America had been only a confused but largely democratic country, and not yet an imperialistic capitalist, or “fascist,” country, such as it has been ever since then, except during the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945), when America was — for only that brief time-span — the most fully democratic country that it has ever been. Almost immediately after WW II, America became, even more than it ever had been, an imperialistic capitalist country, effectively controlled by its military-industrial complex, which never before even had existed. This is the reason why U.S. President Harry S. Truman (inspired by the advice that he had received from his hero, Dwight David Eisenhower — “Ike” — the most gifted liar of anyone who became America’s President, except for Barack Obama) created, in 1947, both the U.S. Department of ‘Defense’ (America’s first-ever standing army — which had been condemned by America’s Founders, but Truman and the U.S. Congress dismissed that concern) and the CIA (for producing coups, which America started doing in 1948 Thailand).

 

Eric Zuesse -- The U.S. Government’s Fake Opposition to Global Warming

The U.S. Government’s Fake Opposition to Global Warming

 

Eric Zuesse, July 13, 2022

 

 

 

The U.S. Government is set to destroy America’s stockpile of thorium, which element is the likeliest source of safe nuclear energy, and is also the likeliest replacement of the fossil fuels that are increasingly threatening the world’s future if a uranium 235 and plutonium nuclear-bomb World War III won’t end the world before global burnout does. 

 

Some people think that a WW III is the world’s biggest threat; others think that a global burnout from fossil-fuels usage is. Thorium-based electricity could provide the solution to both concerns. But the U.S. Government has stunningly ignored thorium, because their top goal is to win control over the entire world (U.S. hegemony, an all-inclusive U.S. global empire), and only the uranium-based nuclear reactors produce feedstock to make nuclear bombs (for conquest), which is the U.S. Government’s top goal. So, their plan is simply to get rid of the thorium ‘waste’ from its nuclear industries. According to the narrative from the U.S. Government’s propagandists, “in 1973 the United States government shut down all thorium related nuclear research due to the success of the uranium reactor to produce energy, so the vast majority of the nuclear reactors that exists today use enriched uranium (U-235) or reprocessed plutonium (Pu-239) as their source of energy,” but the truth is quite otherwise: thorium-research was shut down because bomb-production was the real purpose of all nuclear development in the U.S., then, and now. They wanted more nuclear bombs. (Whereas bombs can be made from thorium producing uranium-233, it’s more difficult and far less suitable for major industrial-scale nuclear industries. As one 2011 engineering analysis concluded, thorium-based production of electricity would “have extraordinary proliferation resistance because thorium cannot be made directly into a weapon.5 The reactor cannot be used to create substantial, pure quantities of plutonium or 238U, which are needed to make bombs.2” Unfortunately, however, this is also why the U.S. Government has shunned it.)

 

America’s Government has built nuclear power upon the foundation of producing fission-bombs, nuclear weapons, which need U-235 and plutonium, that are required for large-scale bomb-making, instead of to build America’s nuclear-electricity production upon the basis of vastly safer thorium, which doesn’t explode. Thorium is being considered a mere ‘waste’, because it’s not useful for bomb-making (although thorium can do that on a small scale). China, by contrast, is racing past the U.S. to build-out mankind’s thorium electrical-production future, instead of to focus upon producing the biggest nuclear-weapons stockpiles like the U.S. and Russia have been doing (to make bombs for potential usage against each other). 

 

Fortunately, two U.S. Senators are now trying to block America’s planned destruction of its thorium stockpiles, which are residues from the production of nuclear weapons and from existing uranium-235-based nuclear electricity-generation. These two Senators want America, not China, to be leading the world into a far safer future. However, they do this not in order to prevent global burnout, nor to prevent a nuclear-war global holocaust, but, instead, in order to prevent a termination of U.S. global hegemony (U.S. rule over the entire world). Loss of U.S. global hegemony is what they are actually worrying about. They simply want America to beat China. It’s purely a competitive goal, for them — not actually a mankind goal (which it is in China): to reduce global warming.

 

On 23 April 2006, the thorium-reactor expert Kirk Sorensen’s blog, “Energy From Thorium” headlined “Don’t throw away U233!”, and he wrote:

 

When I learned that the entire National Defense Stockpile of thorium (3216 metric tonnes) was slated for burial in the Nevada desert, that was bad enough. But the destruction of our U233 really breaks my heart and hurts so much worse.

Uranium-233 is the ideal fuel to start a liquid-fluoride reactor, and there is a very little bit in the world, left over from different attempts to get a thorium-powered future going. Now the DOE is taking great pride in the fact they are going to throw it away. I can only comfort myself with the idea that if they knew how valuable this material is for starting a liquid-fluoride reactor, they would never do this.

It gets even worse – the $128 million that they plan to spend to “blend” down this little bit of U-233 could be used to progress liquid-fluoride reactors, which currently get about $40K a year under the DOE Gen-4 program. The fellow that gets the money tells me it’s enough to “answer the phone”.

And once blended with U-238, the U-233 will be unrecoverable (I’m sure this is what they want). We could not isotopically separate it like natural uranium, since it will be far, far too radioactive to introduce into a diffusion plant. So it’s gone – thrown away when it could have started a thorium reactor.

What a tragic loss and waste.

 

This wasn’t a problem only of the war-mongering George W. Bush U.S. Presidency, which then was in power. It’s instead bipartisan in Washington. Thus, journalist Ambrose Evans Pritchard, in Britain’s Telegraph, bannered, on 29 August 2010, “Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium: If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.”. He meant it seriously, and he wondered why America hadn’t already initiated such a “Manhattan Project II,” in order to put the environmentalist rhetoric of Obama, and of other American liberals, into an authentically promising means of actually achieving their asserted environmentalist objective against global warming. He closed by saying, “If it works, Manhattan II could restore American optimism and strategic leadership at a stroke: if not, it is a boost for US science and surely a more fruitful way to pull the US out of perma-slump than scattershot stimulus. Even better, team up with China and do it together, for all our sakes.” However, twelve more years of “stimulus” (without much stimulation) were yet to pass, before even just two U.S. Senators decided to team up together so as to push that idea through, but not cooperatively, with China (such as that journalist had proposed) — but instead as a means of beating China, so as to maintain America’s continuing global hegemony, against China and Russia. (The U.S. Government has actually been secretly continuing its Cold War even after the Soviet Union and its communism ended in 1991. The U.S. Government’s actual enemy wasn’t communism: it turned out to have been Russia and any other resistant nation; the Cold War, on America’s side, was America’s war against all nations — to control all of them. That’s just a historical fact. Communism was just an excuse.)

 

On 18 May 2022, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville headlined a press release, “Tuberville, Marshall Introduce Bill to Save Clean, Safe Nuclear Power”, and he announced:

 

U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS), a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, today introduced the Thorium Energy Security Act to prevent the destruction of Uranium 233 (U-233), a critical element used to produce clean energy.

“Thorium and U-233 hold the promise to produce clean, safe power and are vital to our national security. Energy will continue to be at the heart of global conflicts, so the United States must invest in energy technology,” Senator Tuberville said. “China clearly saw the value in our thorium research — they’ve taken up where we left off, and we may soon see thorium-powered Chinese aircraft carriers and thorium reactors on the Belt & Road courtesy of American technology.” 

“Uranium-233 is too valuable and too useful to just be thrown in the trash, a fact that the Chinese Communist Party understands but our Department of Energy clearly does not. While we are spending millions of dollars to destroy U-233, the CCP is investing in it by preparing to build a new generation of advanced aircraft carriers and nuclear reactors powered by U-233,” said Senator Marshall. “The United States needs to lead on advanced nuclear reactors and not leave the future of innovative clean energy technologies in the hands of China. Preserving this valuable national resource is the first step on that path.” 

BACKGROUND:

In the 1960s, the United States pioneered thorium molten salt breeder reactor technologies at Oak Ridge National Labs. This promising technology, which employed uranium 233 (U-233), produced clean, safe power, but did not produce plutonium like other reactor designs. As our country was focused on growing our nuclear arsenal, the U.S. shelved thorium and U-233 for decades.

In 2001, the Department of Energy began the process of destroying our stocks of U-233. ...

 

Since then, their bill has been bottled-up being considered in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. After these decades of the U.S. Government’s trying to find a way to ditch thorium as mere waste because it’s not useful for making nuclear bomb-heads, because it doesn’t explode, our Government might at last start to put it to use replacing fossil fuels, which goal, for this Government, has, thus far, been only a rhetorical matter, in order for liberal politicians to appeal to their snookered voters (who don’t recognize the difference between mere rhetoric versus actual intentions), not something that liberal politicians ever actually cared about or intended to solve. (Of course, conservative politicians have instead been saying that human-created global warming doesn’t even exist, that it’s just a hoax. Their voters don’t even care about the environment, and the future — not even about their own descendants.)

 

According to the World Nuclear Association, “The use of thorium as a new primary energy source has been a tantalizing prospect for many years. Extracting its latent energy value in a cost-effective manner remains a challenge, and will require considerable R&D investment. This is occurring preeminently in China, with modest US support.” The near future will actually decide whether America trashes its thorium, or instead will use it to compete against China.

 

According to a 2011 article published by the American Chemical Society, “Should We Consider Using Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors for Power Generation?”:

 

Thorium is four times more abundant than uranium and naturally occurs in only one isotope, 232Th, eliminating all enrichment activities inherent in uranium mining and processing. … [In order to operate a thorium reactor,] there is a start-up load of approximately 1.5 tons of fissile material, such as 235U, 238U, or 239Pu, after which the reactor thermally breeds 233U [by constant feeding of the 100% thorium fuel feedstock, into the reactor] to maintain fission [the reactor’s energy-production]. Conventional nuclear reactors [which use 100% U-235 as their fuel feedstock] need 510 times more initial material [enriched uranium] to start and continuous feeding of enriched uranium.1 Perpetually needing to transport enriched uranium presents proliferation risks. Thorium by itself does not pose proliferation risks and presents a much smaller radiation risk.

 

Recently, Sorensen delivered a 10-minute TED-talk explaining why thorium-based nuclear-based energy will be the world’s future. Finally, the idea that he’s been championing for twenty years is starting to get some traction in war-mongering Washington DC — the world’s global-imperialist capital. Finally, something serious might be afoot to halt global warming, but its motivation is instead to keep the U.S. Government in control over all nations — so as not to lose America’s hegemony. It’s a “national security” matter, to America’s Government: to remain “Number 1” (regardless of whether doing so might actually be endangering both America’s, and the entire world’s, national security, thus threatening everybody’s safety). That’s what it’s really about. All of the liberals’ rhetoric about stopping global warming has merely been PR cover for bomb-making and continuing America’s global hegemony, nothing serious to stop global warming.

 

The only possible competitor to thorium as an ecologically friendly electrical energy source is generally thought to be nuclear fusion, but that has always been unlikely and now seems to be even more unlikely than before. On 23 June 2022, Science magazine headlined “Out of gas: A shortage of tritium fuel may leave fusion energy with an empty tank”, and explained why the feasibility of ever achieving a fusion reactor is looking smaller the more that the barriers to achieving it are becoming scientifically understood. That’s the exact opposite of the prospects for achieving thorium fission reactors. Thorium seems to be the only practicable way to avoid global catastrophe. 

 

 

The U.S. Government’s obsession for global hegemony has been threatening everybody, everywhere. Either it will end, or else the world will end, maybe even within our own lifetimes — especially if the U.S. Government’s grasping for global hegemony will produce WW III. The U.S. Government is global warming’s friend, and everybody’s enemy. Will that change? Nothing yet indicates it will. But perhaps China or some other country will pull us all through this perilous historical moment.

 

—————

 

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

 

Eric Zuesse -- The West Is Abandoning Ukraine

 

The West Is Abandoning Ukraine

 

Eric Zuesse, July 08, 2022

 

On July 7th, Bloomberg News headlined “EU Bureaucracy Seen Blocking 1.5 Billion-Euro Loan to Ukraine”, and reported that, “The executive arm of the European Union is blocking a 1.5 billion-euro ($1.5 billion) loan for Ukraine as caution prevails over the country’s urgent needs, according to officials.”

 

America alone has donated and loaned, during this year, $54 billion to Ukraine, mostly for U.S.-made weapons, which have been rushed there from existing U.S. stockpiles, which stockpiles will need to be restocked with new weapons-orders from firms such as Lockheed Martin, whose corporate stock value is up 12% thus far this year. However, this is a mid-term election-year in America, and inflation is already running against political incumbents, especially Democratic Party ones. On June 10th, the AP bannered “US inflation at new 40-year high”, and reported that “Consumer prices surged 8.6% last month from a year earlier.” Already, on May 20th, the AP had bannered “War fuels surging prices in Europe” and reported that “The war has accelerated inflation across Europe and the world, with prices for energy, materials and food surging at rates not seen for decades. It’s causing sticker shock at the grocery store, gas pumps, electricity bills and construction sites.”

Eric Zuesse -- How the U.S. Government Hides Its Being a Dictatorship

 

How the U.S. Government Hides Its Being a Dictatorship

 

Eric Zuesse, July 07, 2022

 

How did this come to be?

 

The same group of around a thousand people who control the U.S. Government are also in control over the major newsmedia and also over the major academic institutions and think tanks and ‘charitable’ foundations, so that the public are deceived, by those ‘news’-media and the ‘experts’ that they publicize, to believe that the public rule the country (that it’s a “democracy”), and that this tiny super-rich aristocracy (a corrupt oligarchy of mega-corporate controlling owners, America’s billionaires) do not. It’s all done by deceit, and the super-rich fund it, not only directly but via their corporations.

 

Back on 17 March 2011, which was before Britain’s Guardian got taken over by U.S. billionaires, that newspaper headlined “Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media: Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda”, and they reported that, “The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. … The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations ‘without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries’.”

 

Eric Zuesse -- Kissinger’s Davos speech, at the age of 99, shows he never understood what he was doing.

 

Kissinger’s Davos speech, at the age of 99, shows he never understood what he was doing.

 

Eric Zuesse, July 05, 2022

 

 

 

Nixon's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, assisted the U.S. Government’s evils in Vietnam, but also helped China to moderate away from Mao’s rigid Marxism. (Mao considered himself to be applying Marx’s views to a then still predominantly rural national culture.) In both matters, he was reflecting the policy preferences of Republican-Party billionaires, at the time, but also of Democratic Party billionaires, because the billionaire-class, at that time, were just coming away from their prior hope to end up in control of Vietnam, to make it another satellite-nation or vassal or ‘allied’ country, and were looking forward to using both China and Indo-China (including Vietnam) as low-wage workers to employ in order to compete against and keep in check the wages that they would need to pay to their American workers. Consequently, when Kissinger was a part of the U.S. aristocracy’s power-structure, he represented the aristocracy itself, against workers. He was helping to drive down the wages they were paying, and these wages were overwhelmingly being paid to American workers, because the increasingly open-borders international order had not yet established itself as it subsequently did. Stockholders were then even more afraid of potentially rising American wages than they were eager to exploit existing far-lower third-world wages. Henry Kissinger was good for business — especially for America’s giant firms, which would also be out-competing against small “mom and pop” local American businesses, by importing from countries such as Vietnam and China products that would underprice U.S.-made goods, so that their giant firms would also be benefitting by taking a cut from importing those foreign-made goods into the U.S. market. All of this international outsourcing would, for these reasons, increase the inequality of wealth in America — the ratio of the collective wealth of billionaires to the collective wealth of the bottom 50% of Americans. And that ratio did soar starting at around 1970, when Kissinger was part of the U.S. power-structure. He was good for them — the owners. But did he know what he was doing? Or did he instead actually believe the rationalizations that the owners were paying for him to believe and to spout publicly? He was their agent, but was he also their fool?

 

Eric Zuesse -- U.S.-Led Holy War to Conquer Russia and China Declared by Pompeo

U.S.-Led Holy War to Conquer Russia and China Declared by Pompeo

 

Eric Zuesse, July 04, 2022

 

On June 24th, at the think tank, the Hudson Institute, U.S. President Trump’s CIA chief and Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, delivered a 5,000+-word speech, suggesting that America has an essentially God-assigned mission to control the world, so as to preserve freedom and democracy for everybody, and that victory against Russia and China is therefore obligatory for the United States and its allies, not only to serve God but also to serve God’s People, because “central to the economic wellbeing of American families is a United States that leads. It leads all across the world, both in military and in economic power”; and, so, “We must act in concert with our allies to affect strategic clarity, unmistakable to both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. We must prevent the formation of a Pan-Eurasian colossus incorporating Russia, but led by China. To do that, we have to strengthen NATO.” Furthermore, “The AUKUS Union [the recently U.S.-UK-created Asian military alliance] should be folded into this expanded security alliance,” so that NATO will become a global alliance against Russia and China, in order to preserve America’s world leadership. His basic argument was that it’s either us or them, and they must be conquered, because God wants it, and we serve Him.

Eric Zuesse -- Why America’s nuclear threat to Russia now is bigger than the Soviet nuclear threat to America was in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

 

Why America’s nuclear threat to Russia now is bigger than the Soviet nuclear threat to America was in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

 

Eric Zuesse, July 01, 2022

 

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the central issue was how short America’s available reaction-time to a Soviet blitz nuclear attack would be and whether it would be too short for America to respond before America’s leader, JFK, would be able to press the nuclear button and retaliate against such a Soviet nuclear first-strike (from so near a location as Cuba). That time-interval would have been about 30 minutes, and Kennedy told Khrushchev that that would be unacceptably short and so if Khrushchev would go through with his plan to place his missiles in Cuba, then America would preemptively launch our nuclear warheads against the Soviet Union. Khrushchev decided not to do it. WW III was thus averted. But now we’re potentially down to around 5 minutes, in the reverse direction, and almost nobody is even talking about it. 

 

Eric Zuesse -- What more proof is needed that America is a dictatorship, not a democracy?

 

What more proof is needed that America is a dictatorship, not a democracy?

 

Eric Zuesse, June 29, 2022

 

 

Ever since 2014, when the first scientific examination of whether America is a democracy or instead a dictatorship was published, and when it found clearly that America is a dictatorship by the super-rich, I have been studying other relevant evidence; and, on June 28th, the great Democratic Party investigative journalist David Sirota provided yet another evidence for it, headlining, at his “Lever News” site, “Roberts Is The Man Behind The Curtain”. He opened there:

 

Amid all the high-profile rulings dominating the headlines, a more obscure but far-reaching decision slipped through the Supreme Court, even if it was barely part of the news cycle. It is the case that culminates Chief Justice John Roberts’ crusade to fully legalize corruption — and construct a political system that permanently produces all the extremist rulings now repealing the 20th century.

Eric Zuesse -- How ‘Democracies’ Degenerate Into Minoritarian Right-Wing Governments (Aristocracies)

 

How ‘Democracies’ Degenerate Into Minoritarian Right-Wing Governments (Aristocracies)

 

Eric Zuesse, June 27, 2022

 

In America, a woman’s right to an abortion of a pre-conscious (earlier than 20 weeks) fetus is no longer recognized by its federal Government, though, by a 59% to 41% margin (and 67% to 33% among American women, who are the people directly affected), the American people want it to be. That’s one example of America’s dictatorship (minority-rule). (This statement about it isn’t a commentary on the ethics of abortion, but on the polling on abortion, in America.) But there are many other examples of America’s being now a minority-rule nation. 

 

For example: in February of 2008, a U.S. Gallup poll had asked Americans "Would you like to see gun laws in this country made more strict, less strict, or remain as they are?” and 49% said “More Strict,” 11% said “Less Strict,” and 38% said “Remain as Are.” But, then, the U.S. Supreme Court, in June 2008, reversed that Court’s prior rulings, ever since 1939, and they made America’s gun laws far less strict than the gun-laws ever had been before; and, thus, the 5 ruling judges in this 2008 decision imposed upon the nation what were the policy-preferences of actually a mere 11% of Americans. 

 

Eric Zuesse -- The Western press has been lying about the war in Ukraine — and more

 

The Western press has been lying about the war in Ukraine — and more

 

Eric Zuesse, June 23, 2022

 

The norm in Western newsmedia has been to lie, and even to hide the truth, and this fact now is especially clear because what they were reporting about Russia’s ‘losing’ the war is, by now, inconceivable without there having been massive lying by them previously. Furthermore, all of those lies were not real journalism, which demands skepticism of any government’s allegations about a war that is going on, because (at least on our side, even if not also on the side of our government’s declared enemy) governments do routinely issue mere propaganda whenever they are in or supporting a war. And yet, though government lies are reasonably to be expected from a nation that is at war, there was NO such skepticism on the part of the Western press; and some of the falsehoods that they published have even been blatantly ridiculous. 

 

For examples: Here are the openings of two major ‘news’-media reports about Ukraine’s war, on April 1st (and the first one of those reports even referred to Russia’s army as being “the Red Army,” as-if Russia were still communist, as you will see):