James Holbrooks

Activist Post

I picture him in a shadowy room, stretched out in a plush leather chair with a cup of steaming coffee on the table next to him. His hands are steepled at his mouth as he studies in meditative silence the bank of muted screens before him. Flickering across those screens are pundits, press conferences, and live reports from war correspondents. He killed the sound a minute before. He doesn’t need to hear the words. He understands the message all too well.

The West is closing in.

I’ve heard Vladimir Putin referred to as The Chessmaster. I’ve never sat at the board with the man so I can’t say for certain this is apt. But it does seem like the Russian leader’s moves of late have been carefully thought-out and even more carefully executed.

In September of 2013, as the United States war machine was pressing for military intervention in Syria in the wake of a chemical gas attack on that country’s people, Russia swooped in with an offer to oversee the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons. In the face of such blatant sanity, the American warmongers had no choice but to agree to the proposal.

Just a few months later, in December, Russia offered its struggling neighbor and former Soviet fellow Ukraine a $15 billion bailout if it would reverse its march toward the European Union. This forced the war architects’ hand. By February of the following year a Western-backed coup had ousted the democratically elected Ukrainian president, and a pro-Western puppet by the name of Poroshenko was installed in June.

Now, after another year of Western provocations including everything from military exercises to accusations that it helped blow an airplane out of the sky, Russia has finally struck. On Wednesday Europeans received a jarring wakeup call when Putin ordered state-run energy giant Gazprom to cut its flow of natural gas to Ukraine—and through Ukraine, much of Europe—due to nonpayment. Hence forth, says Putin, the gas will flow through a planned pipeline toward Turkey. If Europe wants to tap into that pipe they’ll need to build the infrastructure needed to link up. End of discussion. Bam.

The effects were felt immediately and the whole situation highlights the type of game being played here. The American-led West charges forward in show after show of brute strength, only to be rebuffed at each turn by a calculated move from the Russian president.

Chessmaster? I can’t say. But he’s putting up an impressive defense.

Not that the Gazprom move was breathtakingly insightful or anything. The EU’s dependence on Russian gas was a soft spot Putin could’ve hit blindfolded. The EU as a whole, in fact, has become a sizable weakness in the Western armor. And perhaps some of its member nations are beginning to realize this. Wasn’t it the French leader a couple weeks back who was suggesting it may be time to end the EU sanctions against Russia? I’d ask Hollande, but he’s busy dealing with a bout of terrorism right now. Funny timing, that.

The sheer recklessness of the Western assault can be seen in what’s happening to the price of oil. In a move meant to hurt the Russian economy, American ally Saudi Arabia began flooding the oil market toward the tail end of 2014 in order to slash the price of crude. The idea was that Russia, heavily dependent upon oil exports, would suffer. What the geniuses crafting US strategy apparently failed to consider, however, was that China, the world’s number one oil importer—and Russia’s strongest ally—would reap huge savings in the process. Not to mention the fact that lowering prices have had a devastating effect on the once-booming shale oil industry here in the states.

None of this is news to anyone even half-assedly paying attention to geopolitics. But here’s the thing…

They can’t stop.

The West needs war. It’s doomed without it. The central banking scam upon which its power is rooted has reached its absolute limit. And with Russia and the other BRICS nations’ New Development Bank emerging as a serious threat to their global dominance, the solution has been nail-bitingly clear to Western oligarchs for quite some time. War—in particular, a world war with those countries who would dare turn from the dollar—would reset the books.

The problem, as earlier stated, is that The Chessmaster sees this as clearly as anyone. He’s studied the board and is three moves ahead of his enemy. The West is simply outclassed, and they know it. But they can’t stop. War is an imperative. And so they inevitably resort to the method employed by thieves and liars throughout the ages—they cheat.

The downing of MH17 in July, which US officials immediately blamed on Russian-backed rebels, was soundly proven to have been pulled off by the American-backed junta in Kiev. Remember all the screaming from those same officials about how the Russian military was building up along the Ukrainian border? Well, teams of international inspectors who repeatedly visited that border reported that, yeah, not so much. And does anyone recall that Russian aid convoy purported to have been smuggling military personnel into Ukraine last August? Turns out the trucks were full of things like medicine, baby food and sleeping bags—the type of stuff Russia had been claiming was in the trucks all along—meant for the war-torn people of eastern Ukraine.

And through it all the Western corporate media was there to toe the line. Thing is, we’re a bit too savvy these days. You know, the global political awakening and all that jazz.

And yet, they can’t stop. War is an imperative.

So the question we should be asking ourselves is the same one the architects have been asking, I suspect, for a while now…

What is it gonna take?

They can no longer lie us into war, but they can no longer survive without it. So what’s to be done? Unfortunately for…well, everyone…history has shown us that nothing—absolutely nothing—is beyond the will of the cabal of psychopaths that’ve gripped the planetary reins for centuries now. Not even world leaders are off the table for these people.

They tried to take out Andrew Jackson after he was re-elected on the slogan of “Jackson and No Bank.” They succeeded in popping Lincoln when he refused their loans during the War of Northern Aggression. They took out Franz Ferdinand to kick off the First World War. Then there’s JFK and his heretical monetary ideas. And do we need to go through the list of Middle Eastern and African leaders that’ve been, shall we say, replaced?

America needs war, and they need it now. Nothing they’ve tried thus far has gained traction. They need to go bigger. And in most American minds it doesn’t get any bigger than the Oval Office. So the question I’m asking now is…

Are they desperate enough to assassinate a sitting president of the United States?

As insane as that may be to read, believe me, it was just as insane to write. But I think it’s a question worth considering. Look at the hyper-nationalism that took hold after the September 11 attacks. That’s what they need: a citizenry so traumatized and enraged that the warmongers can point to something, anything (such as a certain Eurasian country), as the culprit. Maybe, just maybe, they think taking out a president would finally get us to go along.

It’s the Petraeus thing that did it. Just doesn’t wash. You want me to believe they’re trying to bring the hammer down on the former Director of the CIA for the egregious crime of having pillow talk with his girlfriend? I don’t buy it.

And something else occurs to me. Remember Obama’s purge of top military brass in 2013? At the time, speculation as to motive ran wild, from something as frightening as a conspiracy involving nuclear weapons to something as relatively benign as Obama simply feeling the axed weren’t politically correct enough. Whatever the case, it was clear that the boss wasn’t happy and had no qualms about making a scene. But don’t worry. I’m sure the sweethearts of the military-industrial complex were cool with that whole deal.

Look at history. Look at half the plots in military science fiction novels. It isn’t exactly a foreign concept. First comes the purge from the paranoid leader, then comes the coup from the disrespected commanders.

And that leads me to this…

I see striking parallels between the situation with Petraeus, a four-star general and one of the most highly decorated military figures in America, and that of Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who at the time of his death in 1940 was the most decorated marine in United States history.

In 1934 Butler testified before a special committee of the House of Representatives. He claimed he’d been approached by a group of powerful businessmen about leading a military coup against Franklin Roosevelt with the end result being the installation of a fascist dictatorship. All of the accused denied the charges and Butler’s account was ridiculed in the media, though the committee’s final report suggested there was much truth to the war hero’s story. Indeed, the fact that the two-time Medal of Honor award winner isn’t a household name on par with Eisenhower and Patton speaks volumes.

Petraeus isn’t squawking about some grand conspiracy, of course. At least, not that we know of. But think about it. If the call was yours to make, who would you get to lead a coup against the president in a climate of endless war, spying, intelligence gathering and blackmail? At a minimum, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency—and, up until an ugly scandal, an honored military man—would be on a very short list of names for the job.

Blackmail. Now there’s a thought. Could that be what these pending charges against Petraeus are really about? Are they using the threat of the cage to remind him to keep his mouth shut? This man was masterminding military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan before he ascended to the helm of the CIA. Can you imagine the secrets stored away in his head? Does he know what was truly behind Obama’s military purge? Was he approached about leading a coup against the president? Is he being hung out to dry now because he refused the offer? And if so, why now? The affair with his biographer was made public back in 2012. Why the threat of charges here in 2015? Is something about to happen?

I know what you’re thinking. I’m thinking it, too. Crazy, right? But let’s be honest, it’s happened before. There’s no reason to think it couldn’t happen again, especially considering the crisis point at which the power junkies appear to have found themselves. And at the end of the day, can we really put it past them to try such a move?

And there’s something else. Another potential gain that could’ve been factored into the cost-benefit analysis regarding the assassination of Barack Obama…division.

It’s clear they want a race war in America. They want the lines to be drawn between colors, and they want us to draw those lines ourselves. It’s the strategy of divide and conquer, and at the moment their tool of choice seems to be law enforcement. Through racially-sensitive cases such as that of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, they’re working to make us believe police abuse is solely about skin pigment. It was recently revealed that liberal billionaire and oft-accused globalist conspirator George Soros bankrolled dozens of different groups of Ferguson, Missouri demonstrators, to the tune of $33 million, so as to push the national debate about institutional racism.

Imagine now, in the midst of this orchestrated racial hysteria, that the first mixed-race president of these “united” states is assassinated. Imagine, if you dare, how they might use such an event.

This is just one guy talking out loud, of course. Just someone making observations. And in truth, I hope I’m wrong. About all of it. The world would be a much safer place if that were the case. But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what I think. It does, however, matter what The Chessmaster thinks. And I wonder…

How many moves ahead is he in the game? Does he see the threat of being tied to a presidential assassination, and if so, what type of action is he planning to counter it?

I believe these questions matter. Because, when you strip away the nonsense, the most important relationship to the health of the planet is the one between the United States and Russia. There’s simply no way around that. And here’s something else there’s no way around…

Vladimir Putin is a thug. He’s a monster like all the rest. The fact that he’s a far more cunning and intelligent monster is no reason to celebrate him. That would be a mistake on our part. I focus on him here only as a means to shed light on a deadly situation. But we should never forget that given the chance, Putin would be every bit the dictator that John McCain dreams about being every night.

How does the saying go? Those who seek power are those least worthy of it?

It’s something like that. I swear.

James Holbrooks is a professional writer and editor. You can find his work or hire him at HolbrooksWordsmithing.com where this article first appeared. Follow James on Twitter.