The War Scare Taming Europe's Right: How Le Pen and AfD Are Brought Into Line, John Helmer, 167

It is Monday of UN General Assembly week and Martin Sieff is away. Pelle Neroth Taylor is joined by John Helmer, the Moscow-based correspondent who has become the show's fortnightly third host. (John's links below) The week behind them saw the heaviest drone barrage of the war on Moscow, a Duma election and a Western press working itself up into rumours of war. Pelle opens with a question from the Fischer thesis on 1914: if threatened elites went to war to keep control then, why not now? Helmer starts with the history of air power. The Italians in Libya, the French in Morocco, the British in India, Afghanistan and Russia in 1919, and the three hundred volumes of the US Strategic Bombing Survey all point the same way. Bombing civilians rallies them to their own government. The barrage of close to 2,000 drones before the vote was, in his reading, an attempt by Kiev and its Western backers to depress Russian turnout, and it boomeranged. Turnout reached 59 per cent against 51 in 2021. United Russia takes 355 of the 450 seats. The Communist Party, usually the loudest complainant about fraud, warned the counters against shoddy work. Falling real incomes normally show up in Russia as a protest vote. This time they did not. The same reasoning carries into the diplomacy. The weekend Trump–Zelensky call was briefed to Axios and the Financial Times as Trump telling Kiev to stop hitting Russian diesel refineries. This is just blame projection: Helmer argues the diesel spike now hurting Republicans before the midterms is Washington's own doing: Trump has been quietly encouraging massive US diesel exports into a market squeezed by the Hormuz blockade in return for financial favours from the oil majors. The two men will meet in New York. A Lavrov–Rubio meeting there is unlikely to move anything, and Lavrov's election at the head of the United Russia list reopens the question of his retirement and a possible cabinet reshuffle. Witkoff and Kushner have Putin's agreement to resume three-way talks, probably in Abu Dhabi in October. Will Russia strike into NATO? Helmer calls it nonsense that the propagandists need. Russia's aim is to cut Ukraine off from the sea through the Odessa port complex, and the costs surface in Chicago grain prices, fertiliser and the farm states along the Canadian border. The untold story is the European right moving to the centre. On 19 September Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, fresh from an Élysée intelligence briefing, publicly accepted that Russian intelligence was behind the Leipzig airport drone. The last stretch turns to false flags. Taming the right with the "Russian threat", is one thing, uniting the EU to go to war after a fake Russian attack is another, even bigger, thing. Would the officials behind Salisbury stage another Novichok? There is no need, Helmer says. The first one worked, and its success was kept intact through the Dawn Sturgess inquiry, which buried the evidence except for one disclosure: Yulia Skripal regained consciousness well before the High Court was told she had, and indicated she did not blame Russia After the conversation comes Pelle's documentary on the Skripal case, built around his interview with Tim Norman. If you realize this was a false flag, then you'll be immunized against anything else the intelligence agencies might do to bring us into a war that can have no winner. John's homepage https://johnhelmer.net/ John's book about Novichok & the Skripal's https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSYJ41DN/...