Category: Aggregated

Brazil’s Senate was embroiled Wednesday in a 15-hour session of speeches and grand-standing, after which a vote was to be taken on proceeding with the impeachment against President Dilma Rousseff. It was expected that the needed simple majority would be achieved by those favoring impeachment. Dilma would then hand over power on May 12 to VP Michel Temer for the duration of the impeachment trial, which can last up to 180 days.

With Dilma out of the way, the trans-Atlantic financial vultures will descend on Brazil in droves, to both knock the “B” out of the BRICS and to use this British Empire “Clean Hands” operation to dismember the country’s relatively advanced scientific, technological, and industrial capabilities.

Earlier this week, Judge Sergio Moro—who reportedly got most of his hot “anti-corruption” leads from the NSA intercepts of top Brazilian politicians (including President Rousseff herself) and businessmen, which Edward Snowden denounced in 2013—ordered the arrest for questioning of nationalist former Finance Minister Guido Mantega, for alleged corruption extending from Petrobras into the all-important BNDES (National Economic and Social Development Bank). BNDES for decades has been the center of national directed credit for infrastructure, as well as for many of the more recent deals that are in the works with China. Wall Street and the City of London have been trying to privatize BNDES for decades.

But tellingly, Tuesday, the Defense Minister of Brazil signed an agreement for cooperation with BNDES for “technical cooperation” for developing a defense industrial base in Brazil. This is a major policy message coming from the still-powerful military-science-industry institutions of Brazil. But it will not be sufficient to stop the assault unless and until Dilma and her allies identify that what is underway is not just a coup (which they have stated), but an international bankers’ coup as part of the British Empire’s assault on all the BRICS, Russia and China included, and join the international efforts to annihilate that Empire once and for all. So far, Dilma has stuck to a strictly national narrative  in a display of typically Brazilian foolish pragmatism.

To be watched over coming days: Judge Moro is really squeezing the multi-millionaire scion of the Odebrecht family (of the huge, international construction engineering firm of the same name) who is in jail for 19 years, offering to cut his sentence in half if he turns state’s evidence against BNDES. Also to be watched: The head of the OAS, Luis Almagro, continues to raise doubts about the legality of the whole Brazilian impeachment process, most recently announcing that he will seek the legal opinion of the OAS-linked Inter-American Human Rights Court. This indicates that there is pressure coming for other countries in Ibero-America to do something about the flagrant coup d’etat underway in Brazil. As Sancho Panza famously said: When you see your neighbor being shaved, its time to wet-down your own whiskers.

Gilbert Doctorow, the European Coordinator of the American Committee for East-West Accord, develops the historic significance of the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra of St. Petersburg’s trip to Palmyra in a May 8 Consortium News article titled, “A Gift of Culture to Battered Palmyra.”

Palmyra has been considered a “twin city” of St. Petersburg for centuries. One reason is that Catherine the Great of St. Petersburg, was likened to Palmyra’s Third Century Queen Zenobia, a powerful ruler of the Palmyran Empire, who conquered Egypt and a large part of Anatolia. In the time of Pushkin, says Doctorow, Russian writers further developed the allusion, drawing upon the widely known beauty and cultural richness of Roman Palmyra.

In the 19th Century, St. Petersburg archaeologists were among the Europeans taking part in digs in Palmyra, and reporting them.

Says Doctorow, “It is not so surprising with that awareness in the Russian intelligentsia, that St. Petersburg conductor Valery Gergiev thought up the grand gesture, an act of great imagination.”

The concert took place little more than a month after Palmyra was liberated from the Islamic State, and just days after the archaeological sites were cleared of mines. In these circumstances, the Russian military moved Maestro Gergiev, the soloists, hundreds of national and international dignitaries, and 100 tons of telecommunications gear into the war zone.

In an extraordinary gesture, the Russians did not rush to evacuate their broadcasters and gear; they stayed to broadcast a follow-on concert featuring a Syrian orchestra and chorus that was held the next day in the same Roman amphitheater. The Russians stayed and telecast the Syrian concert to Russian viewers.

Doctorow reports that Valery Gergiev and his orchestra have performed at the front before. In 2008, he brought his orchestra to Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, just after its liberation from Georgian attackers. In Russia, he and his orchestra regularly do grueling tours of the North and Far East of Russia.

Doctorow called the Palmyra concert Russia’s most successful exercise in “soft power” in many years. The “Pray for Palmyra” Concert was dedicated to the memory of two heroes: Dr. Khaled Asaad, former Director of the Palmyra museum complex for 40 years, who was beheaded by ISIS because he refused to reveal where its treasures were hidden. The presence of the Director of the Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky, Doctorow says, was “a direct counterpoint” to the missing Syrian director, and his presence also symbolized the commitment of Russian art restorers to return Palmyra to its pre-war status as a center for research.

The concert was dedicated to twin heroes: on the opposite side of Dr. Asaad’s portrait, was a photograph of Russian hero Lt. Alexander Prokhorenko, who, surrounded behind ISIS lines, called for a Russian air strike on his position, giving his life to take out an enemy detachment.

The concert’s date also introduced the May 9 V-E Day celebrations in Russia, and served as “a gift to the Russian nation as well for its popular support of the military intervention in Syria.”

Gergiev is now the principal conductor of the Munich Symphony, as well as Artistic and General Director of the Mariinsky Orchestra.

After reviewing the “sour grapes” and outright hostile coverage of the Palmyra concert in much of the Western media, Doctorow concludes his article: “It is an unpardonable error of judgment to speak of a new Cold War as something that lies ahead, just around the corner. We are in the midst of it, and it will take enormous luck or a change of leaders for the better if we are to avoid a hot war.”