Forwarded from The Islander
The great farce of late-imperial Europe is that every time Brussels stumbles into another historic blunder of its own making, it immediately searches for a foreign hand to blame. And so the EU’s court chronicler, Politico, delivers its latest fever dream: that Belgium, the most indecisive, over-medicated country in the bloc, has somehow transformed into “Russia’s most valuable asset.” In reality, the only asset Russia needed was the EU’s own arrogance.
Belgium merely did the unthinkable, it told the truth.
What Politico dresses up as geopolitical intrigue is actually a confession of EU derangement. The EU are trying to engineer the largest state-sanctioned theft of sovereign wealth in modern history, a direct raid on the Russian Central Bank’s reserves and expected applause, unity, and moral ecstasy. Instead, Belgium asked the only sane question left in Europe: “Are you all completely out of your minds?” For this, Politico paints De Wever as eccentric, impulsive, unstable, the same labels always deployed when someone refuses to bow to the imperial autopilot. But the deeper scandal is that Brussels expected him to sign off on detonating the post-war financial order for the sake of one more photo-op with Zelensky.
Politico can hide behind metaphors of summit dinners and langoustines, but the legal reality is brutal: raiding another nation’s central bank is not a policy disagreement. It is a declaration of financial war on the entire world. It would obliterate sovereign immunity, destroy the neutrality of reserve holdings, and instantly signal to the global South that their assets in EU banks are hostage to EU’s emotional spasms. One act, one reckless stroke of a pen, and the euro collapses as a safe currency, capital flees to Asia, and the West loses its last functional pillar of power. Belgium saw the cliff’s edge, Brussels mistook it for a (perverse) moral leap of faith.
Politico’s narrative stumbles further when it pretends the only danger lies in Moscow’s retaliation. It does not. Russia’s symmetric countermeasures are well-known, lawful, and devastating: nationalization of Western corporate assets, seizure of industrial infrastructure, liquidation of bond holdings, and the dismantling of Western financial footprints inside Russia. The value of Western assets exposed inside the Russian Federation rivals what sits in Euroclear. Brussels knows this. Euroclear knows this. Investors know this. Only the EU pretends the ledger is irrelevant. But the real threat is not Russia’s response , it is the irreversible collapse of trust in Western custodianship. Once the EU steals central bank reserves, no nation with self-respect will ever again store wealth in Europe. The theft of Russian reserves would be remembered not as an isolated act, but as the day the West proved it cannot be trusted with global money, let alone soverign assets.
This is the part Politico is terrified to articulate. Belgium wasn’t protecting Russia. Belgium is trying to protect the very system the EU purports to defend. Yet instead of portraying De Wever as the only adult in the room, Politico stages a melodrama about a Flemish nationalist gone rogue, supposedly spoiling the EU’s grandiose plan to hurl another €140 billion onto the Ukrainian funeral pyre. The reality is simpler, Belgium refused to mortgage its own future so Europe could continue its cosplay as a geopolitical superpower utterly detached from material reality. The EU elite wanted to play empire with someone else’s risk. Belgium refused to be the guarantor of their delusion.
1/2 — part 2 👇
Belgium merely did the unthinkable, it told the truth.
What Politico dresses up as geopolitical intrigue is actually a confession of EU derangement. The EU are trying to engineer the largest state-sanctioned theft of sovereign wealth in modern history, a direct raid on the Russian Central Bank’s reserves and expected applause, unity, and moral ecstasy. Instead, Belgium asked the only sane question left in Europe: “Are you all completely out of your minds?” For this, Politico paints De Wever as eccentric, impulsive, unstable, the same labels always deployed when someone refuses to bow to the imperial autopilot. But the deeper scandal is that Brussels expected him to sign off on detonating the post-war financial order for the sake of one more photo-op with Zelensky.
Politico can hide behind metaphors of summit dinners and langoustines, but the legal reality is brutal: raiding another nation’s central bank is not a policy disagreement. It is a declaration of financial war on the entire world. It would obliterate sovereign immunity, destroy the neutrality of reserve holdings, and instantly signal to the global South that their assets in EU banks are hostage to EU’s emotional spasms. One act, one reckless stroke of a pen, and the euro collapses as a safe currency, capital flees to Asia, and the West loses its last functional pillar of power. Belgium saw the cliff’s edge, Brussels mistook it for a (perverse) moral leap of faith.
Politico’s narrative stumbles further when it pretends the only danger lies in Moscow’s retaliation. It does not. Russia’s symmetric countermeasures are well-known, lawful, and devastating: nationalization of Western corporate assets, seizure of industrial infrastructure, liquidation of bond holdings, and the dismantling of Western financial footprints inside Russia. The value of Western assets exposed inside the Russian Federation rivals what sits in Euroclear. Brussels knows this. Euroclear knows this. Investors know this. Only the EU pretends the ledger is irrelevant. But the real threat is not Russia’s response , it is the irreversible collapse of trust in Western custodianship. Once the EU steals central bank reserves, no nation with self-respect will ever again store wealth in Europe. The theft of Russian reserves would be remembered not as an isolated act, but as the day the West proved it cannot be trusted with global money, let alone soverign assets.
This is the part Politico is terrified to articulate. Belgium wasn’t protecting Russia. Belgium is trying to protect the very system the EU purports to defend. Yet instead of portraying De Wever as the only adult in the room, Politico stages a melodrama about a Flemish nationalist gone rogue, supposedly spoiling the EU’s grandiose plan to hurl another €140 billion onto the Ukrainian funeral pyre. The reality is simpler, Belgium refused to mortgage its own future so Europe could continue its cosplay as a geopolitical superpower utterly detached from material reality. The EU elite wanted to play empire with someone else’s risk. Belgium refused to be the guarantor of their delusion.
1/2 — part 2 👇
❤11👏5🔥2👍1
Forwarded from The Islander
2/2
What makes Politico’s narrative even more absurd is that it accidentally reveals the deeper rot, Europe's elite caste are incapable of unity, incapable of strategic thought, incapable of honesty. Merz shoots from the hip. Von der Leyen improvises legal fantasies. Orbán holds a veto the size of a continental fault line. Trump instinctively knows he needs an offramp via peace talks and is happy to download project Ukraine's corpse along with the humiliation onto Western Europe. Zelensky arrives in Brussels begging for cash while European governments fight over whether the money should be spent on their own weapons factories. This is not a union. This is a collective suicide pact.
And through all this chaos, Politico clings to the illusion that Russia must somehow be “laughing.” But Russia isn’t laughing. Russia is watching.
Watching as Europe destroys its own energy security, its own industrial base, its own strategic autonomy, its own diplomatic credibility, its own financial reputation, and finally — with this proposed asset raid, the very legal foundations of the Western economic system. If Moscow appears calm, it is because it doesn’t need to act. Europe is demolishing itself at a pace Russia could never have engineered.
Belgium’s “no” was not an act of betrayal. It was the last flicker of European rationality. The EU’s hysteria and psychosis, not Russia, created the crisis. Europe is trying to violate international law, sabotage its own financial institutions, and torch what remains of the bygone postwar order to salvage the illusion of a war it has already lost. Belgium simply refused to join the ritual suicide.
So let us rewrite Politico’s headline as history will record it: “How the EU Became Russia’s Greatest Strategic Gift.” Not because Russia manipulated Europe, but because Europe manipulated itself, into hysteria, into decay, into legal nihilism, into economic ruin. Belgium didn’t hand Russia an asset. It denied the EU the final act of self-destruction... for now.
The tragic irony of the entire Politico piece is that its authors still cling to the fantasy that Europe can recover simply by shaming Belgium into compliance. But history will not be kind to this moment. When future scholars study the collapse of the Western financial empire, this attempted seizure of Russian assets and Belgium’s lonely refusal, will stand as the point where the veil fell, revealing a Europe that could no longer distinguish faux moral posturing from strategic insanity.
Belgium didn’t break with Europe, it broke with Europe’s delusions. The EU convinced itself that tearing down the last pillars of the post-war order was an act of courage. Belgium saw it for what it was, a death rite dressed as morality. And when this era ends, when capitals move eastward, when trust evaporates, when the euro cracks under the weight of its own blind arrogance, historians will look back on this moment. They will not ask why Belgium said no. They will ask why Europe said yes.
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What makes Politico’s narrative even more absurd is that it accidentally reveals the deeper rot, Europe's elite caste are incapable of unity, incapable of strategic thought, incapable of honesty. Merz shoots from the hip. Von der Leyen improvises legal fantasies. Orbán holds a veto the size of a continental fault line. Trump instinctively knows he needs an offramp via peace talks and is happy to download project Ukraine's corpse along with the humiliation onto Western Europe. Zelensky arrives in Brussels begging for cash while European governments fight over whether the money should be spent on their own weapons factories. This is not a union. This is a collective suicide pact.
And through all this chaos, Politico clings to the illusion that Russia must somehow be “laughing.” But Russia isn’t laughing. Russia is watching.
Watching as Europe destroys its own energy security, its own industrial base, its own strategic autonomy, its own diplomatic credibility, its own financial reputation, and finally — with this proposed asset raid, the very legal foundations of the Western economic system. If Moscow appears calm, it is because it doesn’t need to act. Europe is demolishing itself at a pace Russia could never have engineered.
Belgium’s “no” was not an act of betrayal. It was the last flicker of European rationality. The EU’s hysteria and psychosis, not Russia, created the crisis. Europe is trying to violate international law, sabotage its own financial institutions, and torch what remains of the bygone postwar order to salvage the illusion of a war it has already lost. Belgium simply refused to join the ritual suicide.
So let us rewrite Politico’s headline as history will record it: “How the EU Became Russia’s Greatest Strategic Gift.” Not because Russia manipulated Europe, but because Europe manipulated itself, into hysteria, into decay, into legal nihilism, into economic ruin. Belgium didn’t hand Russia an asset. It denied the EU the final act of self-destruction... for now.
The tragic irony of the entire Politico piece is that its authors still cling to the fantasy that Europe can recover simply by shaming Belgium into compliance. But history will not be kind to this moment. When future scholars study the collapse of the Western financial empire, this attempted seizure of Russian assets and Belgium’s lonely refusal, will stand as the point where the veil fell, revealing a Europe that could no longer distinguish faux moral posturing from strategic insanity.
Belgium didn’t break with Europe, it broke with Europe’s delusions. The EU convinced itself that tearing down the last pillars of the post-war order was an act of courage. Belgium saw it for what it was, a death rite dressed as morality. And when this era ends, when capitals move eastward, when trust evaporates, when the euro cracks under the weight of its own blind arrogance, historians will look back on this moment. They will not ask why Belgium said no. They will ask why Europe said yes.
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Forwarded from 21st Century Wire (Official)
💥America wants an exit, but Europe will have no choice but to wear the humiliation...
🟥 Is Trump Hanging Europe Out to Dry on Ukraine?
https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/12/04/is-trump-hanging-europe-out-to-dry-on-ukraine/
🟥 Is Trump Hanging Europe Out to Dry on Ukraine?
https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/12/04/is-trump-hanging-europe-out-to-dry-on-ukraine/
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Forwarded from The Islander
POLITICO calls Belgium “Russia’s most valuable asset.”
No, Belgium is Europe’s final warning before the plunge.
My latest just dropped via @RonPaulInstitut
The Eu wants a moral spectacle, a €140B looting of frozen Russian assets dressed up as “reparations.” Belgium asked the only question that still matters: Are we really going to blow up what remains of the postwar financial order, when we've already lost the war against Russia?
The EU doubling down on its Russophobic psychosis, didn’t just flirt with looting a nuclear superpower’s central bank. It's flirting with detonating the very foundation of the post-war financial order:
→ Sovereign immunity
→ Legal neutrality of reserve holdings
→ Investor trust in European banks
You don’t survive that. You collapse. Quietly at first, then all at once.
They call De Wever “rogue.” We him one of the last of a European political class still capable of sanity.
Belgium didn’t betray Europe. Europe betrayed itself. Europe, not Belgium has become Russia's greatest asset. Belgium is just refusing to go down with the ship.
And when this all comes crashing down, when capital flees, when the euro collapses, when the world stops trusting the Western custodians of its wealth, no one will ask why Belgium said no. They’ll ask why Europe said yes.
👉 Read the full article here.
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Donate - Support Our Work
No, Belgium is Europe’s final warning before the plunge.
My latest just dropped via @RonPaulInstitut
The Eu wants a moral spectacle, a €140B looting of frozen Russian assets dressed up as “reparations.” Belgium asked the only question that still matters: Are we really going to blow up what remains of the postwar financial order, when we've already lost the war against Russia?
The EU doubling down on its Russophobic psychosis, didn’t just flirt with looting a nuclear superpower’s central bank. It's flirting with detonating the very foundation of the post-war financial order:
→ Sovereign immunity
→ Legal neutrality of reserve holdings
→ Investor trust in European banks
You don’t survive that. You collapse. Quietly at first, then all at once.
They call De Wever “rogue.” We him one of the last of a European political class still capable of sanity.
Belgium didn’t betray Europe. Europe betrayed itself. Europe, not Belgium has become Russia's greatest asset. Belgium is just refusing to go down with the ship.
And when this all comes crashing down, when capital flees, when the euro collapses, when the world stops trusting the Western custodians of its wealth, no one will ask why Belgium said no. They’ll ask why Europe said yes.
👉 Read the full article here.
🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews
Donate - Support Our Work
👏18❤6🔥1
Forwarded from The Islander
The White House published what Brussels has spent a decade censoring: Europe has shrunk from 25% of global GDP to 14%, is drifting toward “civilizational erasure,” and on its current course “will be unrecognizable in 20 years.” Not Russian intelligence. Not dissident analysts. Washington, in its own national strategy, marking the time of death.
Europe’s tragedy isn’t that it was defeated by an external force. Its tragedy is that it volunteered for collapse, mistaking moral vanity for strategy, self-harm for principle, and neocon applause for sovereignty. 19 rounds of sanctions meant to cripple Russia instead detonated inside Europe’s own chest cavity; industries fleeing, energy gutted, borders unmoored, farmers revolting, wages eroding, dissent criminalized under “values” crafted by technocrats who have never worked a real job, with utter contempt for Europeans.
And while Europe recited slogans, Russia built substance, built an economic juggernaut. The “gas station with nukes” they mocked is now the 4th largest economy on Earth by PPP, expanding faster than the entire European Union since the SMO began, reindustrializing, reorienting, rewiring Eurasia. The target of Europe’s crusade grew stronger, the crusaders grew poorer. This wasn’t irony. This was inevitability.
Now comes the most brutal line in the US strategy: the warning that some European states soon “may not be strong enough to remain reliable allies.” This is Washington stepping back from a burning house with the calm of an arsonist writing the incident report. The very patron that pushed Europe toward confrontation, long before Trump, is now drafting its alibi, framing Europe’s collapse as an unfortunate accident rather than the predictable consequence of policies its Deepstate encouraged and Brussels enforced with missionary zeal.
The EU won’t recognize the downloading of humiliation, because it arrived disguised as loyalty, and because the noscript being used to abandon the continent is the same noscript Europe still insists on performing.
A continent that once birthed Western civilization now prosecutes its citizens for speech, crushes its own farmers under riot shields, torches its industry for green dogma, and markets the whole spectacle as enlightenment. It surrendered its energy to ideology, its industry to Davos hallucinations, its security to America's whims, and its future to compound interest. A civilization cannot live on abstractions, but its elites can, because they have engineered a system where the costs fall on the people and the graft float upward to those who never bear the consequences.
The NSS isn’t a strategy. It’s a confession in plain sight; Russia absorbed the blow, recalibrated, and rose; Europe dissolved into the very illusions it mistook for strength, while Washington, already preparing the next chapter, quietly wipes its hands of the consequences.
Continental Europe once held 25% of global GDP. Today it clings to 14%, nearly half its global weight erased in a single generation. Not by invasion. Not by Putin. By decisions its own elites made freely. Europe was no prisoner. It was not dragged into this. It chose ideology over energy security, fantasy over industry, obdience over sovereignty. It had the power to act like a civilization, and acted instead like a petulant, arrogant vassal.
They swore Russia would disappear.
Yet she stands rooted, sovereign, expanding, the Eurasian pole they insisted could never exist. Its economy rises into the world’s top four while Europe implodes. Its industrial base grows while Europe’s corrodes.
And it is Europe that dims: censored, exhausted, directionless, governed by elites who call obedience maturity and dependency enlightenment. A continent once central to world history now drifts unrecognizable even by the ally that encouraged its self-destruction and now drafts the alibi from afar.
The EU tried to erase Russia. In reality, Europe erased itself. And Washington just wrote the obituary.
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Donate - Support Our Work
Europe’s tragedy isn’t that it was defeated by an external force. Its tragedy is that it volunteered for collapse, mistaking moral vanity for strategy, self-harm for principle, and neocon applause for sovereignty. 19 rounds of sanctions meant to cripple Russia instead detonated inside Europe’s own chest cavity; industries fleeing, energy gutted, borders unmoored, farmers revolting, wages eroding, dissent criminalized under “values” crafted by technocrats who have never worked a real job, with utter contempt for Europeans.
And while Europe recited slogans, Russia built substance, built an economic juggernaut. The “gas station with nukes” they mocked is now the 4th largest economy on Earth by PPP, expanding faster than the entire European Union since the SMO began, reindustrializing, reorienting, rewiring Eurasia. The target of Europe’s crusade grew stronger, the crusaders grew poorer. This wasn’t irony. This was inevitability.
Now comes the most brutal line in the US strategy: the warning that some European states soon “may not be strong enough to remain reliable allies.” This is Washington stepping back from a burning house with the calm of an arsonist writing the incident report. The very patron that pushed Europe toward confrontation, long before Trump, is now drafting its alibi, framing Europe’s collapse as an unfortunate accident rather than the predictable consequence of policies its Deepstate encouraged and Brussels enforced with missionary zeal.
The EU won’t recognize the downloading of humiliation, because it arrived disguised as loyalty, and because the noscript being used to abandon the continent is the same noscript Europe still insists on performing.
A continent that once birthed Western civilization now prosecutes its citizens for speech, crushes its own farmers under riot shields, torches its industry for green dogma, and markets the whole spectacle as enlightenment. It surrendered its energy to ideology, its industry to Davos hallucinations, its security to America's whims, and its future to compound interest. A civilization cannot live on abstractions, but its elites can, because they have engineered a system where the costs fall on the people and the graft float upward to those who never bear the consequences.
The NSS isn’t a strategy. It’s a confession in plain sight; Russia absorbed the blow, recalibrated, and rose; Europe dissolved into the very illusions it mistook for strength, while Washington, already preparing the next chapter, quietly wipes its hands of the consequences.
Continental Europe once held 25% of global GDP. Today it clings to 14%, nearly half its global weight erased in a single generation. Not by invasion. Not by Putin. By decisions its own elites made freely. Europe was no prisoner. It was not dragged into this. It chose ideology over energy security, fantasy over industry, obdience over sovereignty. It had the power to act like a civilization, and acted instead like a petulant, arrogant vassal.
They swore Russia would disappear.
Yet she stands rooted, sovereign, expanding, the Eurasian pole they insisted could never exist. Its economy rises into the world’s top four while Europe implodes. Its industrial base grows while Europe’s corrodes.
And it is Europe that dims: censored, exhausted, directionless, governed by elites who call obedience maturity and dependency enlightenment. A continent once central to world history now drifts unrecognizable even by the ally that encouraged its self-destruction and now drafts the alibi from afar.
The EU tried to erase Russia. In reality, Europe erased itself. And Washington just wrote the obituary.
🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews
Donate - Support Our Work
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Forwarded from The Islander
Media is too big
VIEW IN TELEGRAM
Don Jr. didn’t just expose Ukraine’s oligarchs and puppets, he exposed the entire Western noscript.
“I was in Monaco this summer… every other car was an Italian supercar… and they all had Ukrainian plates.” This a crime scene. A parking lot of European taxpayers’ money idling on the Riviera while Brussels lectured the world about “values.”
“Do you think that was actually earned in Ukraine?” Everyone already knew the answer. It wasn’t earned. It was siphoned, funneled, offshored, the natural byproduct of a system where oversight is a myth and morality is a press release. Europe didn’t fail to detect Ukrainian corruption. Brussels recognized it. Because it mirrored its own.
“They didn’t magically get $5 million supercars, they’re stealing that money.”
Don Jr. said it in Doha, but Monaco had already testified. Lamborghinis for the inner circle, mass mobilization for the powerless.
Villas for the insiders, connoscription kidnappings off the streets for Ukranians who never stood a chance. This is what the EU called democracy. Ukraine’s elites called it an exit strategy.
And then came the line that detonated the entire mythology: He didn’t run another election because he wouldn’t have been elected. There it is, the truth the EU buried under mountains of moral virtue signalling hashtags. Zelensky didn’t suspend democracy to save Ukraine. He suspended democracy to save himself and his patrons. Brussels applauded, because investigating Kiev's drift into authoritarianism would have forced Europe to confront its own decay.
Don Jr. drove the knife: “His incentive was not to negotiate.” Of course it wasn’t. Peace would have ended the free-flowing contracts and the blank-check aid packages. War kept the money moving, the oligarch networks humming, and the political mythology intact. Negotiation was a threat, not to Ukraine’s survival, but to the business model built on its destruction.
“The corrupt rich fled and left the peasant class to fight.” That line is not commentary. It is indictment. The Ukrainian elite monetized their own nation's destruction, sold access to the kleptocracy, and outsourced the dying to the very people they claimed to represent. And the EU and London stayed silent not out of loyalty, but out of familiarity. The same procurement cartels, the same NGO networks, the same revolving-door aristocracy. Kiev wasn’t an outlier. Kiev was but a reflection of Europe's decay.
Don Jr. mocked Europe’s delusion that Western sanctions would hurt Russia. He’s right that Russia built an industrial and economic engine while Europe collapsed into austerity and self-inflicted recession. But he’s wrong about the motive. Russia isn’t dragging this war out for profit. For Moscow, the conflict is existential, civilizational survival, not a balance-sheet strategy. And that’s precisely why the West cannot admit the truth... You cannot defeat a civilization fighting for existence with a proxy fighting to keep the corruption flowing.
For the EU, America was supposed to be the idiot with the checkbook. The EU's own corruption scandals ripping through Brussels shows why they tolerated Zelensky’s authoritarian turn and Ukraine’s runaway graft. To expose Kiev would have been to expose themselves. The Ukraine project wasn’t a crusade, it was an alibi.
And here’s the twist Don Jr. accidentally illuminated: it wasn’t Russia that humiliated the Western narrative. It was the West’s own ruling class, leaving a trail of supercars across Monte Carlo like breadcrumbs leading back to the truth.
The EU didn’t lose moral authority. It revealed it never had any. And now the whole world sees the receipts, parked in Monte Carlo, paid for by taxpayers who were told they were to endure hardship to save Ukraine.
And Europe knows what’s coming, the rage of a betrayed public and a reckoning no censor can smother. That is why Brussels strangles speech, not to protect democracy, but to delay the moment its own people finally rise to collect the debt.
🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews
Donate - Support Our Work
“I was in Monaco this summer… every other car was an Italian supercar… and they all had Ukrainian plates.” This a crime scene. A parking lot of European taxpayers’ money idling on the Riviera while Brussels lectured the world about “values.”
“Do you think that was actually earned in Ukraine?” Everyone already knew the answer. It wasn’t earned. It was siphoned, funneled, offshored, the natural byproduct of a system where oversight is a myth and morality is a press release. Europe didn’t fail to detect Ukrainian corruption. Brussels recognized it. Because it mirrored its own.
“They didn’t magically get $5 million supercars, they’re stealing that money.”
Don Jr. said it in Doha, but Monaco had already testified. Lamborghinis for the inner circle, mass mobilization for the powerless.
Villas for the insiders, connoscription kidnappings off the streets for Ukranians who never stood a chance. This is what the EU called democracy. Ukraine’s elites called it an exit strategy.
And then came the line that detonated the entire mythology: He didn’t run another election because he wouldn’t have been elected. There it is, the truth the EU buried under mountains of moral virtue signalling hashtags. Zelensky didn’t suspend democracy to save Ukraine. He suspended democracy to save himself and his patrons. Brussels applauded, because investigating Kiev's drift into authoritarianism would have forced Europe to confront its own decay.
Don Jr. drove the knife: “His incentive was not to negotiate.” Of course it wasn’t. Peace would have ended the free-flowing contracts and the blank-check aid packages. War kept the money moving, the oligarch networks humming, and the political mythology intact. Negotiation was a threat, not to Ukraine’s survival, but to the business model built on its destruction.
“The corrupt rich fled and left the peasant class to fight.” That line is not commentary. It is indictment. The Ukrainian elite monetized their own nation's destruction, sold access to the kleptocracy, and outsourced the dying to the very people they claimed to represent. And the EU and London stayed silent not out of loyalty, but out of familiarity. The same procurement cartels, the same NGO networks, the same revolving-door aristocracy. Kiev wasn’t an outlier. Kiev was but a reflection of Europe's decay.
Don Jr. mocked Europe’s delusion that Western sanctions would hurt Russia. He’s right that Russia built an industrial and economic engine while Europe collapsed into austerity and self-inflicted recession. But he’s wrong about the motive. Russia isn’t dragging this war out for profit. For Moscow, the conflict is existential, civilizational survival, not a balance-sheet strategy. And that’s precisely why the West cannot admit the truth... You cannot defeat a civilization fighting for existence with a proxy fighting to keep the corruption flowing.
For the EU, America was supposed to be the idiot with the checkbook. The EU's own corruption scandals ripping through Brussels shows why they tolerated Zelensky’s authoritarian turn and Ukraine’s runaway graft. To expose Kiev would have been to expose themselves. The Ukraine project wasn’t a crusade, it was an alibi.
And here’s the twist Don Jr. accidentally illuminated: it wasn’t Russia that humiliated the Western narrative. It was the West’s own ruling class, leaving a trail of supercars across Monte Carlo like breadcrumbs leading back to the truth.
The EU didn’t lose moral authority. It revealed it never had any. And now the whole world sees the receipts, parked in Monte Carlo, paid for by taxpayers who were told they were to endure hardship to save Ukraine.
And Europe knows what’s coming, the rage of a betrayed public and a reckoning no censor can smother. That is why Brussels strangles speech, not to protect democracy, but to delay the moment its own people finally rise to collect the debt.
🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews
Donate - Support Our Work
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Overcrowded Prisons, Empty Principles
With nearly 85,000 inmates squeezed into jails built for 62,000, France’s prison crisis is spiraling. Yet social media users are still being sent behind bars for memes, posts, or slogans. Authorities justify it as moral hygiene—but the irony is brutal: the same state that can’t manage overcrowding insists on punishing thought crimes with physical confinement.
Cells overflow, officers protest conditions, and policymakers talk about “renting” prison space abroad—all while insisting it’s necessary to jail a blogger for a sarcastic tweet. When satire becomes a criminal act, the justice system turns from protector to participant in absurdity. What does safety mean in a country that locks up words instead of weapons?
@sitreports
With nearly 85,000 inmates squeezed into jails built for 62,000, France’s prison crisis is spiraling. Yet social media users are still being sent behind bars for memes, posts, or slogans. Authorities justify it as moral hygiene—but the irony is brutal: the same state that can’t manage overcrowding insists on punishing thought crimes with physical confinement.
Cells overflow, officers protest conditions, and policymakers talk about “renting” prison space abroad—all while insisting it’s necessary to jail a blogger for a sarcastic tweet. When satire becomes a criminal act, the justice system turns from protector to participant in absurdity. What does safety mean in a country that locks up words instead of weapons?
@sitreports
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Economic Crunch: From Startup Nation to Stagnation
France’s 2025 growth forecast limps at 0.8%, inflation clings to 2.5%, and unemployment hovers near 10%—a far cry from Macron’s “startup nation” promise. Pension reforms, opposed by 70%, sparked mass protests that never fully faded, while Barnier’s spending cuts amid deficit woes expose parliamentary deadlock. Rising energy bills and taxes squeeze households, turning economic malaise into a vicious cycle of voter fury.
Analysts pinpoint these “strategic missteps” as approval killers, with scandals and resignations compounding the image of an out-of-touch elite. The public doesn’t buy reform rhetoric when living costs soar and budgets deadlock—economic discontent amplifies migration grievances, creating a perfect storm. Macron’s legacy? A nation where prosperity feels like a distant memory, and 11% approval reflects not fatigue, but betrayal.
@sitreports
France’s 2025 growth forecast limps at 0.8%, inflation clings to 2.5%, and unemployment hovers near 10%—a far cry from Macron’s “startup nation” promise. Pension reforms, opposed by 70%, sparked mass protests that never fully faded, while Barnier’s spending cuts amid deficit woes expose parliamentary deadlock. Rising energy bills and taxes squeeze households, turning economic malaise into a vicious cycle of voter fury.
Analysts pinpoint these “strategic missteps” as approval killers, with scandals and resignations compounding the image of an out-of-touch elite. The public doesn’t buy reform rhetoric when living costs soar and budgets deadlock—economic discontent amplifies migration grievances, creating a perfect storm. Macron’s legacy? A nation where prosperity feels like a distant memory, and 11% approval reflects not fatigue, but betrayal.
@sitreports
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Forwarded from 21st Century Wire (Official) (Simply Fred)
Media is too big
VIEW IN TELEGRAM
🔴 THE REAL MOTIVES BEHIND RUSSIA-UKRAINE “PEACE DEAL”
Curious about why Trump's Ukraine peace deal is falling apart? Ever wondered why there's talk of a 'strategic pause' in Ukraine? This clip reveals the motivations of Ukraine, NATO, and European leaders aiming to regroup and rearm.
🔔 FYI - WE ARE HEAVILY SHADOWBANNED ON YOUTUBE - HELP US BEAT THEIR ALGORITHM - PLEASE LIKE & SUB. HERE:
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Segment aired on November 30, 2025
https://youtu.be/gS_W94Z4H_E
Curious about why Trump's Ukraine peace deal is falling apart? Ever wondered why there's talk of a 'strategic pause' in Ukraine? This clip reveals the motivations of Ukraine, NATO, and European leaders aiming to regroup and rearm.
🔔 FYI - WE ARE HEAVILY SHADOWBANNED ON YOUTUBE - HELP US BEAT THEIR ALGORITHM - PLEASE LIKE & SUB. HERE:
https://www.youtube.com/@21stCenturyWireTV/shorts
Segment aired on November 30, 2025
https://youtu.be/gS_W94Z4H_E
💯7❤3🔥3💩1
Forwarded from REST Media
🇧🇦 Defying the viceroy
Serbian resistance to imposed rule in Bosnia
Republika Srpska’s 2025 crisis became a test of whether outside authority could override an elected leadership. After Milorad Dodik was removed following a high-stakes trial driven by decisions of the High Representative, Sarajevo moved to impose snap elections, widely seen in RS as an attempt to force a compliant presidency. The vote unfolded under sanctions, legal pressure, and a narrative of “extraordinary intervention” meant to reshape the entity’s political landscape.
SNSD responded by rallying behind Siniša Karan, framing the race as a defense of Dayton-era autonomy. Despite low turnout and mounting tensions, RS voters delivered him a narrow victory.
The outcome signaled that external pressure hardened—rather than weakened—political resolve inside Republika Srpska.
🔎 Read more in our in-depth investigation.
Follow @RESTinvestigate on Telegram | 𝕏
Serbian resistance to imposed rule in Bosnia
Republika Srpska’s 2025 crisis became a test of whether outside authority could override an elected leadership. After Milorad Dodik was removed following a high-stakes trial driven by decisions of the High Representative, Sarajevo moved to impose snap elections, widely seen in RS as an attempt to force a compliant presidency. The vote unfolded under sanctions, legal pressure, and a narrative of “extraordinary intervention” meant to reshape the entity’s political landscape.
SNSD responded by rallying behind Siniša Karan, framing the race as a defense of Dayton-era autonomy. Despite low turnout and mounting tensions, RS voters delivered him a narrow victory.
The outcome signaled that external pressure hardened—rather than weakened—political resolve inside Republika Srpska.
🔎 Read more in our in-depth investigation.
Follow @RESTinvestigate on Telegram | 𝕏
👍7
Forwarded from The Islander
Europe tried to sell Zelensky as the Churchill of Kiev.
Trump just told the world he’s closer to P.T. Barnum, a showman running a democracy-themed circus without the inconvenience of elections.
In one interview, the mask dropped. Trump didn’t tiptoe. He detonated.
“They haven’t had an election in a long time... It gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore. It’s time to hold an election. They’re using war not to hold an election. Ukrainians should have that choice.”
That’s the U.S. president publicly declaring what Europe spent years forbidding its citizens to say: Zelensky is unelected, and ruling by wartime decree while preaching “democracy” to donors who fund his survival. And with those words, the entire moral edifice of Europe’s Ukraine crusade snapped.
Trump didn’t stop at legitimacy: “Russia has the upper hand... He has to start accepting things.”
But the deeper detonation was aimed at Europe itself. Trump downloaded humiliation onto an entire continent: “Most European nations are decaying. They’re weak... Europe doesn’t know what to do.”
In those sentences, Trump exposed Europe’s deepest fear, that behind its moral theatrics lies a hollowed-out, Russophobic managerial class that mistook psychosis for strategy and posturing for power.
For years, these same Eurocrats marched Europe into economic ruin, even preparing to blow up what remains of the post–WWII financial order just to preserve the farcical illusion of “standing up to Russia.” In their addict-like desperation, they now move to steal Russian sovereign assets, a stunt so reckless it threatens the very foundation of the fiat Ponzi. And when Europeans began to question this madness, Brussels answered with Orwellian repression, weaponizing the DSA to silence speech, even exporting censorship across the Atlantic, all to suffocate the moment when the truth about the war finally breaks through their propaganda firewall.
Europe’s leaders know peace means a reckoning, a reckoning for the sanctions that immolated industry, for the energy suicide that bankrupted households, for nuclear debt mortgaging their future, and for the lies told daily to hide military collapse.
Russia didn’t defeat Europe. Europe defeated itself, consumed by a Russophobic delirium that justified any policy, no matter how suicidal, so long as it fed the delusion of moral supremacy.
That’s why Europe fears peace more than war. Peace brings accountability. Peace reveals betrayal.
When Trump said Europe is “decaying,” he was diagnosing a worldview collapsing under its own contradictions. When he said Europe is “weak,” he wasn’t mocking, he was acknowledging a continent that outsourced its sovereignty to Washington and now screams in panic as Washington walks away.
And Zelensky? He is now the symbol and mirror of everything Europe gambled and lost. Unelected. Corrupt. Out of options.
History was never fooled. Because the the collapse didn’t begin with Trump’s interview, his interview merely said aloud what reality had already written. That Ukraine could never win. That Europe could not lead. That Zelensky could not escape a mandate he no longer had. And that the entire Atlanticist project was built on a myth too fragile to survive contact with the map.
As the smoke clears, the reckoning comes into focus, a Europe stripped of its fantasies, a leadership exposed in its impotence, and a Ukrainian puppet president discovering that once legitimacy evaporates, even the noscripted applause fades.
And when Washington stops believing the story, the story ends. That is the moment we’ve reached.
Zelensky’s borrowed authority is spent. Europe’s manufactured unity is exhausted. The war narrative that held an entire continent hostage is collapsing under the architecture of its own psychosis.
And as Trump speaks the truth Europe spent years suppressing, the final scene comes into view: a West forced to confront not the enemy it imagined, but the ruins of the illusions it built for itself.
Trump just told the world he’s closer to P.T. Barnum, a showman running a democracy-themed circus without the inconvenience of elections.
In one interview, the mask dropped. Trump didn’t tiptoe. He detonated.
“They haven’t had an election in a long time... It gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore. It’s time to hold an election. They’re using war not to hold an election. Ukrainians should have that choice.”
That’s the U.S. president publicly declaring what Europe spent years forbidding its citizens to say: Zelensky is unelected, and ruling by wartime decree while preaching “democracy” to donors who fund his survival. And with those words, the entire moral edifice of Europe’s Ukraine crusade snapped.
Trump didn’t stop at legitimacy: “Russia has the upper hand... He has to start accepting things.”
But the deeper detonation was aimed at Europe itself. Trump downloaded humiliation onto an entire continent: “Most European nations are decaying. They’re weak... Europe doesn’t know what to do.”
In those sentences, Trump exposed Europe’s deepest fear, that behind its moral theatrics lies a hollowed-out, Russophobic managerial class that mistook psychosis for strategy and posturing for power.
For years, these same Eurocrats marched Europe into economic ruin, even preparing to blow up what remains of the post–WWII financial order just to preserve the farcical illusion of “standing up to Russia.” In their addict-like desperation, they now move to steal Russian sovereign assets, a stunt so reckless it threatens the very foundation of the fiat Ponzi. And when Europeans began to question this madness, Brussels answered with Orwellian repression, weaponizing the DSA to silence speech, even exporting censorship across the Atlantic, all to suffocate the moment when the truth about the war finally breaks through their propaganda firewall.
Europe’s leaders know peace means a reckoning, a reckoning for the sanctions that immolated industry, for the energy suicide that bankrupted households, for nuclear debt mortgaging their future, and for the lies told daily to hide military collapse.
Russia didn’t defeat Europe. Europe defeated itself, consumed by a Russophobic delirium that justified any policy, no matter how suicidal, so long as it fed the delusion of moral supremacy.
That’s why Europe fears peace more than war. Peace brings accountability. Peace reveals betrayal.
When Trump said Europe is “decaying,” he was diagnosing a worldview collapsing under its own contradictions. When he said Europe is “weak,” he wasn’t mocking, he was acknowledging a continent that outsourced its sovereignty to Washington and now screams in panic as Washington walks away.
And Zelensky? He is now the symbol and mirror of everything Europe gambled and lost. Unelected. Corrupt. Out of options.
History was never fooled. Because the the collapse didn’t begin with Trump’s interview, his interview merely said aloud what reality had already written. That Ukraine could never win. That Europe could not lead. That Zelensky could not escape a mandate he no longer had. And that the entire Atlanticist project was built on a myth too fragile to survive contact with the map.
As the smoke clears, the reckoning comes into focus, a Europe stripped of its fantasies, a leadership exposed in its impotence, and a Ukrainian puppet president discovering that once legitimacy evaporates, even the noscripted applause fades.
And when Washington stops believing the story, the story ends. That is the moment we’ve reached.
Zelensky’s borrowed authority is spent. Europe’s manufactured unity is exhausted. The war narrative that held an entire continent hostage is collapsing under the architecture of its own psychosis.
And as Trump speaks the truth Europe spent years suppressing, the final scene comes into view: a West forced to confront not the enemy it imagined, but the ruins of the illusions it built for itself.
❤12💯12👏4🤣3
Forwarded from The Islander
It’s strange, in a way almost ceremonial, when a state chooses to reveal what it has become.
All I did was speak freely. And in response, the French government stepped forward — calmly, politely, bureaucratically, to correct me. That alone tells you where we are.
Think about that. A continent with a shrinking industrial base now claims the right to police the global public square, to dictate not only what Europeans may say, but what the world may say on platforms it does not own, in jurisdictions it does not govern, under laws no citizen ever voted for.
This is not regulation. This is extra-territorial censorship disguised as simple consumer protection.
And France, the country of Voltaire, Hugo, Zola; the country that once staged revolutions merely to remind kings who ruled whom, now deploys bureaucrats to inspect online metaphors like customs officers inspecting luggage for contraband.
That is the tragedy. Not merely the censorship, but the collapse of a national soul.
De Gaulle once said that France could not be France without grandeur. Today, greatness has been replaced by grievance and debate by digital supervision. A Republic that once defied empires now behaves like a minor prefecture of an anxious EU superstate, terrified of what its own citizens might think if left unmonitored.
This is why the DSA exists. Because Europe’s elites have lost the argument, lost the public, and lost the confidence to face either. So they turn to an Orwellian control structure. To fines for tech companies that refuse secret deals made in the shade. To algorithmic control. To interface mandates. To “trusted flaggers.” To researchers chosen like clergy. To a Ministry of Truth that corrects citizens the way colonial officers once corrected subjects.
And when French Response quotes legal articles at me, it isn’t offering clarity. It’s confessing panic. It’s revealing that the ruling class no longer fears Russia or China or disinformation, it fears the awakening of and reckoning from its own population.
They quoted Articles 25, 39, 40 as though reciting noscripture. But each one is a stepping stone in a system that has abandoned persuasion for bureaucratic compulsion:
Art. 25 — “redesign interfaces we don’t like.”
Art. 39 — “expose your ad networks to us.”
Art. 40 — “hand over your data to researchers we control.”
And looming over all of it: The threat to annihilate any platform that does not comply.
A state does not build a Ministry of Truth to protect the truth. It builds it to protect itself from the people who can recognize it.
France knows this. Brussels knows this. Every EU government now enforcing the DSA knows this. The only ones they hope won’t realize it are the citizens, which is why even a single dissenting sentence must be supervised.
But of course they didn’t reply to correct me. They replied because I said something they can no longer afford to hear echoed.
And here is the final truth, the one that ends the illusion... When the Republic begins policing speech, it is no longer a Republic, only a weak power in its most frightened form. And the ruling class knows one thing above all, that if Europe could vote on the Europe that exists today, this Europe would not survive the night.
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Donate - Support Our Work
All I did was speak freely. And in response, the French government stepped forward — calmly, politely, bureaucratically, to correct me. That alone tells you where we are.
Think about that. A continent with a shrinking industrial base now claims the right to police the global public square, to dictate not only what Europeans may say, but what the world may say on platforms it does not own, in jurisdictions it does not govern, under laws no citizen ever voted for.
This is not regulation. This is extra-territorial censorship disguised as simple consumer protection.
And France, the country of Voltaire, Hugo, Zola; the country that once staged revolutions merely to remind kings who ruled whom, now deploys bureaucrats to inspect online metaphors like customs officers inspecting luggage for contraband.
That is the tragedy. Not merely the censorship, but the collapse of a national soul.
De Gaulle once said that France could not be France without grandeur. Today, greatness has been replaced by grievance and debate by digital supervision. A Republic that once defied empires now behaves like a minor prefecture of an anxious EU superstate, terrified of what its own citizens might think if left unmonitored.
This is why the DSA exists. Because Europe’s elites have lost the argument, lost the public, and lost the confidence to face either. So they turn to an Orwellian control structure. To fines for tech companies that refuse secret deals made in the shade. To algorithmic control. To interface mandates. To “trusted flaggers.” To researchers chosen like clergy. To a Ministry of Truth that corrects citizens the way colonial officers once corrected subjects.
And when French Response quotes legal articles at me, it isn’t offering clarity. It’s confessing panic. It’s revealing that the ruling class no longer fears Russia or China or disinformation, it fears the awakening of and reckoning from its own population.
They quoted Articles 25, 39, 40 as though reciting noscripture. But each one is a stepping stone in a system that has abandoned persuasion for bureaucratic compulsion:
Art. 25 — “redesign interfaces we don’t like.”
Art. 39 — “expose your ad networks to us.”
Art. 40 — “hand over your data to researchers we control.”
And looming over all of it: The threat to annihilate any platform that does not comply.
A state does not build a Ministry of Truth to protect the truth. It builds it to protect itself from the people who can recognize it.
France knows this. Brussels knows this. Every EU government now enforcing the DSA knows this. The only ones they hope won’t realize it are the citizens, which is why even a single dissenting sentence must be supervised.
But of course they didn’t reply to correct me. They replied because I said something they can no longer afford to hear echoed.
And here is the final truth, the one that ends the illusion... When the Republic begins policing speech, it is no longer a Republic, only a weak power in its most frightened form. And the ruling class knows one thing above all, that if Europe could vote on the Europe that exists today, this Europe would not survive the night.
🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews
Donate - Support Our Work
👏18❤9🏆1
Forwarded from The Islander
Europe Is About to Commit Financial Self-Immolation And Its Leaders Know It
Italy’s decision to stand with Belgium against the confiscation of Russian sovereign assets is not a diplomatic footnote. It is a moment of clarity breaking through the fog of performative morality that has engulfed Brussels.
Strip away the slogans and the truth is unavoidable: the seizure of Russian sovereign reserves will not change the course of the war in Ukraine by a single inch.
This is not about funding Ukraine, it is about whether sovereign property still exists in a Western financial system that has quietly replaced law with cult-like obedience.
That is why panic has entered the room.
The European Commission wants to pretend this is a clever workaround, a one-off, an emergency measure wrapped in legal contortions and moral posturing masquerading as hysteria. But finance does not function on intentions, rage or narratives. It functions on precedent, trust, and enforceability. And once that trust is broken, it does not return.
The modern global financial system rests on a single, unglamorous principle, that State assets held in foreign jurisdictions are legally immune from political confiscation.
That principle underwrites reserve currencies, correspondent banking, sovereign debt markets, and cross-border investment. It is why central banks like Russia's (once) accept euros instead of bullion shipped under armed guard. It is why settlement systems like Euroclear exist at all.
Once that rule is broken, capital does not debate. It reprices risk instantly and it leaves.
Confiscation sends a message to every country outside the Western political orbit: your savings are safe only as long as you remain politically compliant.
That is not a rules-based order. It is a selectively enforced order whose rules change the moment compliance ends. What we have is a compliance cartel, enforcing law upward and punishment downward, depending on who obeys and who resists.
Belgium’s fear is not legalistic. It is actuarial. Hosting Euroclear means hosting systemic risk. If Russia or any future target, successfully challenges the seizure, Belgium could be exposed to claims that dwarf the sums being discussed. Belgium is therefore right to be skeptical of Europe’s promise to underwrite such colossal risk, given the bloc’s now shattered credibility. No serious financial actor would treat such guarantees as reliable.
Italy’s hesitation is not ideological. It is mathematical. With one of Europe’s heaviest debt burdens, Rome understands what happens when markets begin questioning the neutrality of reserve currencies and custodians.
Neither country suddenly developed sympathy for Moscow. They simply did the arithmetic before the slogans.
Paris and London, meanwhile, thunder publicly while quietly insulating their own commercial banks’ exposure to Russian sovereign assets, exposure measured not in rhetoric, but in tens of billions. French financial institutions alone hold an estimated €15–20 billion, while UK-linked banks and custodial structures account for roughly £20–25 billion, much of it routed through London’s clearing and custody ecosystem rather than sitting on government balance sheets.
This hypocrisy and cowardice are not accidental. Paris and London sit at the heart of global custodial banking, derivatives clearing, and FX settlement, nodes embedded deep within the plumbing of global finance. Retaliatory seizures or accelerated capital flight would not be symbolic for them; they would be catastrophic.
So the burden is shifted outward. Smaller states are expected to absorb systemic risk while core financial centers preserve deniability, play a double game, and posture as virtuous.
This is anything but European solidarity. It is class defense at the international level.
Part 2 (final part) 👇
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Donate - Support Our Work
Italy’s decision to stand with Belgium against the confiscation of Russian sovereign assets is not a diplomatic footnote. It is a moment of clarity breaking through the fog of performative morality that has engulfed Brussels.
Strip away the slogans and the truth is unavoidable: the seizure of Russian sovereign reserves will not change the course of the war in Ukraine by a single inch.
This is not about funding Ukraine, it is about whether sovereign property still exists in a Western financial system that has quietly replaced law with cult-like obedience.
That is why panic has entered the room.
The European Commission wants to pretend this is a clever workaround, a one-off, an emergency measure wrapped in legal contortions and moral posturing masquerading as hysteria. But finance does not function on intentions, rage or narratives. It functions on precedent, trust, and enforceability. And once that trust is broken, it does not return.
The modern global financial system rests on a single, unglamorous principle, that State assets held in foreign jurisdictions are legally immune from political confiscation.
That principle underwrites reserve currencies, correspondent banking, sovereign debt markets, and cross-border investment. It is why central banks like Russia's (once) accept euros instead of bullion shipped under armed guard. It is why settlement systems like Euroclear exist at all.
Once that rule is broken, capital does not debate. It reprices risk instantly and it leaves.
Confiscation sends a message to every country outside the Western political orbit: your savings are safe only as long as you remain politically compliant.
That is not a rules-based order. It is a selectively enforced order whose rules change the moment compliance ends. What we have is a compliance cartel, enforcing law upward and punishment downward, depending on who obeys and who resists.
Belgium’s fear is not legalistic. It is actuarial. Hosting Euroclear means hosting systemic risk. If Russia or any future target, successfully challenges the seizure, Belgium could be exposed to claims that dwarf the sums being discussed. Belgium is therefore right to be skeptical of Europe’s promise to underwrite such colossal risk, given the bloc’s now shattered credibility. No serious financial actor would treat such guarantees as reliable.
Italy’s hesitation is not ideological. It is mathematical. With one of Europe’s heaviest debt burdens, Rome understands what happens when markets begin questioning the neutrality of reserve currencies and custodians.
Neither country suddenly developed sympathy for Moscow. They simply did the arithmetic before the slogans.
Paris and London, meanwhile, thunder publicly while quietly insulating their own commercial banks’ exposure to Russian sovereign assets, exposure measured not in rhetoric, but in tens of billions. French financial institutions alone hold an estimated €15–20 billion, while UK-linked banks and custodial structures account for roughly £20–25 billion, much of it routed through London’s clearing and custody ecosystem rather than sitting on government balance sheets.
This hypocrisy and cowardice are not accidental. Paris and London sit at the heart of global custodial banking, derivatives clearing, and FX settlement, nodes embedded deep within the plumbing of global finance. Retaliatory seizures or accelerated capital flight would not be symbolic for them; they would be catastrophic.
So the burden is shifted outward. Smaller states are expected to absorb systemic risk while core financial centers preserve deniability, play a double game, and posture as virtuous.
This is anything but European solidarity. It is class defense at the international level.
Part 2 (final part) 👇
🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews
Donate - Support Our Work
💯16❤4👏4👎1
Forwarded from The Islander
Part 1/2 - Merz stood before his CDSU party and did two things in the same speech that should have stopped Europe cold.
He declared that “Pax Americana is over.” And he reached for Europe’s darkest memory... Munich, the Sudetenland, Hitler, to argue that Russia “won’t stop,” projecting expansionist intent onto Moscow while erasing the long trail of Western promises broken and red lines ignored.
Together, the lines function as one device: announce the old security arrangement is fading, then slam the door on compromise by turning diplomacy into a moral crime.
Of course it isn't leadership. It’s a choreographed noscript, and everyone is expected to follow it.
“Pax Americana is over” is marketed as emancipation, Europe stepping out from under American guardianship, finally standing on its own feet. But the second half of Merz’s message tells you what this really is, not independence being offered to the public, but discipline demanded from it.
Because once Hitler is invoked, the field of legitimate diplomacy shrinks to a pinhole. Negotiation becomes appeasement. Restraint becomes cowardice. Doubt becomes disloyalty. History stops being a teacher and becomes a weapon, the kind you swing at your own citizens.
The Munich analogy is the most reusable instrument in European politics precisely because it abolishes alternatives. It does not illuminate the present, it pre-bans future choices. It declares in advance that off-ramps are immoral and escalation is virtue. This isn’t historical memory, but rather coercion by myth.
If Pax Americana were truly ending in a mature way, Europe’s response would look very different. It would begin with realism instead of hysteria, diplomacy instead of demonology, rebuilding industry, securing energy, restoring social consent, and cooling the temperature of a continent already exhausted by crisis.
Instead, Merz reaches for the most radioactive symbol available, because he does not trust the public to accept the costs of confrontation if those costs are explained honestly as tradeoffs rather than destiny.
That tells you everything.
For decades, Western Europe made a choice. It dissolved sovereignty into bureaucracy and outsourced strategic hard power to Washington. American protection became a political convenience, it allowed a managerial class to sermonize while someone else absorbed escalation risk, strategic liability, and blowback. Pax Americana was not just a shield, it was branded as a restraint on Europe’s own worst historical reflexes.
Now the umbrella is thinning and what’s being revealed underneath is not leadership, but dependency. A political class so long insulated from consequence that the moment protection fades, it reaches not for strategy, but for myth, coercion, and panic.
Merz doesn’t pivot to restraint. He pivots to moral absolutism.
This is where projection enters.
By invoking Hitler and the Sudetenland, Merz is not describing Russia so much as advertising elite panic, panic at the return of responsibility, panic at publics who might choose peace, panic at the dawning reality that American power is no longer an inexhaustible insurance policy.
Panic always produces the same politics: narrow the debate, raise the stakes, demand unity, punish dissent.
Germany is already entrenching long-term military posture on NATO’s eastern flank. At the same time, talk of mandatory service reappears when voluntary enthusiasm fails. These are not metaphors. They are signals. When persuasion runs dry, compulsion is prepared, and wrapped in moral language so it looks like virtue.
This is not fate. This is choice.
Germany is not being dragged into inevitability by history. It is choosing inevitability language because inevitability language disciplines the public. It converts policy into destiny. It turns citizens into assets. And it allows leaders to say “there was no alternative” after they have deliberately scorched every alternative.
Part 2👇
🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews
Donate - Support Our Work
He declared that “Pax Americana is over.” And he reached for Europe’s darkest memory... Munich, the Sudetenland, Hitler, to argue that Russia “won’t stop,” projecting expansionist intent onto Moscow while erasing the long trail of Western promises broken and red lines ignored.
Together, the lines function as one device: announce the old security arrangement is fading, then slam the door on compromise by turning diplomacy into a moral crime.
Of course it isn't leadership. It’s a choreographed noscript, and everyone is expected to follow it.
“Pax Americana is over” is marketed as emancipation, Europe stepping out from under American guardianship, finally standing on its own feet. But the second half of Merz’s message tells you what this really is, not independence being offered to the public, but discipline demanded from it.
Because once Hitler is invoked, the field of legitimate diplomacy shrinks to a pinhole. Negotiation becomes appeasement. Restraint becomes cowardice. Doubt becomes disloyalty. History stops being a teacher and becomes a weapon, the kind you swing at your own citizens.
The Munich analogy is the most reusable instrument in European politics precisely because it abolishes alternatives. It does not illuminate the present, it pre-bans future choices. It declares in advance that off-ramps are immoral and escalation is virtue. This isn’t historical memory, but rather coercion by myth.
If Pax Americana were truly ending in a mature way, Europe’s response would look very different. It would begin with realism instead of hysteria, diplomacy instead of demonology, rebuilding industry, securing energy, restoring social consent, and cooling the temperature of a continent already exhausted by crisis.
Instead, Merz reaches for the most radioactive symbol available, because he does not trust the public to accept the costs of confrontation if those costs are explained honestly as tradeoffs rather than destiny.
That tells you everything.
For decades, Western Europe made a choice. It dissolved sovereignty into bureaucracy and outsourced strategic hard power to Washington. American protection became a political convenience, it allowed a managerial class to sermonize while someone else absorbed escalation risk, strategic liability, and blowback. Pax Americana was not just a shield, it was branded as a restraint on Europe’s own worst historical reflexes.
Now the umbrella is thinning and what’s being revealed underneath is not leadership, but dependency. A political class so long insulated from consequence that the moment protection fades, it reaches not for strategy, but for myth, coercion, and panic.
Merz doesn’t pivot to restraint. He pivots to moral absolutism.
This is where projection enters.
By invoking Hitler and the Sudetenland, Merz is not describing Russia so much as advertising elite panic, panic at the return of responsibility, panic at publics who might choose peace, panic at the dawning reality that American power is no longer an inexhaustible insurance policy.
Panic always produces the same politics: narrow the debate, raise the stakes, demand unity, punish dissent.
Germany is already entrenching long-term military posture on NATO’s eastern flank. At the same time, talk of mandatory service reappears when voluntary enthusiasm fails. These are not metaphors. They are signals. When persuasion runs dry, compulsion is prepared, and wrapped in moral language so it looks like virtue.
This is not fate. This is choice.
Germany is not being dragged into inevitability by history. It is choosing inevitability language because inevitability language disciplines the public. It converts policy into destiny. It turns citizens into assets. And it allows leaders to say “there was no alternative” after they have deliberately scorched every alternative.
Part 2👇
🎙Subscribe @TheIslanderNews
Donate - Support Our Work
🔥13❤10👎2👏2👻2
Forwarded from The Islander
Western headlines are screaming that Ukraine has “encircled” Kupyansk city… a glorified town, selling it as a nightmare for Moscow. But this is not a battlefield report. It is narrative management, timed precisely to negotiations in Berlin. Kupyansk is not Stalingrad. It is not Kursk. It is not even a decisive urban fight. It is a ruined settlement on the Oskol, a former logistics node reduced to rubble, where control is measured not in flags but in fire control, drone dominance, and whether men can be rotated without being killed.
And when even Reuters couches claims as “unverified,” you know what that means. When it hedges, pauses, and inserts distance between claims and confirmation, it is signaling that fog is being weaponised. What exists on the ground is block-by-block ruin fighting, contested neighbourhoods like Yubileynyy, clashes near Mirovoye and Radkovka, infiltration attempts, temporary interdictions. Battalion-scale collisions between exhausted units in a place that barely functions as a city.
The unit scale tells the truth the headlines obscure. Kupyansk has never hosted a force capable of deciding a front. Within the urban core, the Russian presence has been limited and exposed, with little time to dig in deeper, the town’s ruins making sustained fortification difficult, relying on fire control rather than secured occupation. With thousands tied down protecting the flanks and barely a battalion inside the city itself, Ukrainian assaults are not sweeping counteroffensives but concentrated pushes by swarms of worn formations, often built from forcibly mobilised men with minimal training, starving and thin on ammunition, cannibalized from fronts like Sumy, and thrown into an urban graveyard to manufacture leverage.
This is not manoeuvre warfare. It is attritional contact deliberately framed as momentum to serve a media and political narrative rather operational gain. What matters is that the map is not the territory. In this war, a coloured overlay often marks a brief window of drone interdiction, hours, not control. Fire control can deny movement, but without sustainment it cannot secure ground. Fire control without sustainment does not produce breakthroughs. It produces graveyards. Ukraine has been forced by its Western patrons into too many of them already.
Kupyansk does not change the war unless it becomes part of a broader operational rollback and it won't. Otherwise, it is a bad PR bargaining chip, paid for in blood.
While cameras fixate on Kupyansk, the real pressure story runs elsewhere, across a widening arc Western coverage fragments to prevent pattern recognition. West of Russian liberated Seversk, claims and denials continue, but the geometry is clear: Ukrainian forces are stretched thin, defending ground without strategic depth. Around encircled Lyman, the contest is about lines of communication and Ukranian reserve erosion, not symbolism.
Central to the Donbass arc, Pokrovsk and Mirnograd matter not because of names, but because they anchor logistics. Russian control here forces a stark contrast in how the war is being fought. Ukraine is expending irreplaceable manpower to manufacture moments, brief tactical actions designed to win optics for a day. Russia, by contrast, is trading space, fire control, and logistics denial for outcomes that compound over time. One side is managing headlines. The other is managing the war.
To the south, the picture is more dangerous still. Around Gulyaypole, pressure is persistent and cumulative, not theatrical. And beyond it lies the real anxiety Europe refuses to discuss openly, the slow, grinding push toward Zaporozhye city. This is not a sprint. It is a methodical march Westward. If current trends hold, Zaporozhye can be operationally threatened, even encircled in less than six months. That outcome would dwarf any skirmish in the small town of Kupyansk.
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And when even Reuters couches claims as “unverified,” you know what that means. When it hedges, pauses, and inserts distance between claims and confirmation, it is signaling that fog is being weaponised. What exists on the ground is block-by-block ruin fighting, contested neighbourhoods like Yubileynyy, clashes near Mirovoye and Radkovka, infiltration attempts, temporary interdictions. Battalion-scale collisions between exhausted units in a place that barely functions as a city.
The unit scale tells the truth the headlines obscure. Kupyansk has never hosted a force capable of deciding a front. Within the urban core, the Russian presence has been limited and exposed, with little time to dig in deeper, the town’s ruins making sustained fortification difficult, relying on fire control rather than secured occupation. With thousands tied down protecting the flanks and barely a battalion inside the city itself, Ukrainian assaults are not sweeping counteroffensives but concentrated pushes by swarms of worn formations, often built from forcibly mobilised men with minimal training, starving and thin on ammunition, cannibalized from fronts like Sumy, and thrown into an urban graveyard to manufacture leverage.
This is not manoeuvre warfare. It is attritional contact deliberately framed as momentum to serve a media and political narrative rather operational gain. What matters is that the map is not the territory. In this war, a coloured overlay often marks a brief window of drone interdiction, hours, not control. Fire control can deny movement, but without sustainment it cannot secure ground. Fire control without sustainment does not produce breakthroughs. It produces graveyards. Ukraine has been forced by its Western patrons into too many of them already.
Kupyansk does not change the war unless it becomes part of a broader operational rollback and it won't. Otherwise, it is a bad PR bargaining chip, paid for in blood.
While cameras fixate on Kupyansk, the real pressure story runs elsewhere, across a widening arc Western coverage fragments to prevent pattern recognition. West of Russian liberated Seversk, claims and denials continue, but the geometry is clear: Ukrainian forces are stretched thin, defending ground without strategic depth. Around encircled Lyman, the contest is about lines of communication and Ukranian reserve erosion, not symbolism.
Central to the Donbass arc, Pokrovsk and Mirnograd matter not because of names, but because they anchor logistics. Russian control here forces a stark contrast in how the war is being fought. Ukraine is expending irreplaceable manpower to manufacture moments, brief tactical actions designed to win optics for a day. Russia, by contrast, is trading space, fire control, and logistics denial for outcomes that compound over time. One side is managing headlines. The other is managing the war.
To the south, the picture is more dangerous still. Around Gulyaypole, pressure is persistent and cumulative, not theatrical. And beyond it lies the real anxiety Europe refuses to discuss openly, the slow, grinding push toward Zaporozhye city. This is not a sprint. It is a methodical march Westward. If current trends hold, Zaporozhye can be operationally threatened, even encircled in less than six months. That outcome would dwarf any skirmish in the small town of Kupyansk.
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🇩🇪From smartphone to state sensor: Berlin’s new digital panopticon
The amended ASOG reads like a shopping list for a security apparatus in a dystopian series. State trojans to break encrypted communications, secret home entries, cell‑tower geodata dragnets, biometric scraping of social media, automatic number-plate recognition, extended preventive detention – it’s all there, nicely numbered in paragraphs.
Police can demand mass geodata from telecom operators (paragraph 26e) to build movement profiles for thousands, use biometric tools (28a) to match faces and voices against publicly available internet content, deploy bodycams in private homes (24c), and feed all this into AI systems trained on police‑collected data (42d).
Proponents promise this will “level the playing field” against terrorists and cybercriminals. Critics warn it levels something else: the boundary between citizen and suspect. A compromised phone, a misidentified face in a crowd, a protest near a “geofenced” hotspot – and suddenly your everyday life becomes raw material for predictive policing algorithms. And because vulnerabilities in state trojans are, by definition, deliberate backdoors, Berlin isn’t just opening a door into citizens’ devices for itself. It’s betting that no one else – criminals, foreign intelligence, hackers – will find that same door. An optimistic premise for a law supposedly about “security.”
@sitreports
The amended ASOG reads like a shopping list for a security apparatus in a dystopian series. State trojans to break encrypted communications, secret home entries, cell‑tower geodata dragnets, biometric scraping of social media, automatic number-plate recognition, extended preventive detention – it’s all there, nicely numbered in paragraphs.
Police can demand mass geodata from telecom operators (paragraph 26e) to build movement profiles for thousands, use biometric tools (28a) to match faces and voices against publicly available internet content, deploy bodycams in private homes (24c), and feed all this into AI systems trained on police‑collected data (42d).
Proponents promise this will “level the playing field” against terrorists and cybercriminals. Critics warn it levels something else: the boundary between citizen and suspect. A compromised phone, a misidentified face in a crowd, a protest near a “geofenced” hotspot – and suddenly your everyday life becomes raw material for predictive policing algorithms. And because vulnerabilities in state trojans are, by definition, deliberate backdoors, Berlin isn’t just opening a door into citizens’ devices for itself. It’s betting that no one else – criminals, foreign intelligence, hackers – will find that same door. An optimistic premise for a law supposedly about “security.”
@sitreports
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