Peter Zeihan is not the man to pay attention here. It's the other guy. Pure Narrative framing going on here; I've heard this framing before- this cohort of Globohomo ain't slick. Other guy's openly repeating the old Globohomo position on Russia: wear it down, bleed it out, break it up (implicitly, take it over).
Zeihan's there purely to give substance to the other guy's framing. For all his gainsaying of the other guy, it's not disagreement on the core point- just the details. Zeihan's role in this video is to give the audience an illusion of facts and logic for the other guy's Rhetorical statements that do the framing.
The takeaway here is that it is now thinkable to outright conquer, occupy, and Westernize (poz) Russia. "If Putin doesn't make it happen sooner due to incompetence, "business forces" and demographics will make it happen soon enough, so get ready to seize the new opportunities soon to come the West's way!" Narrative Good Cop/Bad Cop in action. It's the goal of the post-Cold War Establishment reiterated.
This video is meant for a Globohomo-friendly audience of "Outer Party" types that think they're insiders, which is the sort of audience that men like Zeihan in particular speak to on the regular. Events like this are how Establishment narratives are promulgated before they go wide with mass media, so if you want advanced warning of narrative shifts this sort of thing is what to watch out for- and Zeihan's the sort of man to follow since this is his beat.
This makes me miss Frame Game Radio. He'd be all over this video if he were still around. Classic "unthinking" (rethinking) framing in action. Learn this and you won't be surprised at what Globohomo does. Master it, and you'll see what the other Imperial Powers (and those aiming to be like them) do differently to achieve the same end. Seeing the tells is a necessary step towards making Empire fall.
As I said last week, no dissident movement succeeds without operating as an insurgency. No insurgency succeeds without external support.
Support for dissident operations of any kind--violent or not, criminal or legitimate, moral or not--requires the erection and refinement of a logistics capacity in order to ensure that what you need to get done has the men, material, and money required to do so.
This is why dissidents operate as insurgencies; without support from the population the dissidents claim to support this capacity cannot be erected on-site, but must instead be funneled in from outside (i.e. support from a party hostile to the dissidents' enemies).
What has changed in the last few generations is the capacity for a dissident movement to acquire external support without being coopted into the thrall of a rival power to the dissidents' enemies. As I noted last week and several times before that, there is liminal space between the imperial spheres of power and influence. Many of the states in these spaces have residency and business regimes friendly to foreigners--that would be you here--so long as they don't make problems for the hosts.
Are you a serious dissident movement? Do you want to erect your own support network that operates in these liminal spaces, and thus can render aid to your operations? You shoud if you are. I will review the benefits.
Taking advantage of international regulatory arbitrage, just like your enemies, LEGALLY move assets and personnel around. Got an effective operator? Protect his family by securing their assets using your offshore front office's services to put them in a trust, and if they are open to it move some or all of them out of the reach of your enemies so he can focus on doing work for the cause.
Secure access to the banking system by using banks that do not give two shits about you, and can issue you cards that you can use in your home state.
Using the same rules as your enemies, and based out of the field office you erect offshore, erect a corporate structure that can turn into as many revenue streams as your group can manage. Then employ as many of your supporters, especially those that are not field operators, as possible to ensure their loyalty to you as well as provide plausible reason to vet them and filter out enemy agents.
Using the opportunity of a neutral space, contact and network with compatible dissidents operating elsewhere to erect mutual support across state (and sphere) lines so as to avoid being coopted by the imperial powers in thrall to Empire. (Hint: This is where adherance to the same religion becomes a formidible and practical asset, even if the sects are not identical.)
What this is not is cheap or easy. That's why it requires that the dissident be serious before attempting it. In addition to getting a passport, the operative doing the work of setting up the offshore office will need to have certain papers in order and the legal authority to spend the thousands of US dollars (or equivalent). He will also need have at his back a successful economic operation that he can use to legally attain access to the foreign state in that liminal space, which means that a dissident operation must prove itself serious by having a competent business arm in operation.
It may seem counter-intuitive, especially for nationalist dissidents, to do this but there is no viable alternative to this option that both mitigates the threat of the state and avoids being coopted by hostile foreign imperial powers. The fight at home must, by necessity, involve going abroad- both to secure support and to create fallbacks should things go wrong.
Fortunately, some dissidents already do this. There is hope. The rest is just getting them to see the opportunity and point them in this direction. Empire is waiting to fall.
That problem is information. The specific problem is that information from sources outside the imperial sphere dominated by the power he dissents against is no less a weapon of Narrative Warfare than the sources he is accostumed to- all that varies are the details of how that institution executes its primary function of prosecuting such warfare.
It is easy for imperial powers to coopt dissidents to become agents to turn and employ against its rival powers. That is Sun Tzu 101, right out of the chapter on spies, and yet it continues to be a problem.
It is easy for this to happen because rival imperial powers see the value in taking enemy nationals or subjects and making them into mouthpieces for its propaganda, all under the cover of "exposing the truth". That turned dissident is now an enemy spy in all but name, and the imperial power in question is correct to regard such a catspaw as an enemy spy- and treat them accordingly.
We see this cooptation process in two notable examples.
The first is the influence of Alexander Dugin on Western dissidents in North America and Europe, often misunderstanding what his positions actually are--willfully so--in order to simultaneously sell the image of a Russia that is not real as well as to attempt to signal receptability to Russian Intelligence for cooperation (and thus cooptation).
(In this case, it is an attempt--in vain, as it turns out--to court external support for their efforts. This example is one of failure, as Russian Intelligence sees no value in rendering such support and right now lacks the means to do so anyway.)
The second is in the influence of the Chinese Communist Party with dissidents focused on the Asian sphere, such as The New Atlas. In this case it is the CCP that is the active party, seeking out pliable Western dissidents and using an influence operation similar to what was executed against Project Veritas in order to suborn the dissident to the Party and make him an asset under their control.
(This is an example of success, as through just a couple of turned dissidents they can and have erected a vast and deniable influence network throughout the sphere of Western dissidents and promulgate CCP-favored narratives with ease such that even the savvy can be fooled.)
The CIA and its fellow agencies in Globohomo have long ago standardized this very form of turning and deploying dissidents against Russia and China. That's what the entire Non-Governmental Organization network exists to do: give cover to Globohomo intelligence operations to undermine enemy targets and set them up to be taken over and assimilated into Globohomo.
This issue is complicated by one other fact: no successful dissident movement succeeds without operating as an insurgency, and no insurgency succeeds without external support. The savvy among all dissidents know this, which is why they seek out external support in the first place and often find rival imperial operations waiting for them on the other side.
This is a big problem. Yet, due to the liminal space issue I mentioned last week, now again comes into the picture.
The entire point of having your dissident organization establish a satellite office in a liminal space location such as Dubai, Singapore, or some other location between two or all of the imperial powers is that you can establish there the infrastructure necessary to do the following:
Secure access to the banking system.
Erect the infrastructure necessary to finance operations at home.
Use that same infrastructure to move personnel around deniably by giving them jobs in companies operating where you need them.
Use that same infrastructure to establish a legal business machine that can support your organization and its members' dependents entirely outside of state power.
Use that same infrastructure to erect wholly independent information (and thus intelligence) sources that can be relied upon.
The latter two in particular are vital to success. You need to guarantee the loyalty of your supporters; being able to feed, clothe, and house them despite the state's efforts goes a long way towards doing that. You need to have reliable intelligence to act upon; using your non-combatant suppporter to seek out reliable sources, vet what they find, and process it into useful intelligence. You must become your own news network.
That most dissidents worldwide can't even concieve of this at all is a good reason why they are so readily crushed or turned into assets for another imperial power that also hates them, wants to exterminate them, and thinks it's funny.
No one said making Empire fall is easy, quick, or convenient. This is what must be done--what is necessary--to make Empire fall.
Time Ghost does a transparancy video explaining where the money goes. This is far more instructive than many, including the host Indy, think.
Note that no one at Time Ghost is, in any way, a dissident against Empire. That is not why I bring this to your attention.
I note this because, in the interest of upholding trust with their audience and supporters, Time Ghost showed the logistics supporting the operation to the public at-large.
Dissidents should take note of this video, and others like it, even by people they otherwise do not support because logistics doesn't give a shit about your politics anymore than gravity does. A successful operation OF ANY KIND has its logistics locked down tight.
Empire--specifically, the elite Thralls at the top of various agencies comprising its private and government arms across all the imperial spheres--know this. This is explicit in military, law enforcement, and intelligence operations and implicit elsewhere but the lesson is the same: cut off logistics, and resistance becomes impossible.
Time Ghost, being no threat to the Thralls of Empire running Globohomo, may operate as it does without fear. Dissidents do not.
This shows dissidents two things. First is what it takes to run a successful threat to Empire is just as much a matter of logistics--and, with that, organization and discipline--as it is to run Globohomo. Second is that the key difference is the capacity to interference with the enemy's logistics.
In the matter of logistics, as Time Ghost's video shows, there is a single chokepoint for Empire to employ: banking access.
Time Ghost cannot maintain operations if they are unable to purchase goods or pay for services, either direct (those needed to do specific things) or indirect (those needed to sustain those who do things). As dissidents have seen, being severed from access to the banking system is--to date--an effective counter to dissidents that present a viable threat.
Further complicating matters is that lesser Thralls, such as the rainbow-haired Death Cultists acting as disposable grunts for Empire's Globohomo wing or the womanly-natured petty bureaucrats of the Chinese Communist Party (male and female alike), use this mechanism to settle petty scores and massage the necessarily weak ego that being such a figure requires. This accounts for many of the uses outside of any legitimate state or national security interest (i.e. against actual predators such as traffickers and child predators) on lower-profile targets, regardless of alignment with Empire's dominant Regime in that sphere.
Before I return to the financial aspect, I will--for the observant--make the following note: when it is viable, cultivate and maintain logistics capacities outside of the banking system- and it is viable more often than you may think. All successful dissident movements and insuregencies do this.
Far-seeing dissidents, such as Andrew Torba, have known of this for years and are at work on alternatives. Right now, this is focused on the current point of contention: payment processing. What needs to come next, and soon after Torba or some other party succeeds, is alternative routing to the banks themselves and a bank that will deal with dissidents.
This is where big picture geopolitics comes into the picture.
As a matter of necessity, dissidents--especially those focused on the affairs of their specific nation and homeland--must keep the global picture in mind. This is because events half the world away directly impact upon their capacity to act, for good or ill.
The three imperial Spheres--Russia, China, Globohomo--are vying for who is Empire's Goodest Boy. Dissidents, out of necessity, should take advantage of this fact.
At the least, all dissidents regardless of their purpose should seek out a satellite office in a liminal space between the Imperial Powers; this, in fact, is the value of a place such as Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (and the UAE knows it, proven by its own efforts to stay in that liminal space). Those too weak to do so on their own should seek out partners to collaborate with on this purpose. The reason to do this is to secure access to banking outside one's home state.
All of this means that a dissident that is disorganized or undisciplined--unserious--must become both (become serious) to become able to pursue such a strategy and succeed. With this access to the core of logistics secured and locked down, the specific details of ensuring the flow of financial resources from that liminal space office to the field location that requires it can be worked out and erected.
In time, this means taking the reality of the corporate structures exposed by The Panama Papers (and its fellow exposure pieces) for the end of securing logistics. This is not optional; accept that is is required and get it done.
But that is for another post, as it means looking at what a successful dissident operation must be out of necessity: an intelligence network.
Regardless of the politics, or the means, operations that succeed are operations that locked down the ability to pay and get paid- and that, despite alternatives, ends up meaning banking access at all levels. This is what it takes to see Empire fall. Get on with it, or get crushed by it.
