The need to hold our noses - put politics aside and do the right thing.
20220429
American conservatives are conflicted. For 70 years the United States has been preparing to fight the Russians. We enlisted a whole bunch of supporters in NATO in this quest. We have spent trillions of dollars on weaponry.
Now that the war has come, they are getting cold feet. They claim that the war was provoked by their political opposition – the neocons who have now found a home in the Democrat party. Some conservatives wanted to believe that Putin was the Great White Hope as the Democrats forgot their roots and destroyed white culture under the banner of diversity. Conservatives wanted to believe that Putin was the Christian stalwart as the Democrats abandoned and persecuted the religious.
Nope. Putin is a lying, posturing politician, wrapping himself in the flags of religion, traditional values and nationalism. Nothing unusual there. He is unusual only in that he was willing to start a war.
Ron Paul, a conservative that I generally admire, says that it is none of America's business what Russia does in Eastern Europe. America should not be involved. He is certainly right to claim that the military-industrial complex benefits from this war and may well have done a lot to instigate it. He is right to claim that we did not take every possible measure to avoid it.
He is wrong to claim that it does not affect our interests. This is as naked of an aggression as can be imagined, and there is no logical endpoint to it. If one allows Russia to engulf one country, Ukraine, which resolutely does not want to be Russian, the same logic could be applied to the Baltics, Moldova, Poland and everything west of there. It has to stop someplace, and the logical places here, where it started.
Paul Craig Roberts is even more in the bag, giving credence to the Russian claims that they represent the true interest of the Russian speaking people in eastern Ukraine. The vacuity of that claim was more than clear even in 2014. A majority of the people in the Donbass and Crimea did not want the Russians. Many of them left when the Russians came. Those who are left do not have the freedom to talk about their situation.
Ukraine did not represent a threat to Russia in 2022. It did not represent a threat eight years ago. It is clear that reconquering Ukraine has been on Putin's agenda since he took power two decades ago. Roberts is simply blind to that fact.
Edward Slavsquat has the best summary I have seen of the situation. The United States and NATO have fought a number of stupid wars: Vietnam, Serbia, Libya, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq, ongoing hostilities with Iran… the list goes on. None of those wars affected vital American interests, and the American case for involvement was tenuous. Moreover, those wars were vastly expensive.
Getting involved in Ukraine is a much clearer cut decision. Russia attacked Ukraine. There is no denying it. Ukraine does not want Russia. This is obvious to all. Russia is destroying the major Russian-speaking cities in Ukraine. Any claim of protecting Russian speakers is absolute nonsense. He is killing them.
As far as money goes, this is the war which has justified trillions of dollars of research and development over seven decades. A vast standing army and warehouses full of munitions. Ukraine is willing to let its soldiers do the fighting. All that the West has to do is provide arms. It is a trivial cost compared to what is at stake, and trivial compared to the money that was wasted on far less justifiable wars.
We have to hold our noses and accept that the despicable neocons wanted this war, or at least did not do much to prevent it. As Matt Taibbi writes, the corrupt military-industrial complex is shilling for the war. It will make the money. A senile old president, steeped in corruption (see Hunter Biden), perhaps fraudulently elected (see 2000 Mules documentary), will take credit if it turns out successfully. So be it.
The conservatives are absolutely right that the larger danger is the New World Order. We still have to confront the medical tyranny of the public health zealots. We still have to reclaim public education and keep our children from being coached into changing genders. We have to reclaim the electoral process, ensuring the integrity of our democracy. We have to protect our freedoms from social credit systems that are being introduced via digital currency, implanted microchips, and universal surveillance systems.
These issues are bigger than, and separate from, the war in Ukraine. What we are facing here is naked, 19th century empire building aggression. It's the kind of primordial, anachronistic threat that NATO was built to deter. It involves 19th century atrocities like rape, murder, torture and kidnapping. Still in front of us is the battle against 21st century atrocities like government-approved pederasty, forced gender realignment, forced medical procedures, lockdowns and deplatforming. We have to deal with this one first, but not be blind to the fact that there are bigger battles yet to come.
I think Roberts has long gone past his "Sell By" date, he's been firmly in the pocket of the Russian imperialists for years now, doing his part to help them create their "Greater Eurasia". No doubt he got suckered by Dugin's "Fourth Political Theory", what appears to be a nice piece of dezinformatsiya put out to sucker "conservatives" into helping Putin et al re-create the old Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. Ron Paul isn't too swift, either, maybe he should be made aware of the following, written in 1997, which has much present day significance:
"The absolute imperative of Russian geopolitics on the Black Sea coast is the total and unlimited control of Moscow along its entire length from Ukrainian to Abkhazian territories. It is possible to divide this entire zone on an ethno-cultural basis as much as you like, granting ethnic and confessional autonomy to the Crimean Little Russians, Tatars, Cossacks, Abkhazians, Georgians, etc., but all this only with absolute control of Moscow over the military and political situation. These sectors must be radically divorced from the thalassocratic influence coming from the west and from Turkey (or even Greece). The northern coast of the Black Sea should be exclusively Eurasian and centrally subordinate to Moscow..." https://n01r.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Foundations-of-Geopolitics-Geopolitical-Future-of-Russia-Alexander-Dugin-English-auto-translation-with-appended-original.pdf
And that last bit, written 25 years ago, is being carried out today. Crimea was the first chunk to be bitten off, now it’s Donetsk, Zaporhizia, and Kherson Oblasts, after that Odessa. Moldova appears to have been placed within the Moscow-dominated Eurasian sphere of influence. If this analysis is correct, then Romania is next, followed by Bulgaria - but Ukraine is the keystone. It should now be obvious - from this book written 25 years ago (whose full English translation I just found - French and German are easy, but Russian is hard work...) - that the outrage over the US-funded biological warfare labs and everything else was just a convenient pretext for something that was planned out decades ago.
Here’s some background on Aleksandr Dugin:
”Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, the man behind “Duginism,” is a Russian political strategist with ties to some of the most powerful people in Russia; various oligarchs, billionaires, Kremlinites, military men, and even Putin himself. This includes people such as Sergey Naryshkin (Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service), Igor Rodionov (Defence Minister), and Gennadiy Seleznyov (Chairman of the State Duma). Dugin’s father was a colonel-general of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), which is essentially the Russian militaries’ own KGB; a foreign-intelligence agency. GRU was originally established in the USSR by Leon Trotsky’s deputy. Because Dugin’s father was an extremely high ranking glowie, Dugin was born into spookdom; the number of influential KGB agents that Dugin has collaborated with is too long to list: http://archive.vn/iOvCT.
More here: https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/putins-and-dugins-vision-of-a-greater, but Paul should read Dugin's book - the *real* version, not the "Fourth Political Theory" deception - he'd see Dugin's - and Putin's - *real* intentions towards the US and American interests.
There has been no impact to negotiations with Russia. Sanctions aren’t doing anything now except isolating them from the west. They still have the oil, gas and $600B of physical gold reserves. Their central bank is making it easy for friends to buy their exports. The USA threw all their leverage at them. They got take. Off swift... the Rouble is stronger now than it was in January. The USA is in an economically leveraged Keynesian nightmare, manufactured by our inept central bankers and the political left. I am no neocon, and I expect the world order to conduct business these days in peace. However, 2 months into this war, if nobody else is capable or willing, then the Ukrainians need to wipe out the Russians entirely. This crap with Russia being a threat backed up by China has to end in the 21st century. We spend $85B a year on the intelligence community... when we needed them most they just yelled at us, exclaiming that a very very bad man in Russia was starting a war... and then promptly did nothing. I’m right with Graham on this. What did we waste $1 Trillion on the pentagon over the last decade? I’m not suggesting American soldiers be deployed. The Ukrainians have proven exceptionally capable. Maybe even more efficient than Americans at this point given their abilities with the limited resources at their disposal up to this point. The American economy does not need this war now. It’s adding fuel to the domestic fire. Drop thermite plasma on the Russian Military for all I care. Send a space net and take out all of the Russian satellites. All 400 of them. Destroy their ability to communicate at all. Take them back to 1917. The Russians don’t have enough resistance in their population to stop him, fine. When this is over, I suspect Russia will look like Japan after WWII. One thing is certain: the Neocons got their wish. Now it’s time to fold them like Iraq in Desert Storm. But their chicken shits. Nobody wants to see Putin use nuclear weapons. I might remind everyone that it is the USA who had them first. The Russians were second. Stalin even claimed nuclear war with the west was inevitable. So we had better find a way to deal with that threat or it will make everyone a pussy from here on out. It’s not about punishment. Americans need our intelligence agencies out of this war. So they need to end it and end it now. Putin won’t negotiate in good faith or the neocons haven’t tried. Either way, whatever we have now isn’t working to stop anything. Putin will con-scribe his high schoolers and wipe out a generation. They got their wish, they’re at the big game. Putin wanted a war. Let’s give the Ukrainians what Putin asked for. Then we can punish the Russians. Diplomacy only works if the hard power to enforce it actually has a backbone. Time to go to the chiropractor.