What lies are you going to believe? The Russo-Japanese War
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The American left detests the lies told by the Russians. The American right detests the lies told by the American establishment and the Covid cult.
The small and tenuous middle knows that they are all lying. Except for the indefatigable Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Alex Berenson, there is not time or energy enough to address, or even to acknowledge the sea of lies that surrounds us. It takes discretion to choose which lies are worth fighting.
For the moment, Covid remains at the center of the system of lies supported by the New World Order and the World Economic Forum. The Great Reset required not only a laboratory developed disease, but a system of propagating fear and therefore obedience to the measures being put forth to deal with the disease.
The system was pretty well described beforehand in the October, 2019 Event 201, the SPARS document and the movie Plandemic
Governments needed to stampede people into doing things that were both counterintuitive and not in their own interests. These included lockdowns, masks, social distancing, vaccinations and the like. Event 201 above is a good example of the psychological problem as they saw it and the solutions they put together.
They described the process as "nudging" people to fall in line and do what they were told. It worked well. Most people did what they were asked, including accepting the vaccinations. Nobody was exempted. Russia and China subjected their people to coerced vaccination the same way Western countries did. According to Our World in Data
64.3% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
11.17 billion doses have been administered globally, and 16.07 million are now administered each day.
However, only 14.4% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.
A look at the map shows that in the world's most developed countries – North America, Western Europe, Russia and Northeast Asia – just about everybody has got the jab.
Reports pour in every day about the adverse health effects suffered by the recipients of the injections. Although the media remains adamant about not reporting it, alternative sources such as The Daily Expose, Global Research, The Epoch Times, Vernon Coleman and Joseph Mercola are relentless. Substack bloggers Jessica Rose, Matthew Crawford, Alex Berenson and Steve Kirsch likewise hit the theme every day.
At this point I think it doesn't much matter. People who have stubbornly resisted the jab will continue to do so. Since there is no way to undo it, those who got it simply have to hope for the best. To whatever extent it turns out that our governments, health officials, universities and others have been lying to us, we will have to live with the consequences. It is too late to do anything now but hope.
As far as my family goes, by the time this war is over, we expect Covid will be forgotten. The country is only about 35% vaccinated and the number is barely edging up. A significant majority of our friends do not want anything to do with the jabs.
Which brings us around to the Russians. The war in Ukraine has only been going for a month. There might be some hope of ending it without a nuclear holocaust.
Russia has been practicing the art of lying longer and more vigorously than even our own governments and health officials. Putin is a master. Yet many people among the right, frightened and disgusted by the lies they hear from American progressives and the establishment that they control, mistakenly took Putin at his word.
Putin has claimed to represent traditional values. He embraces the Christian church. He supports traditional sex roles. He governs a traditionally white country and has not welcomed immigration. He has opposed the predominantly Jewish oligarchs who arose under Yeltsin after the fall of the Soviet Union.
For these reasons many people who have been most active in exposing the deceits involved in the Covid phenomenon have embraced Russia. Among them are the editorial staffs of The Daily Exposé, Global Research, and Celia Farber. She published an article today including a great number of Russian propaganda pieces, including one by a Patrick Lancaster, whom I briefly mentioned in my post of March 1 as a guy who offered the other side of the picture with regard to shelling in the Donbass.
I will say the same for most of the writers at the Unz Review. I am grateful to Unz for posting my piece on Russian and Ukrainian language use here in Ukraine. That piece is interesting because
(1) It received so few comments – nobody seemed interested, and
(2) Among the comments it received are typical posts from Russian trolls.
I may be gaining a little clout on the Internet. My post yesterday on ways to end the war likewise attracted a Russian troll. My Internet buddy Streamfortyseven has more experience with them than I do. His comments on the post go right to the issue. It is worth showing a Russian troll's post and Streamfortyseven's take.
Tony Gaggiotti
I don't know where you are getting your information, but it's obviously
not from anyone on the ground in such "destroyed" cities as Kharkiv.
At least one journalist has been reporting from there on a near-daily
basis and reports that Russian attacks have been against military targets.
In fact, because the Russians established "humanitarian corridors"
prior to the advance there were few civilians left. Much the same in
Mariupol where mostly Azov and Right Sektor fighters remain, using
human shields to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible.
In fairness: It is not easy to obtain anything but pro-Western
propaganda regarding Ukraine. In fact I can't remember a time when
more blatant lies were aired on mainstream media. One would never
know, without some exertion, that Zalenskyy had banned all
opposition parties just this week.
My response:
Streamfortyseven had a good post yesterday on the many sources of Russian propaganda. Rather than ask for sources, with which they will inundate you, just ignore these trolls. Common sense tells you that there can be no military targets left in Mariupol. The humanitarian crisis there is huge. The Azov battalion, a perpetual Russian bogeyman, is neither that big nor that strong. The Right Sektor was a political entity, now dissolved. You could spend endless time fighting this BS. Recognize it for what it is, and ignore it.
Here is the relevant paragraph in the Streamfortyseven post to which I was referring:
… As for Dugin, he's had Putin in his pocket for a long time - he's behind Strategic Culture, Fort Russ, Greanville Times, Near Eastern Outlook, Asian Times, and suchlike - and I'd include Andrei Martyanov, The Saker, anti-empire.com, and Moon of Alabama in that particular archipelago - the people advocating for a Greater Eurasia, Russia's answer to the Silk Road thing. Lots of US "conservatives" have been suckered in, too. The enemy of your enemy isn't necessarily your friend. Ron Unz seems to post a lot of their stuff and has for years. I posted on Dugin here:
There are some points in common to the things written by Russian trolls. They write with a snide superiority, as if what they were writing were so self-evident it needs to be pointed out only to a rube such as me. They are insulting. They never admit that they are wrong. They seem to all read from the same script. There are certain stock phrases such as Azov battalion, Right Sector, Ukrnazi, Fascist and so on used throughout what they write.
Responding to their posts is an absolute waste of time. They will never give up and never admit that they are wrong. Though you could not prove that they are in the pay of the Russians, it seems like a pretty good bet.
Russian propaganda often comes from sources that appear to be associated with the United States military. Veterans Today is one such. Patrick Lancaster claims to be a veteran.
Earlier today I posted a piece by Peggy Noonan on the Russo-Japanese war. Such is my contempt for the New York Times that I did not do the obvious thing, check to see if I could read it for free online, but rather posted the recognized text of a screenshot of the article. I thought better of it and deleted the post. If you follow the link above, you will get a more readable copy. Turns out to be the WSJ anyhow.
Looking back in time, the Russians have a history of starting wars with smaller countries and getting their butts kicked. After Japan, it happened with the winter war in Finland in 1939 and the war in Afghanistan. What Ukraine is doing is not without precedent.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the explosions are increasingly infrequent. The strong man has committed to taking the restless children out for a long walk today, and the good-looking woman is looking forward to getting back to teaching music. We need something to structure our days again.
3:00 PM. The explosions resumed and have been going all day. Same sector, Irpin. To my untrained ear it sounds more like artillery than missiles. The consistency is what one would expect of an artillery assault. I hope I'm right in guessing that it is a sustained Ukrainian counterattack on the dug-in Russian positions.
A lot of the Putin-supporting "conservatives" have been taken in by Alexander Dugin's Fourth Political Theory - "Foundations of Geopolitics is by far Dugin’s most important work. Dugin himself describes it as an “indispensable guide for all those who make decisions in the most important spheres of Russian political life – for politicians, entrepreneurs, economists, bankers, diplomats, analysts, political scientists, and so on.” In FoG, Dugin outlines his ‘Neo-Eurasianist’ geopolitical strategy, which includes a multitude of instructions on how to subvert, manipulate, and conquer various countries in order to create a Eurasianist empire.
As Dugin said, the book is highly influential among Russian elites, including the military, who used it as a textbook in their Academy of the General Staff. It was co-drafted by Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, head of the International Department of the Russian Ministry of Defence. After writing FoG, Dugin was hired as a guest lecturer by the military, to explain his geopolitical Neo-Eurasianist theory to Russian officers and the likes. Seleznyov, a former Russian State Duma speaker and a buddy of Dugin, urged that FoG should be incorporated into the Russian school curriculum.
The most important thing about FoG is that it is, essentially, straight-to-the-point and completely “mask-off,” which you’ll see when we get into the contents of the book in the following sections.
Fourth Political Theory, on the other hand, couldn’t be more different. You may have seen 4PT being praised by various nationalists in the West, as it has been heavily marketed to Westerners by Arktos Media (which publishes and translates Dugin’s work for Western consumption) and other “New Right” or “Alt-Right” influencers. 4PT is not designed for Russian consumption, but to be read by hapless Western nationalists. Dugin’s aim with 4PT is to ideologically subvert nationalists in the West, making them more malleable and likely to assist (passively or actively) him in achieving the political goals he laid out in Foundations of Geopolitics. 4PT is overflowing with psychobabble, verbose gobbledygook, and complete bastardizations of various historic right-wing thinkers — particularly notable is the manner in which Dugin mutated and completely inverted the Traditionalist School of thought. 4PT will be quoted throughout this piece, but for an idea of the sort of nonsense included in the book, chapter 13, “Gender in the Fourth Political Theory,” is devoted to arguing in favor of a-sexual transgenderism. Behind the shoddy and transparent mask of phony “Traditionalism,” nothing separates Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory from the extant ideology of the New World Order* that he claims to oppose.
* Often labeled as “Neo-Liberalism,” though I personally believe that this label is inaccurate and insufficient.
In summary:
FoG is Dugin’s political strategy document, in which he outlines highly detailed plans on how to create a Eurasian empire by subverting foreign nations, it was written for Eurasianists, to benefit Eurasianists. 4PT is an implementation of FoG’s political strategy, in that 4PT is a subversive book written for Westerners and disseminated in the West, to channel Western nationalism towards Eurasianist ends." https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/heres-a-little-article-by-aleksandr
Unz has fallen for this bit of desinformatsiya hook, line, and sinker: "All the political systems of the modern age have been the products of three distinct ideologies: the first, and oldest, is liberal democracy; the second is Marxism; and the third is fascism. The latter two have long since failed and passed out of the pages of history, and the first no longer operates as an ideology, but rather as something taken for granted. The world today finds itself on the brink of a post-political reality – one in which the values of liberalism are so deeply embedded that the average person is not aware that there is an ideology at work around him. As a result, liberalism is threatening to monopolise political discourse and drown the world in a universal sameness, destroying everything that makes the various cultures and peoples unique. According to Alexander Dugin, what is needed to break through this morass is a fourth ideology – one that will sift through the debris of the first three to look for elements that might be useful, but that remains innovative and unique in itself. Dugin does not offer a point-by-point program for this new theory, but rather outlines the parameters within which it might develop and the issues which it must address. Dugin foresees that the Fourth Political Theory will use the tools and concepts of modernity against itself, to bring about a return of cultural diversity against commercialisation, as well as the traditional worldview of all the peoples of the world – albeit within an entirely new context. Written by a scholar who is actively influencing the direction of Russian geopolitical strategy today, The Fourth Political Theory is an introduction to an idea that may well shape the course of the world’s political future.
Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) is one of the best-known writers and political commentators in post-Soviet Russia. In addition to the many books he has authored on political, philosophical and spiritual topics, he currently serves on the staff of Moscow State University, and is the intellectual leader of the Eurasia Movement. For more than a decade, he has also been an advisor to Vladimir Putin and others in the Kremlin on geopolitical matters, being a vocal advocate of a return of Russian power to the global stage, to act as a counterweight to American domination." https://www.unz.com/bookstore/alexander_dugin__the-fourth-political-theory/
No real critique of this has appeared in those pages, presumably because few American "conservatives" can read any language other than English - not even French or German. If they'd read Foundations of Geopolitics - they might have a slightly different take on things, especially since FoG states, in pertinent part, that "Next comes the Ukrainian question. The sovereignty of Ukraine is such a negative
phenomenon for Russian geopolitics that, in principle, it can easily provoke an armed
conflict. Without the Black Sea coast from Izmail to Kerch, Russia gets such an
extended coastal strip, really controlled by someone unknown, that its very existence
as a normal and independent state is called into question. The Black Sea does not
replace access to the "warm seas" and its geopolitical significance drops sharply due
to the stable Atlanticist control over the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, but at least it
makes it possible to secure the central regions from the potential expansion of Turkish
influence, being extremely convenient, reliable and an inexpensive border.
Ukraine, as an independent state with some kind of territorial ambitions, poses a huge
danger to the whole of Eurasia, and without a solution to the Ukrainian problem, it is
pointless to talk about continental geopolitics at all. This does not mean that the cultural,
linguistic or economic autonomy of Ukraine should be limited, and that it should become
a purely administrative sector of the Russian centralized state (as, to some extent, was the
case in the tsarist empire or under the USSR). But strategically, Ukraine should be strictly a
projection of Moscow in the south and west (although more details about possible models
of restructuring will be discussed in the chapter on the West).
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. Taking *that* into consideration, it should be more widely known as having been a goal for the last quarter century of neo-Bolshevists such as Dugin and Putin. This, of course, puts Putin's theft of Crimea in the floodlights, and the "Crimean referendum" in question. This should make it apparent that he intends to take Ukraine and the other Black Sea nations one chunk at a time...