2022-02-27
At the back of their minds both Biden and Putin have been agonizing over just how Thwap is going to react to this world crisis. Well White House or Kremlin bureaucrat being paid to monitor my blog in order to instantly alert your boss that Thwap has deigned to speak; TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY!!!!
Ahem! I think this is mostly Biden's fault but I am angry that Putin has attacked the Ukraine itself. I had no problem with Putin recognizing the Donbas provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.
There is nothing to choose between the competing mafia dons in Washington or Moscow. FWIW I think Putin is far more intelligent than Biden. But that doesn't take a lot of doing. Biden has always been an idiot and now his aged brain is incapable of sustained focus and clarity. I have always said (in the face of the moronic, fanatical Putin hatred embraced by brainwashed liberals) that comparing the foreign policy behaviour of Russia and the USA honestly, one finds that Russia has been far more patient and circumspect and that the USA has been belligerent and provocative. And that the reasons for this are not Putin's love of peace and respect for the rule of law, but are, rather, due to Russia's relative poverty and weakness. Russia's GDP is smaller than Canada's. It's population is over 100 million people larger than Canada's. Which makes Russians much poorer than Canadians. Wars are expensive. Occupations are even more expensive. Putin (while being as debased and insane as any other garden-variety national politician) is not a delusional idiot. He can't bully the world the way the USA can, starting wars of choice and meddling in any country on the planet he has designs on. Because he can't afford to.
Ian Welsh Says Putin Will Win
Before I get going too far I want to take the opportunity to mention that initially I thought that Putin had miscalculated by attacking the Ukraine itself rather than merely recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk and occupying them with Russian troops. Perhaps his anger and resentment over years of the USA's bullying and boorishness had actually pushed him over the edge. Perhaps he now felt compelled to strut and preen and just show everybody that Russia was actually powerful (when it isn't really). Until I read Ian Welsh on the subject. (I've been reading and admiring his work for years. Only recently I posted about how much I agreed with him on a the "Freedom Convoy.") Essentially Welsh is arguing that Biden's sanctions aren't going to hit Putin that hard. Sanction against Russian energy for instance, would raise energy costs world-wide, contributing to the inflationary pressures that are destroying Biden's presidency.
Welsh also quotes a statement from China's foreign ministry blaming the USA for pushing Russia to the wall and excoriating America for its brazen hypocrisy. China knows that it too is being targeted by the USA for having become too powerful for the USA to control. Russia and China together dominate most of Asia and all of it's people and resources. They need each other to resist domination by the US-led cartel.
Putin isn't going to try to conquer the Ukraine and make it a part of Russia. (As far too many people are insisting without any evidence.) He has offered the current government a cease-fire if they promise to never join NATO. This offer has been refused.
2022-02-28
Apparently Zelensky has accepted sending a delegation to negotiate with Russia without preconditions. At least that's what I'd read a few hours ago. Since I wrote that line I had a bath, ate dinner, did some sit-ups, some dishes, put my clean laundry away, ... you know, stuff. And now, a National Post headline on my browser homepage says the Ukraine has walked away from the talks. But that's the National Pest. I haven't seen this confirmed anywhere else.
"Whataboutism" Isn't a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card For Hypocrisy.
In the few posts I've made about this crisis before the Russian invasion, I always asked why the fuck anybody believes that Joe Biden cares about the people of the Ukraine given his absolute nonchalance about the millions of people suffering and dying under the hammer-blows of US imperialism. Generally, the liberals who I'm trying to communicate with accuse me of "Whataboutism." I don't remember when I first heard this term. It might have been Hillary-bots deflecting criticism of their goddess. Or it might have been liberal imperialists shrieking about Assad and Putin and denying the relevance of US and Israeli behaviour to the debate. It is now used to bludgeon any efforts to
Apparently the term itself was first used in 1974 in a letter-to-the-editor by an Irish history teacher, Sean O'Conaill. He said that the "Whatabouts" were the people defending the IRA by pointing to the crimes of the English. I assume O'Conaill was a Catholic because a Protestant criticizing the IRA and saying that the crimes of the English are irrelevant sounds to shameless to bother thinking about. So, I'm assuming that O'Conaill was a Catholic and that he did oppose the English but he was also an opponent of violence in general. The violence had to stop from both sides. (Again, I'm assuming this about O'Conaill. I've tried to look him up but haven't found anything.) The important thing is that if that was the case, then O'Conaill had some moral and intellectual integrity and consistency.
This cannot be said for those liberal fools, those brainwashed idiots, screaming blue murder about Putin and marching lockstep to the ever-shifting melody of the USA's foreign policy establishment. I'm not justifying Putin's actions when I ask the simple question about WHY we're supposed to believe a mass-murderer like Biden cares about Ukranians. Once we understand that Biden, who has played key roles destroying Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Honduras, etc., doesn't give a shit about the people of the Ukraine but is, rather, cynically using their sufferings to sell his own cynical, insane policies towards Russia, then we start to think more clearly about the topic.
IF O'Conaill was saying that his own people were guilty and that both sides had an equal moral obligation to stop the violence that is an entirely different thing from wishing to ignore the guilt on your own side and justifying your side's campaign against its enemy.
Censorship and Propaganda
So, on another browser homepage I was offered the headline "How to avoid sharing bad information about Russia's inavsion of Ukraine" from the MIT Technology Review. Expecting laffs, I decided to read it. It was about what I'd expected. I stopped reading at this section:
One of the best things you can do in a situation like this, for your own sanity and for the people who listen to you on the Internet, is to find your anchor to reality. Who are the reliable sources who post English-speaking coverage? Who can you follow and amplify to spread good information?
Journalists like Jane Lytvynenko, who is herself Ukrainian and has a background in misinformation reporting, are identifying and sharing resources for those who want to donate to support Ukrainian charities and media outlets, and providing vital context on the invasion. Others have crowdsourced a list of propaganda-laden news outlets and social media accounts to avoid. Bellingcat has a running public spreadsheet of debunked claims. The news outlet Kyiv Independent is tweeting constant updates.
"Belling Cat" is a fraud. He's a paid propagandist for US and UK "intelligence." That a hack like him is being offered to us as someone to help learn truth from fiction on the Ukraine crisis is evidence of the weakness and deceitful nature of the Washington consensus.
We're treated to daily doses about how Ukranian President Zelensky provided the voice of the Ukranian translation of Paddington Bear, and how brave the Ukranians are, and how democratic they all are. And pro-Russian sources are instantly discredited by virtue of being pro-Russian. Because, you know, the truth is entirely on one side. So, to protect us from lies, viewpoints from the Russian side are being systematically throttled and even shut-down. Obviously the mass censorship of alternative voices will continue because the US oligarchy has little confidence in its propaganda withstanding the truth.
Danger of Nuclear War
I was debating all of this with some liberals at a liberal blog and they all found it self-evidently hilarious that I (and other people on twitter apparently) were worried about nuclear war. At that point in the discussion I'd already gotten tired of beating my head against a brick wall and I didn't bother asking for clarification as to why fearing a nuclear holocaust is funny.
Glenn Greenwald discusses this phenomenon here:
In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.
Less than a week into this war, that can no longer be said. One of the media's most beloved members of Congress, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), on Friday explicitly and emphatically urged that the U.S. military be deployed to Ukraine to establish a “no-fly zone” — i.e., American soldiers would order Russia not to enter Ukrainian airspace and would directly attack any Russian jets or other military units which disobeyed. That would, by definition and design, immediately ensure that the two countries with by far the planet's largest nuclear stockpiles would be fighting one another, all over Ukraine.
Here's Caitlin Johnstone on the same thing:
All of this has made nuclear war in the near term a whole lot more likely than it was just a few days ago… which is a really strange thing to type.
As I’m always saying, the primary risk of nuclear war is not that anyone will choose to start one, it’s that one could be triggered by any combination of miscommunication, miscalculation, misunderstanding or technical malfunction amid the chaos and confusion of escalating cold war tensions. This nearly happened, repeatedly, in the last cold war. The more tense things get, the greater the likelihood of an unthinkable chain of events from which there is no coming back.
Cold war brinkmanship has far too many small, unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that they can ramp up aggressions without triggering a nuclear exchange. Anyone who feels safe with these games of nuclear chicken simply does not understand them.
Chris Hedges introduces his latest article for Scheer Post, titled “Chronicle of a War Foretold“, with the following:
“After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.”
Imperial narrative managers have been falling all over themselves working to dismiss and discredit the abundantly evidenced idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was due largely to Moscow’s fear of NATO expansion and the refusal of Washington and Kyiv to solidify a policy that Ukraine would not be added to the alliance.
...
It makes sense that they would have to do this. After all, if westerners were to get it into their heads that this whole terrible war could have been avoided by simply solidifying a policy of neutrality for Ukraine and issuing a guarantee that it would never be added to NATO, they would begin asking why this did not happen. NATO powers had no interest in adding Ukraine to the alliance anyway, so it doesn’t really make sense to refuse to make such low-cost concessions if the only alternative is mass military slaughter. I mean, unless your goal was to provoke mass military slaughter to advance your own geostrategic objectives.
So they work hard to present the narrative that the invasion has nothing to do with NATO at all, and occurred solely because Putin is an evil madman who hates freedom and wants to destroy democracy.
Conclusion
It was Vladimir Putin who chose to launch this invasion and to inflict the inevitable traumas and deaths on innocent people. That guilt will never wash away. BUT ... (and you're free to disagree with me on this) ... I think his crime is less than the crimes of bush II who started a war of choice against a country (Iraq) that was not and which would never be a threat to the United States. More, bush II "justified" his war with a pack of lies about "weapons of mass destruction" that never existed. Putin's Russia was being surrounded by an enemy alliance (NATO) that has a demonstrated track record of chipping away at its opponents until they are weak enough to attack. This desire to subjugate Russia was Biden's (and his predecessors') conscious decision. It is a cynical, evil, reckless, and insane, useless policy.
It is clear that the Biden administration's policy is going to be to continue to arm and train Ukranian insurgents to get Russia bogged-down in a debilitating permanent campaign. Just like the USA did to the USSR in Afghanistan. And, just like Afghanistan, constant fighting will make the Ukraine a hell-hole for years, perhaps decades to come.
What would happen in a world without official US enemies Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea, China? What would a world completely subjugated by the United States be like? For one thing, the USA needs enemies to distract its people from their own subjugation. So they'd invent something. Maybe "internal enemies." Of which there'd be plenty because the USA's ruling elite are amoral, selfish, anti-human, anti-democratic psychopaths who live to steal and poison and torture and exploit and kill.
I started this post a long time ago. But I knew that I had a lot to say and that none of it would matter. The powerful actors at the centre of all of this don't even know that I exist and most of them are too deluded or evil to listen to me anyway. And I know that my liberal acquaintances (who still believe in the "Russiagate" conspiracy) are immune to rational argument when it comes to narratives like this. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to make the time to pushback against this insanity in whatever little way that I can. Here's another article that I agree with.
Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine is undoubtedly illegal and immoral. From the point of view of Russian interests, it is also likely to prove a costly mistake. The primary question now, however, is what to do about this, and the answers presented thus far by those outraged by the invasion are dangerously counterproductive.
“Putin must be punished,” the Americans and Europeans insist. But the forms of punishment now being implemented – severe economic sanctions and military aid to Ukraine – are designed to prolong the military struggle and to cripple the Russian economy, apparently on the theory that Russia’s discontented masses and oligarchs will then replace Putin with a leader more to the West’s liking. Pardon me, but this makes little sense. Prolonging the conflict will kill more Ukrainians and Russians, inspire their compatriots and loved ones to seek revenge. It may also bring the world close to nuclear war.
Read the whole thing. Enlighten yourselves.
1 comment:
Dear anonymous commenter,
Your stupid, puerile comment is unworthy of posting. Come back after you've learned how to construct an actual argument.
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