The Apotheosis of War – Vasily Vereshchagin, 1871.
Note to Reader. A longer essay, in ten sections, some short. Readers are free to reproduce, in whole or in part. Not all later sections need be read in sequence.
Sections: Strategy Redux / Eyes On The Prize / Western Innocence & WW III / God Favours Russia / The China Mirage / The 7 Deadly Sins / Nord Stream – Heating Up & Cooling Down / Economics 303 – Washington’s Principle Exports / Memories Are Made Of This / End Notes I, II, II, IV.
>>> Strategy Redux <<
The US-NATO-UK Ukrainian Proxy War on Russia is an existential war of survival, for Russia. The West as well. It is now a Zero Sum Game Conflict. American political and economic goals are to destroy the Russian state, apply regime change strategies and steal Russia’s vast natural resources. This campaign comes as the culmination of several hundred years of Western global dominance, not by the superiority of Western ideas and values, of which we hear much, but rather by The West’s superiority in applying organized violence, mass murder and resource theft, notably against technologically inferior states. It thus is a test of The West’s dominant Geo-Political and Geo-Economic Success Paradigm. Russia is not a technologically inferior state. The Ukrainian people are entirely expendable cannon fodder for this campaign and they are the modern equivalent of a Pyramid of Skulls.
For Russia, this Special Military Operation (SMO) is a veil that appears for the absorption of the Eastern Ukrainian States, thought long overdue yet in fact long in the planning and preparation. Their SMO is the principle vector to draw a fully committed West into a war with Russia on Russia’s terms, not theirs, apply devastating resource counter-sanctions on a thoroughly corrupt and incompetent European Union (EU), weaken those states and run them, the US and the UK out of weapons and prosperity. A decade long campaign or longer. One that positions Russia as having responded to Western Aggression. Thus, to conclude that this SMO is entirely for the protection of the Eastern Ukrainian States is to conclude wrongly.
This is not a war between Russia (with China) with The Ukraine and for The Ukraine. Russia and China, like some other states, have challenged the Western Imperial Global System for Enrichment – theirs. Others have tried. China and Russia have the economic and military power to replace that World Community, as repetitively pitched, that 12.5% being The West, with their system of interests and preferences. One could pitch this war as a war of two ideological power blocks, one with the majority of the world’s population, land, industrial power, resources and the military power for their security and the other, an Old Imperium that is running out of everything except propaganda and feckless leaders. The dismantling of Pax Americana.
Of this painting: Realism taken to near photographic quality by the nineteenth century anti-war painter Vasily Vereshchagin. Here, a Middle Eastern setting of a past battle, cited as that of the warlord Tamelane’s Turco-Mongol Army and their entire destruction of the Persian city of Isfahan, 1387, a city of some 70,000 people, where after his soldiers stacked the severed heads of the population they murdered in pyramid formations, to have the flesh picked over by crows. Tamerlane directed the entire slaughter of that city as he did many others. Factually and more accurately, as the leader, he created the circumstances for his soldiers to act accordingly. He appealed to an accepted belief that lends justification to extreme violence, an ancestral license to kill. Such primal drives are always there, latent, for most and will dominate if given approval from a revered or feared figure of authority. This also lies within the brains of chimpanzees. Well understood in the Modern Era. For both humans and chimpanzees. Of this Modern Era, so-called, the poor under-educated working class boys are still transported to distant lands, sold on mythic adventure narratives and yet who know nothing more than Queen and Country or my country right or wrong. There are those who lie. There are those who die. What the US-NATO-UK Proxy War Elite Planners have done to the Armed Forces of The Ukraine [AFU] and foreign personnel as they commit themselves to industrial scale slaughter, courtesy of The Russian War Machine. The prerequisite for an orderly Modern Era is to suppress such primal drives in favour of reinforcing civilized behaviours. It is the Democratic West, so-called, in its foreign adventurism, that does the reverse. Thus do some so view the Executive arm of Western Governments as criminal operations. In the limit, Democracies sell out their principles to the interests of private power. Modern life may advance in a technical sense. Human nature remains invariant, highly self-serving and significantly is it genetically determined. Thus . . .
One might add that the commission of mass murder by highly trained individuals operating in groups can be as successful an integrative, social binding experience – for them – as singing hymns in church – for others. For some, both. Sermons on Sunday. Massacres on Monday. A rather obvious anthropological and historical reality and one that continues to allude that class of the over-educated, or most of them. They are the submissive void, contextualized further below.
“We invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe . . . so that we could blame President Putin. The West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. If there had been no decision to move NATO eastward to include Ukraine . . . there would be no war in Ukraine” – Dr. John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago.
>>> Eyes On The Prize <<<
From the New York based political satire magazine Puck, 1902. Many illustrations dealt with US and UK intrusions into and exploitation of The Global South. Pitching the Civilization Narrative that non-Western, non-Christian, coloured people of less developed nations of the world as barbarians and thus less human. That those regions were rich in resources is not coincidental to Western interests. The prime driver beneath the veneer of Victorian moralizing.
“The Russian Federation, with a population of 2% of the world, controls 15% of the world’s territory and up to 30% of the planet’s main resources. Such a situation cannot continue indefinitely” – Dr. Condoleezza Rice, 66th US Secretary of State.
Considered by some to be an unindicted war criminal and here, helpfully explaining how her government functions. US planning was always to stop the European Union buying Russian gas. Dr. Rice May, 2014 – “You want to change the structure of energy dependence. You want to depend more on the North America energy platform . . . to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia”. Indeed is the present written in the past.
The subjugation by The West of industrially weaker states in pursuit of Geo-Economic Interests is, in the modern era, wrapped in the dress uniform of spreading democracy, promoting personal rights and that Holy Grail of Western Values, fighting for freedom. Historically pitched as The White Man’s Burden. The narratives are highly contrived, may use superficially convincing alliterative doubles such as the promotion of peace and prosperity or democracy and development and where target states see through this facade for colonial exploitation redux, The West resorts to intimidation of leaders, financial strangulation, trade blockades, small scale violence, assassinations and war. There is no example that can be evinced as convincing evidence that Western Thought Leaders, by their self-definitions, have ever bombed a country into a democracy. That Western States define their purpose as one of spreading peace, prosperity and personal rights and freedoms throughout the world is a lie, a permanent lie and it is the maintenance of The Permanent Lie that defines those states as Fascist States.
Fascist States operate on a bedrock of permanent lies, often evinced as the values that tell us who we are. Few question why these supposedly self-evident truths must be repeated. As for these values that tell us who we are, they are correct.
The vast wealth and benefits that several hundred years of Elite Imperial Western Geo-Political and Geo-Economic Interests that derived from the application of highly organized state violence on industrially underdeveloped societies has been squandered. Western societies face escalating difficulties of wealth inequities, corrupt political leaderships, central banks that serve the privileged few, loss of personal freedoms and loss of livable incomes, ecosystem destruction and a loss of security. Interestingly, Security is that Holy Grail of modern life that the Leadership Class most often promote, notably when vilifying foreign leaders. The West, more precisely Washington and always with its eyes on the prize, along with its subservient allies who ride kneeling on Washington’s foreign policy coat tails, has now declared war on China and Russia and of the latter a kinetic war utilizing a fascist proxy presently sacrificed to a small theatre operation on Russia’s western border.
Contrasting Dr. Condoleezza Rice’s remarks directed at a foreign country, that foreign country’s leader President Vlad Putin declared – “It is in our historical tradition, in the fate of our people, to stop those who are striving for world domination, who threaten to dismember and enslave our Motherland, our Fatherland. We will do it now and so it will be”.
On matters of sanction success, slightly over one hundred Western companies left Russia. Well over one thousand have remained and say nothing of it. Fertilizer is imported by The West with no restrictions on Russian ships. Sanctions are applied on Russian food and fertilizer to third world countries. Of cargo blocked in European ports, it is directed to their own needs (as reported) and thus the evidentiary Class A Exhibit that the European Union is fascist.
There were eyes on that other prize – The Ukraine. The rewards were personal.
In January 2018 at the Council on Foreign Relations New York, the US peak influence think tank, Joe Biden as former Vice President described US foreign policy in action. He informed in a media briefing how he forced the removal of the Kyiv State Prosecutor who was investigating his son’s financial arrangements in The Ukraine. Withholding military aid was the pressure tactic.
In September 2019, House Democrats launched a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump over whistleblower accusations that he threatened to withhold aid to The Ukraine as a pressure tactic to force the Ukrainian government to investigate whether Joe Biden’s son Hunter benefited financially from the firing of the Kyiv prosecutor.
Vice President Biden and prominent Obama administration names were on record that the removal of the Kyiv prosecutor was official US policy.
Vice President Joe Biden, 23rd January, 2018: “And that is I’m desperately concerned about the backsliding on the part of Kyiv in terms of corruption. They made – I mean, I’ll give you one concrete example. I was – not I, but it just happened to be that was the assignment I got. I got all the good ones. And so I got Ukraine. And I remember going over, convincing our team, our leaders to – convincing that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kyiv. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.
So they said they had – they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to – or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said – I said. Call him. (Laughter).
I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter). He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time. Well, there’s still – so they made some genuine substantial changes institutionally and with people. But one of the three institutions, there’s now some backsliding”.
Backsliding here means appointments of other than Washington stooges within the administrations of Washington’s good allies.
There was a time when The West was run by accomplished men who could accomplish things. One such accomplished man was the imperial murderer and Nobel Prize laureate Winston Churchill who continued to assert British interests even as Britain was in decline. President Harry Truman was a man of accomplishments who authorized two nuclear strikes on the population centres of a defeated, non-nuclear state, the outcome from which placed the United States at the head of the post-WWII Geo-political Dining Table. Now The West is mostly run by ignorant opportunists and sycophants who accomplish outcomes diametrical to their intents.
Russia is not losing in The Ukraine. They now appear to be moving to a war footing, the SMO is finished and the Russian Armed Forces are positioning for a larger war with US-NATO-UK proxy forces on Ukrainian territory now that the Eastern Provinces are as Russia. The Pentagon Generals understand what this means. Their political leadership may believe their own false rhetoric and would have us believe it too – that Russia has lost and repeatedly lost from the start of the SMO. For NATO to run a major war against Russia requires mass mobilization of industry as Europe is being de-industrialized. Russia’s mobilization of more forces has timing consistent with military training and preparation for launching attacks as the winter ground freezes over.
The ancient Chinese military strategist SunZi (SunTzu) pointed out variously that every battle won is won before it is fought, that the leadership make many calculations before acting, to act deceptively and that to be decisive is to strike without warning. “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt”. What the Western Mainstream Media are left with is to cite decisive Russian victories as signs of weakness and every tactical maneuver of the AFU a strategic success and in doing so are we treated as fools.
>>> Western Innocence & WW III <<<
German film director Leni Riefenstahl said the “patriotic messages” of her propaganda films were dependent not on “orders from above”, that being the German Nazi Government, nor Adolph Hitler whom she knew, but on the “submissive void” of the German public, notably the liberal educated class. The liberal borgeosie as she expressed it. This is only half true. One always knows what those above want and expect. Whether it was the America First publishers, Randolph Hearst, Joe Pulitzer or Henry Luce and now the non-media media corporate executives. It never needs stating. American and British propaganda films, including recent films, are too numerous to list. One discussed in a prior essay is the Vietnam War era film The Deer Hunter.
From Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature address on the US-NATO-UK war on Iraq . . .
“How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that George W. Bush and Tony Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock, Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution . . . At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began”.
“We don’t do body counts” – US four star General Tommy Franks clarifying military policy. Body counts require teams to count the dead. Difficult if entire apartment blocks have been collapsed via carpet bombing operations.
Notably, international lawyers within the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office could not furnish Prime Minister Blair with any legal justification under international law for invading Iraq, as reported. The Prime Minister did obtain an opinion from one international law specialist and we understand that this remains classified. Nowhere in Australian Mainstream Media, always notable for that friendly face of fascism raised to a high art form, has the question of the Australian political executive as unindicted war criminals received substantive attention or any beyond unqualified assertions that foreign wars were legally authorized as an act of the Federal Parliament. Submissive voids do not just appear. They need to be worked up. Australian Governments have committed forces to numerous foreign wars waged by larger ally states against smaller other states that have presented no threat to the Australian state. No one discusses why Australian Forces joined American Forces in Vietnam or Afghanistan and what was achieved. Vietnam, incidentally, is still not a democracy but it is a Washington ally.
Certain principles that flowed from the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials may have more than just a passing relevance . . .
Principle VI.
The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
(a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
The campaign to vilify the Russian Leader started after his 2007 Munich address, wherein The Washington-London Masters of The Known Universe came to know that it just got smaller, courtesy of Russia declaring its intention of conforming to Western diktats.
The cover of this Rand Corporation paper, dated 2019 and entitled Extending Russia – Competing From Advantageous Ground, is one of several public domain documents that evidence plans going far back to destroy the Russian State short of direct war with The West. Western Mainstream Media can continue to claim that Russia’s SMO was entirely unprovoked because the Curators of that domain know that even if there is clear evidence of their intentions, few will look for it and of those who find this, some will still deny the implications of what they are actually looking at. The Curators of The Public Mind understand this. Some marketing professionals label this The Grand Hypnosis. For others, the submissive void.
The myth of Western Innocence is virtually unassailable. In The West. Not in Asia nor The Third World so-called, The Global South, Africa, India, South America, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Haiti too. Nor in The West for native populations, such as they remain. Matters have turned serious – for The West and now that the Eastern Ukrainian Provinces are in the Russian State, military actions directed at them by Kyiv plus embedded AFU actions become direct attacks on Russia. This move to integrate with Russia has taken time and is not consistent with the revanchist accusations regularly leveled at President Putin as a modern day Peter the Great. Now courtesy of failed Western policies. Include those countries joining The Great Eurasian Union, as a flight from The West.
According to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in his Russian national address 21st September, 2022: “In reality, we are fighting the collective West plus NATO”. He stated that half of the main forces of the AFU have been destroyed – 61,207 dead, 49,368 wounded. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have lost 5,937. Over 2,000 foreign mercenaries were eliminated and 1,000 remain at the combat zone. On matters of certainty, clarity will come in one to two to three years time, looking back. Defense Minister Shoigu added that the entire constellation of NATO space based satellites are being used against Russia – over 70 military and 200 civilian satellites to reconnoiter the location of Russian units. He reports that the Western Command directs operation from Kyiv. Such Western strategies, directed with great success against technologically inferior states for hundreds of years, are now applied against two of the world’s most powerful states, Russia and China, both of which can project force over continental distances. Whereas much has been written on the several years of a very restrained approach of the Russian Government to Western provocations, it appears that the Russian Government is not resisting The West walking into a trap of its making.
“The purpose of The West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are already directly saying that in 1991 they were able to split the Soviet Union and now the time has come for Russia itself and that it should disintegrate into many mortally warring regions and regions” – President Vlad Putin in his national address, 21st September, 2022.
The last phrase is notable. Western Armed Forces operate well in conflicting regions, Syria an example where Syrian crude oil is removed for the benefit of the United States and the US Armed Forces function as supply chain guarantor, a role in which they have proven experience.
The Russian President added – “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people – this is not a bluff” and . . . “those trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the tables can turn on them”. The Russian President made clear that Russia will protect its territorial integrity and sovereignty by all the systems available to them and noted that they possess different types of weapons, some more modern than NATO weapons and by implication unstoppable. Notably misreported in certain of the Washington – London Mainstream Media.
Washington’s nuclear blackmail comes with a long history and whereas the United States used two nuclear weapons against non-nuclear state Japan, already declared to have lost the war by the American general running the war, Douglas MacArthur, the United States has threatened their use against non-nuclear states some twenty times that are known. Russia has received such threats. China has received such threats. Certain of the Western Political and Military Classes talk to Pre-Emptive Strike Theory as if this runs in one direction, not theirs.
“The United States is ham-handed and brutal in conceiving and executing clandestine operations and it is simply no good at espionage; its operatives never have enough linguistic and cultural knowledge of target countries to recruit spies effectively. The CIA also appears to be one of the most easily penetrated espionage organizations on the planet. From the beginning, it has repeatedly lost its assets to double agents.”
Dr. Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, 2010.
China and Russia see the United States, Britain and NATO as sponsors of terrorism and the principle drivers of war and will treat them accordingly, inferred from speeches made at the September, 2022 Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference. Extended to sycophantic allies. Attendees included India, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others and so represent some three quarters of the world’s population and the majority of its industrial power and resources. Those left out on their own decision are the FIRE economies of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate, the leaders of which falsely believe that they remain The Masters of This Universe. Yet no US dollar hegemony with a services economy. It needs more.
Notably absent – The West. Not the world community. Here the 85%. “We are working to create an international reserve currency based on the BRICS basket of currencies” – Vlad Putin. 21st May, 2022. This excludes the US dollar.
As Washington-London and now Brussels’ foreign policy operates on vilifying and dehumanizing these states and leaders who do not conform, this makes future accommodations difficult or impossible. Include general purpose lying that wraps up everyone in targeted states for collective punishment. What is not difficult nor impossible is war and their readiness to resort to war evidences that this Proxy War is a desired objective. Yet the aforementioned Masters of The Universe are facing an energy crisis and a population crisis in their own countries and these are not the only crises they face. They have disenfranchised foreign states that are energy and mineral rich, on that obsolete Geo-Political Success Paradigm – we can exert pressure and if needed invade them and take what we want. Those states include Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, some Stan States, The Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya. The West now finds itself in Zugzwang, a chess term, wherein any moves positions the player as worse off.
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