As I said at the start, if you are in the west you are being conditioned to support the war, to at least as great an extent as people are being conditioned to support it in Russia.
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The space for truth is very limited, as the world crashes into full dystopia.
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Many of my regular readers are annoyed when I point out that Russia is far too weak a country to be a military superpower that can challenge NATO. It has an economy the size of that of Spain or Italy, and a military crippled by corruption. It has an economy that is not only small but woefully undeveloped and reliant on raw commodity export, be it energy, cereal or mineral.
To historians, the most significant thing about Putin may be his failure to develop manufacturing industry at a time when China raced into world manufacturing domination.
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For my entire lifetime, the western military industrial complex and its national and NATO functionaries have exaggerated systematically the “Russian threat” in order to justify their own bloated budgets. I have explained this throughout the Ukraine crisis and again and again I have said that Russia does not have the ability to conquer Ukraine – it is therefore utterly ludicrous for NATO propagandists to claim we have to squander fortunes to defend against Russia sweeping through all of western Europe.
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The logical fallacy of western politicians cheering Ukrainian advances around Kharkiv, and in the same time saying that still trillions more need to be spent on defence against Russian invasion by the USA, Germany, France, UK and others, would be obvious to a five year old. Yet peculiarly I don’t believe I have ever seen or heard the fallacy queried in the media.
Putin’s reaction appears to be escalation. The conscription is a huge statement internally which probably does make major military reverse not politically survivable, even for Putin. The proposed referenda in occupied districts also make any backtracking very problematic.
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Borders are not immutable. The borders of sovereign Ukraine only lasted 21 years before Russia annexed Crimea. A Ukrainian victory that retakes Crimea from Russia would involve a long war and a death toll rising into the millions.
There really are – and remember I worked over twenty years in British Foreign Office, six of them in the senior management structure – people in NATO, and in all western governments, who have no problem with the notion of hundreds of thousands of dead people, particularly as they are nearly all Eastern Europeans or Central Asians. They are not even particularly perturbed by the risk the conflict could turn nuclear. They are delighted that the Russian armed forces are being degraded and vast sums pumped into western military budgets. That is worth any number of dead Ukrainians to them.
I do not believe the USA, UK nor NATO has any political will for peace. This is a disaster. The question is whether the economic pain their populations will feel this winter will force the western politicians to consider the negotiating table. This war can only end with at least de facto international recognition of Russian control of Crimea, and with some kind of special status for the Donbass. The alternative is a war so destructive as to bring disaster across the entire world economy, with the possibility of nuclear escalation.
„The space for truth is very limited, as the world crashes into full dystopia.“ Several concepts here are quite interesting. „Space for truth“? Is there truth, as opposed to truths? Why is it dystopia is always and inevitably in the future? This is something I see especially in US media, but it’s certainly not limited to the US. Is this, like global heating or species loss, a reality so horrible that it cannot be held in the mind?
