One of the most celebrated quotes from modern cinema comes from the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men (1992). Cross-examined during the court-martial proceedings, Col. Jessep (Jack Nicholson) has been called to testify as a witness by defence lawyer and subordinate Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise), and in a state of growing agitation growls his notorious retort…
Col. Jessup: I’ll answer the question. You want answers?
Lt. Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to them.
Col Jessup: You want answers?!
Lt. Kaffee: I want the truth!
Col. Jessup: You can’t handle the truth!
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The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed cover the tirade by official English language spokesperson Sarah Ashton-Cirillo in which the deranged ex-Democratic Party activist threatened journalists and media figures who criticized Ukraine’s war effort with death:
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Barbarians at the gates?
In the West we value liberal democracy and look to our own liberal democracies as the true bastions of modern civilisation. It is an outlook doubtless culturally instilled, and enshrined with it, we were taught to have considerable faith in elected governments, the civil service, our courts of law, and the fourth estate provided by a free and independent press. Historically, we have indeed held faith in all these democratic institutions, which although admittedly flawed, were once revered by a good many or else more generally acknowledged as safeguards and regarded as necessary evils by the rest of us.
However, public trust in liberal democracy and its institutions has suddenly reached an historic low, and as our trust in the extant political systems continues to wane, growing numbers are seeing how the whole edifice of western democracy is currently rotting away from the top down. Commensurate to this, we are witnessing the somewhat abrupt and inexorable decline of western influence across the world; by extension, the troubling vision of a global retreat for “modern civilisation”. To steal a line from Marx and Engels generally quoted in the form of a translation of The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air.”
In response, a schism has been widening between two apparently rival groups: those who are eager to restore public trust in state authorities, political institutions and establishment media, and others whose loss of faith is more final and absolute, and so have turned their backs fundamentally to all of the old organs of state. Both sides, for contrary but comparable reasons, show tendencies of know-all superiority, and meanwhile fall into alternative states of heightened anxiety, depression or worse, paranoia. There is a great deal to fear. In this regard, neither side is mistaken at all.
The one side sees only the unstoppable and merciless encroachment of a soulless and authoritarian state apparatus crushing all individual expression and freedom; the other side dreads an inexorable collapse into chaos and a populist anarchy. So one seeks remedies away from the blaring pronouncements of mainstream authority within receding corners of the internet – for some lost souls any alternative will do – while the other still regularly turns on the nightly news or pores over pages of the broadsheets with occasionally cheers for national security agencies that they once feared and loathed in turn. Both see the darkness coming and so clamber despairing towards any chinks of light.
Superficially this division is between liberal/democratic-statism as opposed to the apparently reactionary forces of nationalist-conservative/libertarianism. In fact, significance differences between the opposing camps are more nuanced, as evidenced by the placement of slashes uniting what would otherwise be competing political orientations within themselves. Nonetheless, this is a broadly accepted portrayal of how the political landscape is being reshaped.
In an attempt to keep this article reasonably brief while also covering a lot of ground, I shall try not to venture off into the weeds and the various related topics that range from Trump’s election victory, the shock Brexit result, Russiagate scandals, the covid response and so on. I have already dealt with all of these subjects extensively – so for readers who want to find analysis and my opinions on each of these matters I refer you to those earlier posts (follow the links provided). Instead, the point is simply to recognise and understand how we have entered such a period of factionalisation resulting in deep political bifurcation and the emergence of two distinct warring factions where – to paraphrase George W Bush – from the liberal perspective, you are either with us or with the enemy.
With this borne in mind, I appreciate that much that follows puts me inside this envisioned enemy camp for many readers on the liberal side. On the other hand, anyone who knows me personally, or who regularly follows this blog, understands that I have no time for Trump, no time for the majority of Brexiteers, no time for the “Covid-deniers” (while I hate the term, I use it for sake of convenience) and no time for the far right and nationalistic politics in general, whether of Putin, Netanyahu and the Likudniks, or the January 6th protesters/rioters. Unapologetically, I remain a Corbynista. And if I were American voter, would today be campaigning for the election of RFK Jr. Quite possibly America’s last remaining hope:
Having swiftly addressed any doubts surrounding my political perspectives and questionable motivation for compiling this post, I now wish to return to the principle matter in hand, and delve headlong into the nitty-gritty. Not to discover the grubby truth of our contemporary political reality in its fullness, but to outline the most incontrovertible and thus strictly speaking non-partisan dirty truths, beginning with the smelliest and most grotesque truth of all. The most gargantuan and gnarliest pachyderm ever stuffed into the tightest corner of the most claustrophobic of rooms: how the ostensible US Commander-in-Chief is utterly incapable of commanding anything whatsoever…
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Joe Biden is incapable of running anything let alone the Free World
Here is Joe Biden on stage in Hanoi, Vietnam during a visit that also marked the end to the underwhelming G20 summit in India:
After bumbling on more or less incoherently from beginning to end for the entire speech, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre eventually interrupted Biden mid-sentence – perhaps fearing what he is about to say next – Biden’s mic was cut and soothing jazz music played over to cover the shock, as the US President forlornly meandered off the stage. Moments earlier, Biden had literally told his audience that he was about to go to bed!
Now here’s the rub. What happened last week in Hanoi has happened in countless places and earlier occasions. The fact is – and this is the first of many irrefutable actualities that many liberals find so hard to swallow – Biden is totally unfit to hold office. He is very obviously not compos mentis.
Moreover, the clear signs that Biden is suffering with some form of senility or dementia had been perfectly evident in the prior months leading up to his 2020 presidential victory and it is even something I have previously discussed on the blog. Yet despite the mounting evidence, the liberal media remained silent and actually rallied to Biden’s electoral cause – doubtless in determined efforts to prevent the re-election of Trump – but presumably as consequence of their own failures in this regard, have consistently covered up evidence of Biden’s steady mental decline.
All of which unavoidably leads to a question of nearly fathomless political importance. The elephant in the room besides Biden’s senility itself: if Joe Biden isn’t running America then who behind the scenes is ultimately pulling the strings? Like you, I do not have any definitive answer to this question. We probably all know who it isn’t however. Sit back down, Kamala Harris! Yet the sheer weight of this question can hardly be overstated, particularly in light of the evidently deteriorating politico-economic situation both on the US domestic front and abroad.
This obvious decline in American leadership is now leading the West as a whole into dire straits, while mainstream denial of the seriousness of the situation once again underlines the deficiencies of the establishment media. Joe Biden’s failing health should never have become a matter for public concern. It should have remained a private family matter. Neither should my next point of contention… but facts do still remain facts. And likewise, all of the issues raised below underscore a central concern, one I have also highlighted many times previously, that the fourth estate effectively died years ago. (Which is sadly a constant refrain on this blog.)
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The Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed in all of its military objectives
In early June, Ukraine launched its long overdue counteroffensive. Back then, fellow Europeans and Americans had been told to expect a rapid and sweeping assault that would cut off the Russian advance entirely as it reached the Sea of Azov, where the battles would culminate with the final liberation of Crimea. But all of these promises were soon forgotten. Instead the Western media has gradually withdrawn its focus from the stalled and evidently failed advancement of Ukrainian troops. And in this instance, no news very definitely means bad news.
Esteemed American political scientist and international relations scholar, John Mearsheimer speaking in a lecture back in June 2015 had already issued a grave caution to the Western powers, saying the US and Europe were “leading Ukraine down the primrose path”:
“What are the implications for Ukraine? This is in many ways the most important part of my talk, and I’ll just take two or three minutes. When I give this talk many people in the West think that there’s sort of a deep-seated immoral dimension to my position, because I’m blaming the West and not Putin who certainly has authoritarian or thuggish tendencies – there’s no question about that – but I actually think that what’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.” 1 [from 43:40 mins]
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Almost exactly eight years on, and three months into the counteroffensive, Mearsheimer now updates his stance and expounds upon just how catastrophic the Ukrainian counteroffensive has been [with his original footnotes retained throughout — although the links are not available]:
It is now clear that Ukraine’s eagerly anticipated counteroffensive has been a colossal failure.[1] After three months, the Ukrainian army has made little progress pushing back the Russians. Indeed, it has yet to get beyond the so-called “grey zone,” the heavily contested strip of land that lies in front of the first main line of Russian defenses. The New York Times reports that “In the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, as much as 20 percent of the weaponry Ukraine sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to U.S. and European officials. The toll included some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — that the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians.”[2] According to virtually all accounts of the fighting, Ukrainian troops have suffered enormous casualties.[3] All nine of the vaunted brigades that NATO armed and trained for the counteroffensive have been badly chewed up on the battlefield.
Nor is Mearsheimer alone in his unvarnished criticism, either prior to the counteroffensive or since. Although it has since become very hard not to acknowledge the basic fact that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is essentially over; its forces suffering unsustainable losses both in terms of equipment supplied by the Nato countries and sheer number of Ukrainian soldiers maimed or killed in action.
In a very recent article candidly entitled “Ukraine ‘in deep trouble’: Some experts say $1B more from US won’t matter”, USA Today reports that:
Steven Myers, an Air Force veteran, State Department advisory panel member and Russia expert, says the Biden administration “party line” is that Ukraine is winning and that Russia must yield to the West or become a “vassal of China.” Myers says new Ukraine Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, a Blinken pat on the back and the latest aid package won’t dramatically alter Ukraine’s struggle against its far-bigger neighbor.
The same piece continues with an altogether stark assessment of the realities on the ground and the unrealistic prospects of any further Ukrainian advancement:
“There is no effective counterstrategy available to the Ukrainians,” Myers said. “The Ukrainians are in deep trouble.”
Myers told USA TODAY the Ukrainians use “pin pricks” and news about taking back land to demonstrate progress to the West − but are less transparent about the cost in Ukrainian lives.
“They don’t talk about the counterstrikes by the Russians, who don’t care about gaining or holding ground in the kill zone and are experts at laying traps,” he said.
Ukrainian forays into Russian territory usually result in drones smashing high-rise windows in Moscow. A Russian rocket attack Wednesday the eastern Ukraine city of Kostiantynivka struck a downtown market, killing 17 civilians hours after Blinken arrived in Kyiv.
Ukraine and the West badly need an exit strategy, Myers said.
“Europe is in more economic trouble than we are. Germany’s in deep recession,” Myers said. “The Europeans are not going to shoulder more economic burden. They need an off-ramp.”
Again, Myers is not alone in taking this position. As the piece goes on to explain:
Sean McFate, a professor at Syracuse University and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council think tank, aligns with Myers. He supports the change in defense ministers, saying corruption claims forced the issue. But that won’t change the course of the war, he said.
McFate says the U.S. relied on conventional warfare tactics in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan − and lost. Yet the U.S. has not changed tactics in Ukraine, he says. Russia made the same mistakes early in Ukraine with its ill-fated blitz toward Kyiv, McFate told USA TODAY. Now the Kremlin is relying on more modern tools of war, he said, such as controlling information and mercenary troops.
“Things are going nowhere for Ukraine,” McFate said. “Wars are no longer won like World War II by taking the enemy’s land, killing their troops and flying your flag over their capital.”
Click here to read the full article written by John Bacon, published in USA Today on September 7th.
Returning to John Mearsheimer’s analysis in his piece curtly entitled “Bound to Lose”, he summarises “the results so far” of Ukraine’s counteroffensive strategy in these terms:
The counteroffensive has been an abysmal failure, contrary to the expectations of almost everyone in the West. Ukraine has suffered huge casualties and lost large amounts of weaponry in three months of fighting.[47] In the process, its army has yet to reach the first line of Russia’s defense-in-depth; it remains bogged down fighting in the grey zone located in front of Russia’s main defense lines, where, as one Ukrainian soldier put it, “They were just waiting for us…prepared positions everywhere. It was a wall of steel. It was horrendous.”[48] As noted, Western officials report that Ukraine lost about 20 percent of the weapons it employed on the battlefield during the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, which included a good number of the tanks and armored fighting vehicles that the West had provided.[49]
Continuing:
It is now widely recognized that the counteroffensive has failed and there is no serious prospect of Ukraine suddenly achieving success before either the fall rains or Ukrainian leaders shut it down.[54] For example, The Kyiv Independent recently ran a story with the title: “Inching Forward in Bakhmut Counteroffensive, Ukraine’s Hardened Units Look Ahead to Long, Grim War.”[55] Relatedly, The Washington Post published an article on 10 August that emphasized the dark mood in Ukraine: “Two months after Ukraine went on the attack, with little visible progress on the front and a relentless, bloody summer across the country, the narrative of unity and endless perseverance has begun to fray. The number of dead — untold thousands — increases daily. Millions are displaced and see no chance of returning home. In every corner of the country, civilians are exhausted from a spate of recent Russian attacks…. Ukrainians, much in need of good news, are simply not getting any.”[56]
Concluding his latest assessment of what he finally regards as disastrous failure at the level of Western, and specifically, US foreign policy:
It is hard to imagine, for example, the US taking its gunsights off Russia in the foreseeable future. The most likely result is that that the war will go on and eventually end in a frozen conflict with Russia in possession of a significant portion of Ukrainian territory. But that outcome will not put an end to the competition and conflict between Russia and Ukraine or between Russia and the West.
Click here to read John Mearsheimer’s full article entitled “Bound to Lose” published on his Substack on September 2nd.
Trickles of truth are very, very slowly gathering into streams. But if these streams of information ever seem likely to turn into a flood, then we can be quite sure that the establishment media will do their best to distract us with other news of events home and abroad. Distraction from unpalatable facts has become their forte.
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The war in Ukraine is not a Hollywood battle of good against evil
Ukraine is a divided nation. The western half, which is Ukrainian speaking, looks towards Europe; the Eastern half speaks Russian and prefers to keep its distance from the West. The opposition has been mostly portrayed as pro-EU (even when much of the sentiment is actually anti-Russia) and thus pro-democracy, which is a deliberate and calculated over-simplification.
Unfortunately for the people of Ukraine, the location of their homeland is key to winning what Arthur Conolly, an intelligence officer and captain of the British East India Company’s Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry, once called “The Great Game”, and what Zbigniew Brzezinski nearly two centuries later alluded to as “The Grand Chessboard”. Brzezinski helpfully subtitling his 1998 book of the same name, “American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives”. In other words, the neo-con “Pax Americana” but by another name, with Brzezinski’s preferred approach more cloak-and-dagger than the full frontal assault of the PNAC crazies.
The major strategy of this updated quest for global hegemony (“The New Great Game” as some have called it), is again little different than during the days of Arthur Conolly: to seize control of Eurasia. And just as ‘the game’ itself hasn’t significantly altered in two centuries nor have the main competitors changed much either. Back in Conolly’s time, it was Britain in one corner against Russia in the other; nowadays America sits in for the UK.
In this pursuit of global dominion, the Ukraine is a vital stronghold. Firstly, it is located approximately at the hub of the Eurasian landmass. But additionally, Ukraine currently provides Russia with access to the Black Sea; the principal base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet being at Sevastopol – likewise, in Syria, the Russian fleet has its naval base at Tartus ensuring access to the Eastern Mediterranean. So capturing Ukraine weakens Russia militarily too, and would help in another way, therefore, to edge the world closer to Brzezinski’s stated goal of “American primacy”.
It is not by chance that Sevastopol, the second largest port in Ukraine, is located on one of the most well-known peninsulas in the world; that of the Crimea. A tongue of land jutting into the Black Sea and, like the rock of Gibraltar, of huge strategic importance. And no accident that the Crimea shares its name with an even more famous war. A war against the Russians between the years 1853–56 that is remembered, in part, for the real humanitarian courage of nurses like Florence Nightingale, but mostly because of gung-ho military campaigns such as the Battle of Balaclava (October 25th 1854) which featured that suicidally reckless charge of the Light Brigade. Old-time military madmen commanding the six hundred to ride “into the valley of Death.”2
Conolly didn’t live to hear about the shambolic pawn sacrifice at Balaklava; part of a failed attempt to capture the port and fortress of Sevastopol, which was already Russia’s principal naval base on the Black Sea. Identified as a British agent, he had been executed a decade before – beheaded in a square in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. So Conolly was himself a victim of the Great Game, just as were more innocent and forgotten thousands, losing their lives in campaign after campaign, of which the Crimean War was one brief episode. And the scars of this centuries’ long face-off between empires have never healed, instead the wounds are routinely reopened. Indeed, that earlier age of imperialism never ended but has skilfully reinvented itself: the significant difference between old imperialism and more swanky neo-imperialism being one of image. In the modern world running up your flag above a defeated territory is no way to win respect or curry favour whether at home or abroad.
The above passages are reproduced almost verbatim from an extended article written and published back in February 10th 2014 in the midst of the Euromaidan uprising and prior to the coup that ensued. The post is entitled “The New Great Game: ‘Pax Americana’ from Syria to Uzbekistan to the Ukraine.”
Shortly afterwards, I penned a follow-up article entitled “never let a good Ukrainian crisis go to waste…” published on April 22nd in which I quote Zbigniew Brzezinski’s exact formulation of US geostrategy in which he states more precisely how US primacy ultimately hinges on gaining control over Ukraine:
In truth, the game never changed. And sadly it is a game (at least to those currently holding power) – as Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America’s leading geopolitical strategists, makes clear not least with the title of his notorious book on Eurasian geostrategy, “The Grand Chessboard”. In it he wrote:
In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term: preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.3
This neo-imperialist game is much the same as the older imperialist game, in which only the strategies have been updated. It is about control of territory, of energy resources, of financial systems, and it has (and always did) amount to a series of proxy wars against the competing interests of competing powers. Traditionally Russia has been the great adversary, but now there is China too. So the Cold War that officially concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989… ended only in name. With the Ukrainian crisis (or should that be “Ukraine Crisis”) the chill that remained has become considerably icier. Treacherously so. But our military-industrial-financial complex needs perpetual war just to keep the racket going, or, when that ceases to be an option (as it now has), to maintain the illusion of an imminent threat against us. Bin Laden is dead, so a new Cold War is just the ticket. On top of which, as Brzezinski also explained in his book:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
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Ukraine is still full of Banderites, many also holding vital positions of power
Ukrainian journalist and exiled antiwar dissident Ruslan Kostaba has been jailed and brutally attacked by ultranationalists for his years of opposition to his government’s war in the Donbas that began in 2014, and his calls for peace with Russia.
A fortnight ago he spoke to The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal about the growing movement in Ukraine against escalating the war, and the price his countrymen face for attempting to escape the war:
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Here is a screenshot taken from the recent England international against Ukraine that was played in Poland:
Behind the goal there are three centrally placed banners. The middle one is darker and harder to resolve, but if you look carefully you will notice the word Azov, which instantly provides a clue. On either side, however, the banners are far easier to recognise. They are Ukrainian flags centrally embossed with the Azov Brigade emblem. Except that’s not quite correct. Strictly speaking the official badge of the Azov Brigade is different and this is the emblem of its former incarnation the Azov Battalion which existed prior to its widely publicised de-Nazification and subsequent rebranding for Western consumption:
To quote directly from the current Wikipedia entry (from which the image is drawn), this older design features “a combination of a mirrored Wolfsangel and the Black Sun, two symbols associated with the Wehrmacht and SS, over a small Tryzub. Since 2015, it is no longer in use as a symbol of the regiment.” [All links retained]
These old Azov banners immediately caught my eye as I was watching the game. How can it be, I wondered, that Ukrainian fans are able to roll out unambiguously Nazi emblems and no-one appears either to notice or care.
To put this into context, when Celtic fans raised Palestinian flags during a game, the flags were promptly removed and the club afterwards fined by UEFA. The football authorities generally clampdown on political displays of this kind, unless apparently… well, unless implicitly it sanctions them. Because this is generally what happens whenever Ukrainian nationalists unfurl their Nazi paraphernalia, as they are frequently in the habit of doing; the authorities just turn a blind eye to their own regulations, as did the production team and commentators working for the otherwise aching progressive Channel 4 throughout the two and a half hours of its live broadcast of the match.
Or here is another recent example that happened in London in response to an antiwar demonstration. An event that provided the opportunity for a different cohort of Ukrainian nationalists to fly literal Nazi flags directly opposite a World War II memorial:
How can this ever be permitted? Yes certainly, I am a firm advocate of freedom of speech, but flying a Wolfsangel – a variant of the Swastika – in central London in the close vicinity of a war memorial is a clear provocation… Is nobody else offended by any of this?
As veteran investigative journalist, war correspondent and ardent peace activist John Pilger wrote in an extended piece published on May 1st:
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias’ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Click here to read John Pilger’s full article entitled “There is a war coming shrouded in propaganda. It will involve us. Speak up” published on May 1st.
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The coming war with the rest of the world
While Britain’s political class is distracted by a Downing Street party, the world is at the most dangerous strategic juncture since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
These are the sobering thoughts of Daily Telegraph’s International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, as expressed in the opening paragraph in his latest article entitled “The West’s nightmare: a war on three fronts”.
Under the strapline “There has never been a more unsettling strategic landscape in my lifetime – we must turn our attention to the prospect of conflict”, the same piece then continues:
The West faces escalating threat of conflict on three fronts, each separate but linked by unknown levels of collusion: Russia’s mobilisation of a strike force on Ukraine’s border, China’s “dress rehearsal” for an attack on Taiwan, and Iran’s nuclear brinksmanship.
Each country is emboldening the other two to press their advantage, and together they risk a fundamental convulsion of the global order.
You have to go back yet further to find a moment when Western democracies were so vulnerable to a sudden change in fortunes. Today’s events have echoes of the interlude between the Chamberlain-Daladier capitulation at Munich in 1938 and consequences that followed in rapid crescendo from Anschluss to the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
Click here to find Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article published on December 9th behind The Telegraph paywall.
Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, regular columnist Michael McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Hoover fellow at Stanford University teamed up with Oleksiy Honcharuk, former Ukrainian Prime Minister under current President Volodymyr Zelensky, and member of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center in an article headlined “The best response to Russia’s threats is a closer relationship with Ukraine”, which states:
Since 1939, the specter of an all-out conventional war in Europe between two major militaries has never been greater.
Click here to read the full article published by the Washington Post on Dec 1st.
It is quite easy, of course, to write off commentators like Evans-Pritchard and McFaul as alarmists, since what they are speculating on – even forecasting – is more or less unthinkable. War with Russia. War with Iran. War with China. War with all three simultaneously! This is absolute madness, and nothing good could possibly come from a war with any of these three rising powers.
However, if we accept Evans-Pritchard’s account this build up to the terrifying potential of full-fledged global conflict becomes very nearly inevitable, as an unavoidable response to the expansionism of Putin and Xi and/or the belligerence of the Iranians. To have stood by and done nothing, he compares directly with appeasement of Nazism – all three rivals to western hegemony duly compared to the most wicked and unassuageable enemy of humanity in modern times. Such unabashed reduction ad Hitlerum is always deemed permissible when enemies under scrutiny are ours!
Passages taken from another article this time published back on December 17th 2021 as Russian troops assembled on the borders of Ukraine and while many in the West – myself included – still held out hope of a peaceful resolution.
Provocatively entitled “the coming wars with Russia, China and Iran – why the stakes are raised in the last days of the unipolar order”, the opening conflict – the now admitted US proxy war against Russia (see the brief Grayzone report below) – is well underway. Meanwhile, as the Nato-led Ukrainian counteroffensive falters and in the West some are seeking ways to freeze the conflict, another proxy war in Syria is brewing once again and meanwhile the major hawks in Washington, led by the deeply ensconced neocon faction, are already turning attention back toward China.
Warning: The Grayzone report below is based on entirely on mainstream news footage, however there is an image shown in the original report that is unusually graphic at about 1:40 mins.
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My article closes with a reminders of parallel historical events and ends with a defiant peace proposal; a conclusion that has become more pertinent today than when I wrote it almost two years ago:
America’s long-term geostrategic repositioning through the stealth expansion of Nato directly up to the borders of Russia and China is now combined with its ever more bellicose political posturing. Repeatedly under the threat of attack, loose defensive alliances have tightened between Russia, China and Iran, so a coordinated response becomes all the more likely. Should the West or Israel (with US consent) take the decision to declare “pre-emptive” war against any one of the three sovereign powers, the realistic expectation is wider war. Given the probable magnitude of a three-pronged retaliation and the genuine potential for a thermonuclear exchange, the prospect of wars against Russia, China and Iran is therefore absolutely unthinkable.
A century ago a detached and callous ruling class led a largely innocent and unwitting generation into the bloody technological hellhole of no-man’s land to slaughter one another for the glory of king and country and, importantly, for the sake of empire. Back then and ever since, we have rightly talked of “lions led by donkeys”. Astonishingly, the donkeys are back in charge again, except that this time around besides an imbecilic and unprincipled political class, we also have an atrophied antiwar opposition, a moribund fourth estate and an endlessly diverted populous, so the worry is that we may be dealing with donkeys virtually all the way down.
So forgive me when I hammer this point: war is in the air again, and not just any old war. WAR with Russia! WAR with Iran! WAR with China! WAR with all three simultaneously!
I make no apologies for my vulgar use of capitals. We all need to shout about this. What’s the alternative?
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Concluding thoughts
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I am not a pessimist by nature but my unconscious is now screaming on a nightly basis. I wake up regularly with visions of war. Last night I witnessed an entire flotilla of British warships being blown apart by unseen incoming missiles, and I feared to turn around and see the rising flames and smoke of mushrooms clouds. Then I woke up.
Is my unconscious being hysterical? That’s a rhetorical question in case you thought otherwise.
But I continue writing because I really do believe there is a chance to end this nightmare. We just need to accept the truth – to handle it fully – and take appropriate action. We need to talk to one another honestly again about the threat of nuclear annihilation, as we did during the Cold War days when I was a child. We need to acknowledge the dire truth about our political leadership and the unstated imperialist drive to maintain Western supremacy. If we cannot finally accept that a multipolar world is rising then we are doomed, because the only alternative is war – a war of such terrific ferocity and unimaginable scale that little if anything will survive the cataclysm. In the event, none of us will be able to handle the truth of what has occurred.
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Updates:
Col. Doug Macgregor has become one of the fiercest critics of US foreign policy and an outspoken advocate for a peaceful resolution of the war in Ukraine. A fortnight ago he gave an interview for the Swiss German-language media outlet Die Weltwoche in which he outlined the already disastrous failures of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the escalating danger of the hawks in Washington doubling down on China:
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In another recent discussion uploaded on Friday 22nd, Brian Berletic of The New Atlas spoke to Garland Nixon and Dr. Wilmer Leon about US political interference around the world and how the youth are specifically targeted. They compared strategies in different regions and considered the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment in Taiwan in the context of how events have unfolded in Ukraine:
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On Thursday 21st, Judge Andrew Napolitano spoke with former British diplomat, Alastair Crooke, who is also founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, an organisation that advocates for engagement between political Islam and the West.
They discussed the poor international reception to Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest statements at the United Nations framed within the broader context of rising domestic pressure on Joe Biden and in light of growing revelations of Ukraine’s exhausted and spent counteroffensive “that has achieved nothing at all and has decimated the army”:
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On the same day, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou of The Duran reviewed Antony Blinken’s speech delivered at John Hopkins University on September 13th and what they sardonically describe as the Blinken Doctrine. How on the one hand Blinken concedes the unipolar moment has ended and American power is significantly weakened, on the other he now calls for unrestrained belligerence towards American’s principle geopolitical rivals Russia and China:
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Additional:
Embedded below is an interview I gave with podcaster Richard Cox that was recorded about a month ago. We began with a discussion of the origins of the conflict and how the original victims of the war when it started in Donbass have never been given a voice in the Western media. We also considered the likely outcomes as the military offensive already appeared to have stalled and the possible long-term consequences of backing the Ukrainian ultranationalists and its extreme right-wing paramilitary groups:
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1 In fuller context:
“I think the facts are quite clear on this: that the west is responsible; and my aim is that the main deep causes – the aim of the United States and its European allies – is to peel Ukraine away from Russia’s orbit and incorporate it into the West. Our basic goal has been to make Ukraine a western bulwark on Russia’s border and Russia says, “this ain’t happening. Period. End the story. And we will do everything we can to make sure it does not happen. That’s the deep cause… [from 10:45 mins]
What are the implications for Ukraine? This is in many ways the most important part of my talk, and I’ll just take two or three minutes. When I give this talk many people in the West think that there’s sort of a deep-seated immoral dimension to my position, because I’m blaming the West and not Putin who certainly has authoritarian or thuggish tendencies – there’s no question about that – but I actually think that what’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.
And I believe that the policy that I’m advocating which is neutralizing Ukraine and then building it up economically and getting it out of the competition between Russia on one side, and Nato on the other side, is the best thing that could happen to the Ukrainians. What we’re doing is encouraging the Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians. We’re encouraging the Ukrainians to think that they will ultimately become part of the West because we will ultimately defeat Putin and we will ultimately get our way. Time is on our side. And, of course, the Ukrainians are playing along with this and the Ukrainians are almost completely unwilling to compromise with the Russians and instead want to pursue a hardline policy. Well, as I said to you before, if they do that the end result is that their country is going to be wrecked.” [from 43:40 mins]
2 As then- poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson famously commemorated the incident in a narrative poem of the same title.
3 Extract from The Grand Chessboard, Chapter 2 “The Eurasian Chessboard”, p. 40, written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, published in 1997. It is available at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski
wall of controversy 