Lordre: Russia

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Bilderberg, WEF abandoning the globe for the West

Considering the agendas listed for their most recent meeting, it is noticeable that the Bilderberg forum is focusing less on the supposedly empathy-driven management of world human welfare and much more on the survival of the West. The West, meaning the narrow portion of the world whose most influential people attend these very meetings.

The new focus on ongoing conflicts like Ukraine's reveals that this group is not focused on managing the world’s economic wellbeing but the group’s own members’ desires and insecurities.

Shifting agendas away from world human welfare

If you look at the agendas from 2010 onwards, there is a certain shift from more scientific global concerns to increasingly narrow political ones, driven by a craving by the Western liberal attendees for victory and conquest over other countries and ideologies they personally disapprove of. Notice, in particular, the disappearance of the importance of climate change, formerly a key pressing issue in globalisation and a real basis for global cooperation, now abandoned by these supposedly caring leaders and experts for their preservation of their own political influence. Fear is the motive of their discussions - their own fear, not society's.

Some will begin to ask, was climate change ever real for those people? And, if it is no longer real for them, why should any of their current concerns be taken seriously outside their club? It seems that the most pressing global issues are less interesting to them than what they personally fancy or caters to their personal interests.

The same pattern is apparent at the World Economic Forum, which prioritised talking about the conflict in Ukraine, highlighting global fractures and amplifying conflict rather than maintaining the false liberal tenet of global cooperation. It is striking that the ideological principals guiding Western society just fluctuate depending on what would be satisfying to its richest and most influential individuals at the moment, getting us to scratch their itches. Globalisation and harmony one minute, national power and domination the next. Free markers one minute, state intervention the next.

'Me, me, me'

What we see here is that these forums for bigwigs, experts and public figure seem to be losing their pretence of being caring and responsible managers over global welfare, indicating this was never authentic in the first place. They are out for themselves.

What has happened can be compared with Bill Gates’ apparent obsession with conspiracy theories about himself (also see that one of the Bilderberg agendas is again "disinformation") and his need to save himself from campaigns against his character. Rather than acting like the bewildered but well-meaning philanthropist he claimed to be, and removing himself from a controversial situation, he is increasingly obsessed with defeating a political enemy, even coming into conflict with Elon Musk.

What happened to the experts who focused on the bigger picture of global society and health? Why should we care about their terror at conspiracy theorists in their own society and apparent geopolitical threats from Russia and China to their influence?

Eventually, we will begin to ask: what need do we have for a conference among individuals whose main interest is just their own avoidance of being hanged by the people? Is saving some self-important pencil necks we know very little about, from being snapped, really necessary for the public good and urgent for society to pursue?

Liberalism without prosperity?

The basic appeal of liberalism, and more so the neoliberal economic policy that dominated the world for decades, is meant to be the prosperity it optimises (or at least prevents the loss of). Unfortunately, faced with acute conflict in the world, proponents of this ideology may be increasingly instead turning to sacrifice and austerity in the name of 'civilisation', promoting a geopolitical struggle against competing poles of power like Russia and China. This puts liberalism in the position of, in the future, not presiding over a prospering people but a starved and hobbled people who wonder what it is all for.

Without offering prosperity, liberal democratic states offer nothing. By trying to convince people to enter a global confrontation with opposing continents, and forget about global welfare and even food supplies, the liberal regimes will throw away the only thing they were meant to be about. What hope is there, then, for their survival?

In a way, accusing the other side of weaponising all sorts of things is itself an attempt to weaponise those things. By saying others are weaponising information, for example, as the Guardian does, you are basically turning information sources into targets for military action.

Or, you are telling people to close their ears to other sources and listen instead to you. You are taking the war to the information sphere and telling your audience to fight for you by only listening to you, thereby unnecessarily militarising and weaponising this sphere. You were the one who adopted the idea that making people hold specific beliefs is a military objective you want met, and declared this view publicly. Others may just have welcomed a healthy debate, with every point, from the most banal to the most diabolic, open for consideration. So, who really weaponised something?

Pandemic of censorship

In a 2020 exchange of ideas, the Mont Order information-sharing society agreed that “The way content related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been controlled is a potential gateway to increasingly aggressive censorship by Western governments”. This referred to the handling of medical disinformation, which can indeed be fatal, but later, disputed political information was increasingly being dealt with in the same way.

The Mont Order prediction seemed to come true later, when all dissenting sources on the Ukraine conflict were being treated as enemy operators rather than legitimate participants in a debate. Virtually every statement critical of the West and NATO was also suddenly treated as the statement of none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself. The accepted idea became that everyone must promote a single narrative on any controversial issue, and all dissent must be dealt with like enemy shellfire, and silenced immediately.

Attention given to the idea of Russia spreading propaganda, and a lack of grasp of what propaganda is (other than that it is enemy information and therefore bad), has likely made many people in the West incapable of spotting a lot of very obvious and shoddy propaganda from the West itself. The cliché that the other side only produces propaganda and its claims can all be dismissed (even if true) is a huge accomplishment in propaganda. Inconvenient information is to be dismissed without consideration and even any source dismissed as an enemy agent, regardless of where it is located or its prior reputation. Everything becomes ad hominem attacks and shooting the messenger (in Ukraine itself, that probably is happening literally).

Being right doesn't mean being correct

Control of all publicly-consumed information works well for winning information wars where the goal is to convince the people of something, but it does not create informed experts. It is not hard to guess that Western journalists and politicians are themselves consuming dubious information, confusing a sense of righteousness for accuracy (the word "right" being the same word used to describe things that are morally encouraged or factually correct is a source of confusion, maybe). A rational person, meanwhile, concedes that our own regimes and the small, narrow blob of familiar corporate sponsors in the West could be motivated to spread their own fakes and propaganda.

In some ways, the discouragement of anything contrary to the single supreme narrative on a given controversy makes the West every bit as vulnerable to mindless propaganda as the most totalitarian societies in history. At worst, it means the very foundations of our supposed Western civilisation are just fakes and falsehoods, devoid of substance. We do not enjoy liberty, and lack access to the truth.

Weaponisation of TikTokers and YouTubers

The Biden administration actually intervened to convince TikTok creators to help it convince users of its position on the fighting in Ukraine. To the US government, everything is a weapon, and its foreign policy goals need to be achieved using every ethical and unethical method it can find.

It can seem as if genuine grassroots voices are rising up to support Ukraine's apparently morally just cause on YouTube, unanimously siding with the West and the supposed universal decency it represents when it comes to conflicts. The reality, though, is that even this behaviour is explained more by these people's reliance on a single platform aligned with the West and the sanctions it uses to control content creators. Creators want to stay in good standing with the platform, and this has more to do with what they say than any genuine moral stance on anything.

The sanctioned point of view

If we focus on YouTube's weaponisation, it is not hard to notice that content (even from entertainers) praising Ukraine or NATO in the ongoing conflict in Europe retains its monetisation (ads still play), in addition to which pro-Ukraine ads are allowed all over the site itself, despite this cause being ethically dirty and politically aligned in a violent conflict (revenue is blocked for video content on other conflicts). This tells us two things. First, that YouTube's management are guided by agents of the US government when it comes to foreign policy (certainly, Google is). Second, that the users creating the content had some kind of advance knowledge of the measures in place to reward or punish people depending on what conclusions their videos endorsed regarding the Ukraine conflict. With such factors in force, how likely is a content creator to arrive at balanced conclusions on the war in Ukraine? Basically, they have been given financial incentives to promote a specific view in their videos.

Clearly, the same narrow group of people who have sway over Western regimes and are able to treat politicians to all kinds of carrots and sticks are doing the same with even small content creators online. Consequently, what appears to be mass support popping up for a cause is always more likely to just be financially motivated and originating from a very narrow source.

To display a Ukrainian flag at one's church, or on one's car or social media profile, is not an autonomous action by people. Nobody was really moved by what they saw in Ukraine or in any other foreign conflict, but by sanctions, i.e. a cycle of reward and punishment by the powerful, which is the basis of all Western policy and morality. The resulting activity supporting the state's policies is subtly state-controlled. One way or another, incentives are created by the state and influence operations take place, in an effort to weaponise everything and everyone to sanitise and prop up an otherwise dubious and dirty policy of inflaming a foreign conflict.

There is something insidious about the biological warfare warnings by the Russian and Chinese governments coinciding with acute geopolitical conflict, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the obsession of Western governments and elites with vigilant public health policy.

A US military paper described “public resistance to public health measures” as a military threat to the US preparedness to withstand a biological attack. It is also a threat to US preparedness to launch such a germ warfare attack on an adversary, because it impairs the ability to carry out necessary inoculations of US troops and civilians at home ahead of just such an attack, to avoid the viral weapon backfiring on America.

Inoculation against what, again?

The US government's supposedly defensive Project Bioshield includes the aim of developing vaccines. This makes no sense. Inoculation campaigns would require knowledge of the exact biological threat, both in terms of its identity and the timing of its deployment as a weapon. You would require samples of the specific viral threat to already exist in the lab, to even begin work.

What is Bioshield going to develop a vaccine against, if it doesn't know what the enemy-manufactured virus will be? Inoculations are by definition a preventative measure against a known threat. In a military sense, it is about protecting one's people and resources and preserving them for future action. The development of a military vaccine only seems to make sense if a military is developing an offensive viral weapon and wants to inoculate its own troops to stop the weapon infecting its own forces.

Winning the vaccination debate is a US military objective

The option to impose mandatory inoculations of the population, and especially military forces, is a necessary part of any preparation for biological warfare, whether the attack is to come from an adversary or your own military. The state would necessarily have to forcibly inoculate large parts of its own population, in order to make sure the lethality of its own weapons does not backfire on its people and resources and undermine victory.

Western societies would not simply accept mandatory inoculations without society undergoing the necessary debate over the issue, and we seem to be past that stage now. The intentional politicisation of Covid-19 and very forced attempt to have a public debate over the necessity of mandatory vaccinations (even though the situation was not serious enough for that) could have been preparation to help build offensive biological warfare options against Russia and China. In a way, it is like building nuclear bunkers.

Russians and Chinese spotted something

Then, we come back to the biological weapon claims of the Russians and Chinese, whether one trusts them or not as a source. They allege that the United States has a very aggressive biological warfare program, with facilities near both of these adversary states. They are clearly unnerved, even paranoid. This may be more to do with them noticing Western states apparently hardening themselves for a biological warfare situation at home, taking advantage of the pandemic to overcome any social and political objections to the idea of the sudden inoculation of entire nations on the state's command.

West seems sure of victory

Finally, there is the uncompromising warmongering of Western states, which is uncharacteristic of countries that are held in check by the traditional threat of mutual destruction in a nuclear war. Clearly, Western governments believe they can actually eliminate Russia and China as threats within a short timeframe. This is apparent in their triumphalist attitude, which exceeds their apparent capabilities, as if they intend to lean on indirect or covert means of attack. While many may see the threat in "colour revolutions" (staged uprisings and street violence led by staff at Western embassies), germ warfare also fits such a description. The West talks like it has an ultimate secret weapon, and that weapon could take the form of viruses.

Many of the individuals responsible for advising Western policies (World Economic Forum attendees, for example) have developed an obsession both with pandemics and with enemy regimes at the same time, as if both are certainly on their minds and considerable energy has gone towards both. They also hate alternate sources of information, and especially anti-vaxxers. Their vision is of a society that can live with very harsh public health policies, and also be resolute in its commitment against the "enemy". This is the ideal combination before launching a germ warfare campaign.

Germ warfare preparations failed?

Then again, we can just as easily go back to the US military paper's gloomy conclusion mentioned at the beginning of this post. It may be that anti-vaxxers have ruined everything for them and destroyed their plans.

The extent of rejection of vaccines in Western countries, and official frustrations with much of society's lack of acceptance of harsh health policies, suggest that Western preparations for germ warfare have failed, and our own societies are insufficiently controlled to allow our governments to wage this war. The truth may be that China has a much more compliant population, giving its regime the best capability to both resist biological attacks and launch them.

If Western governments think a biological attack is a viable way to get rid of Russia and China, they are playing with fire. Russia has taken a very aggressive tone since the war in Ukraine started, and would respond brutally to such an attack if it traced it (maybe going straight to nuclear weapons), while China would be able to withstand it and counterattack to deadly effect.

Russia and China’s dismissals of the US and the West’s authority in the international system (the rules-based order) by pointing to Western wars such as the Iraq War of 2003 or the 2011 bombing of Libya are in turn rejected in Western circles as ‘whataboutism’. But is this succinct reply a sufficient defence of the West?

Someone saying 'what about', and bringing up the other fellow's own failings or sins, like any ad hominem attack, is not necessarily a false argument. If someone’s whole point in an argument is that you are a thief, and you are in fact a thief, then their argument is in fact valid.

In logic, ‘Whataboutism’ is only a false argument when its structure contains a conclusion that does not really follow, for example, 'you are a thief too, therefore I am not a thief'.

No-one really says anything so absurd, so to accuse someone of this logical fallacy is ridiculous. The Russians and Chinese have never made the claim that they are innocent of crimes because they can show the West also commits crimes.

Western hypocrisy is the point

When Russia and China defenders point to the West’s hypocrisy, they are never asserting a false conclusion or falsely claiming to refute a Western allegation. They are just refusing the discussion entirely, because they have another topic they would prefer to talk about.

To claim this refusal of the subject, in favour of attacking the West’s hypocrisy, is an ad hominem fallacy, is no more correct than to claim that Russian diplomats refusing to talk about hot dogs is an ad hominem attack on the intellects of American barbecue-goers, and that Russian answers must be about hot dogs or else they are doing ‘whataboutism’. If you think someone is talking nonsense, you don’t have to address the minutiae of it. If you want, you can wisely change the subject to their credibility, which should have been established first anyway.

As soon as ‘what about Iraq?’ is asked, the United States’ moral authority and its right to confront other nations on moral issues in the first place becomes the subject of the discussion. Under those conditions, whataboutism is a valid argument. We are rewinding the discussion to where it should really start. We are judging the moral character that the US and the West are tacitly claiming (which they need to establish first, before appointing themselves to accuse other nations), so facts that hurt their character are valid to bring up.

'What about whataboutism?'

In fact, invoking the term ‘whataboutism’ when facing Russian and Chinese claims about the West may itself be a form of ‘whataboutism’ (in this case it takes the form ‘what about whataboutism?’), and an example of this as a real logical fallacy. Western apologists in this case really are falsely inferring that they have refuted Russian and Chinese accusations of Western hypocrisy by dismissing them as logical fallacies, when the accusations may not be logical fallacies but distinct and accurate claims that hurt the West's standing.

Someone being guilty of a crime himself arguably destroys his moral authority to judge others committing the same crime and removes his right to take the podium to talk about another fellow's crime. His own actions in committing the crime make his moral authority and statements on anyone else’s crimes dubious, and call his motivations into question. It may show that he is actually just looking for a monopoly on force or the right to commit crimes, rather than sincerely addressing crimes.

When used to challenge someone’s moral authority or ideology, ‘whataboutism’ is a valid and healthy starting point before addressing someone’s claims in the first place. It is not only logically valid but devastating to an opponent, if they cannot withstand it.

WHOAREYOUism

Whataboutism is not a rude interruption to the West's accusations against any regime. It is a legitimate attempt to rewind the conversation to where it ought to begin. The correct phrasing actually goes: 'who are you'?

If the West’s claim is that it represents some kind of moral purity or higher authority, which is indeed its claim when it uses the term ‘rules-based order’ to describe a vision of itself safeguarding international rules and norms, then for Russia and China to point out that it is untrustworthy because of its hypocrisy is fatal to the West.

‘Whataboutism’ is the winner. A ‘rules-based order’ proposed by cockroaches is no way to start cleaning the world, because their very nature disqualifies them from talking about it.

While many on the pacifist left see Russia as hypocritical, modelling its actions in Ukraine on US aggression against countries like Iraq, it is once again the United States that seems to have brought faulty ideas about war and victory to Ukraine.

What kept causing defeat for the United States in foreign conflicts is not a weakness in its excellent military technology, but the intellectual bankruptcy of American leaders and strategists, many of whom are little more than dullards and thugs. For all their military might, such warriors don't understand what war even is.

Americans seem to regard war as nothing more than a shooting competition, getting overly fixated on acts of killing and talking about who they have killed. This may be because of the gun culture that the lives of most American military enthusiasts revolve around.

Killing the enemy

We saw the the trigger-happy approach on display by American leaders in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the mere deaths of insurgents or even civilians were portrayed as victories in the war. It was also a major weakness in the US strategy in Vietnam, which notoriously focused on body counts. Hence, attrition is always the main American goal in wars, despite there being no obvious end to it. It offers no threshold at which one can actually be calculated to win, or even any guarantee that the conflict will ever end.

American military leaders think war is defined as shooting the enemy, and victory is defined as the enemy being dead. The depth of their military thought goes no deeper than that. There is no thought to what happens next, and even less for any agency on the part of their targets.

Coincidently, I’m celebrating the 27,000 dead Russian soldiers and a bakers dozen dead GENERALS! How embarrassing for you!!#SlavaUkraine https://t.co/6n8F66y4ch
— Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) May 22, 2022

In the American military mind, if you kill the enemy, and you keep killing the enemy, eventually they will all be dead and the war will be won. It does not matter what anyone is trying to do, or who goes where, as long as the enemy is being shot. Based on the reports bragging about the allegedly killed Russian generals and high Russian casualties, this idea is now being applied by American warmongers to Russian forces in Ukraine, even though Russians are far better equipped and able to defend themselves than other factions the US and its allies failed to defeat when applying the same philosophy.

No-one needs to die

Although it will surprise people who play computer games, making sure enemy soldiers won't go home to their mothers is not in tune with how wars are really won. No-one is keeping a score, and it is very often the loser that manages to achieve more 'kills' before losing (just look up deaths in the American Civil War or World War Two). This is because war is not even about killing anyone.

As Clausewitz famously stated, war is the continuation of politics by other means. And we also cannot forget Sun Tzu’s formulation, “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight”. In other words, winning wars is as much to do with not killing people as it is to do with killing them. For Russians to learn that they are being killed by American weapons will not make Russians think they live in a safe world where they do not need to apply military force, and should seek peace.

Imagine if the situation was reversed. This would mean Russia bragging about causing American troop deaths in a war, and expecting America to then withdraw from foreign conflicts and give up on military solutions to threats around the world. Imagine, also, that this foreign conflict is happening just across the border to the mainland United States, and could spill over into American cities or include artillery being fired at such cities, the way the war in Ukraine threatens Russian cities. Would Americans cave in to the pressure, maybe deciding that their military is not very good, and give up?

In fact, needlessly killing an enemy and threatening them with death is not only absolutely irrelevant to waging a war effectively but just complicates the ability to wage it by making the enemy double down, because now they are even more emotionally invested in the conflict and the war is more personal. This approach produces fiercer and more numerous people willing to fight, especially when the war is waged close to home, as the Ukraine war is for Russians.

Understanding how to win a war is all about defining victory, which is actually nothing to do with killing or dying and can be accomplished with no casualties (like Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, which has no parallel in the pointlessly bloodthirsty history of the United States).

Russia brings rulebook for winning

From the start of its intervention, Russia took the opposite view to American warmakers, with no particular interest in how many people it would kill in Ukraine. Even just getting started in what may be a long war, Russia has been just as interested in rebuilding infrastructure as destroying it. The West, on the other hand, tells of Russian brutality and talks up the West's supposedly humanitarian approach to war, but this is drivel. Rebuilding the cities they destroy is something the US and UK never do, and would never do. People in the West are okay with Ukraine becoming a desolated boneyard, as we have no attachment to the country. It isn't our neighbour, we don't know anyone there.

The second reason the US cannot win wars is because it sets no realistic objective, resulting in 'mission creep' as politicians and military leaders continuously imagine how they can hurt their opponent, with no clear idea of where the process ends. This is already a criticism of the US approach to the war in Ukraine.

Defining victory

The objective of wars is to win them, not necessarily to kill anyone. This means putting the opponent at your mercy, whether now or in the future, and then negotiating the end of the war.

The Taliban, through superior endurance, put the American military and the American people at its mercy in Afghanistan and won. It did this not through might, but through endurance: America lost the will to go on, yielding to pressure, while the Taliban did not. It may take a long time, but the side that has the staying power will always win, and the other side will eventually be put at its mercy. Russia has the staying power to stay where Russia and Russians are, and Ukraine is a neighbour of Russia and home to 8 million Russians – more people than the population of Finland. The West's attachment to Ukraine and the need to prop the country's regime up is a recent scheme from 2014 onwards, as fake as our attachment to the cardboard cut-out Afghan regime that collapsed in Kabul.

The United States will lose for the same reason it always loses: disinterest in the people on the ground or the need to win their hearts and minds. The US is involved for its own glory and its need to kill people it sees as bad. US weapons will always kill people, but the end result will not be a favourable political outcome any more than it was in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.

Former president George W. Bush accidentally stated the truth about his 2003 invasion of Iraq, referring to it as unjustified and brutal.

Rather than taking the chance to suggest that the American regime has changed since its aggression in 2003 (like Bush's fellow Iraq-era war criminal Antony Blinken did), media stories were instead trying to cover for Bush and convince us that this old war was in fact justified. This makes sense, because the same journalistic outlets helped to cause that war, so of course they have a reason to be apologists for the aggression.

Iraq and Ukraine wars incomparable

The Iraq War was much more brutal and lethal than the war in Ukraine, with no concern for mass civilian casualties during US attacks. In the opening days of the US attack on Iraq, American troops murdered far more people than their Russian counterparts did in the same length of time in their attack against Ukraine’s embattled regime.

The Iraq War is also obviously far harder to justify, waged far away from US shores (in contrast to the Russian intervention in the neighbouring state) and against a country that posed no threat, was at peace, and was receiving no foreign instruction and backing to a wage war (contrast Iraq with Ukraine, which was getting huge weapons deliveries specifically to kill Russian troops before the Russian attack).

It would have been a mistake if Bush had said that the Iraq and Ukraine wars are similarly brutal and unjustified. US actions in Iraq were far more brutal and difficult to justify than Russian actions in Ukraine. Again, Iraq was at peace and posed no imminent threat to the US. Ukraine was already at war with local rebels and was being equipped, to loud applause, specifically to pose a threat to Russian troops.

American superiority?

The Iraq invasion is only more justified than the Ukraine invasion if you subscribe to the idea that the US is simply better than other countries, being the indispensable country and thus more morally entitled to take direct action to defend its security than Russia. The people subscribing to this idea think it is great if the US attacks potential small threats thousands of miles away, but also believe Russia must never be allowed to use its military to penetrate across the border to address a far more substantial threat. Even more ridiculously, the proponents also think Russian leaders should base Russian foreign policy on this same idea: the US is indispensable and must never have its security undermined, whereas Russia is dispensable and it is okay for Russians to perish. Any suggestion by any nation that it might care about its own security more than the United States is deplored by the United States, which demands fawning and adoration by the whole world.

The preposterous idea described above is “American exceptionalism”, as famously affirmed by Barack Obama in a West Point speech. There, he said “The United States is the one indispensable nation”.

Others know this dispensable point of view simply as chauvinism and the unexceptional, historically unimaginative craving of each a powerful Western country to gain world domination. The same view was shared by Spain, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, Germany, and now the United States. In the case of America, the asserted moral clarity (that America is a "force for good") turns mere exceptionalism into neoconservatism, which became guilty of war crimes, lies, torture and cancer-spreading weapons.

Bush’s gaffe and the media’s attempts to cover for him reveal the vacuous, fake morality governing all the outraged Western responses to the war in Ukraine. The people wanting to punish Russia are not really unnerved by scenes of death or the inhumanity of any atrocity, as they themselves are responsible for worse crimes and continue to give justifications for those acts.

Turkey has too many grievances against Washington's foreign policy to just yield to American demands concerning NATO expansion in Scandinavia.

What we will see, as the US tries to overcome resistance from Turkey, is that the initiative to expand NATO does not at all come from Finland or Sweden’s leadership. It comes entirely from the regime in the United States, which always relied on what it calls influence operations and suitcases of cash to achieve its selfish foreign policy objectives.

Pushing NATO to the limit

Turkey essentially demands that its NATO allies stop supporting its foreign and domestic enemies, and is looking to get US sanctions reversed in exchange for its cooperation on NATO expansion. These are reasonable demands of an ally.

However, in the above link, where the demands are listed, American Iraq War lunatic Michael Rubin does an adequate job expressing how NATO heads will probably react to the defiance expressed by a member state. They will argue that Turkey should be expelled from NATO, for which there is no mechanism, and neither is there a mechanism that may override the veto right of Turkey.

Some NATO ideologues will probably say that Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan should be killed, as this reflects the kind of damaged and deranged ideation in American foreign policy now.

A more and more coercive NATO, in which the US government simply compels member states to obey it and serve its narrow foreign policy interests, is a NATO that could fall apart.

Is NATO dead?

The standoff could reveal that, far from being reinvigorated by Russia's actions in Ukraine, NATO is dead.

The lack of a mechanism to remove Turkey from NATO means that the NATO members will have to all become law-breakers and fail to follow their own founding document, if they want to cast Turkey out. If, alternatively, the US decides to place additional sanctions on Turkey, this will likely backfire and result in Turkey using its veto more regularly, as well as even more cooperation by the NATO member with Russia and China, making the alliance an increasingly meaningless dead weight.

What is happening suggests that NATO at least does not function very well for US foreign goals. This only raises the question as to why anyone would want to expand an alliance that is dead and simply retains the bulk of the members from a bygone political constellation in the Cold War. The current standoff makes a much better case for dissolving and replacing NATO than expanding it, even if one holds the aggressive American views that guide foreign policy in the North Atlantic Area now.

NATO and the EU could both be replaced by smaller blocs, with the EU also experiencing a similar impasse with Poland and Hungary and the ideologues similarly threatening expulsion.

Rand Paul delaying military aid to the central government of the Ukraine, in the hope Americans can get better assurances about how their money is being spent, was unquestionably a good thing.

One thing the media is getting right is that Americans need to think more about their country’s foreign policy, and they need to think more about how it affects them. Unfortunately, the majority of opinions being presented amount to a simplistic pro-Ukraine messaging campaign, undoubtedly also sponsored by the US government.

Costs of interventionism

Previous adventurism and foreign entanglements were at very little cost to Americans, compared to the possible fallout over the Ukraine. Biden himself warned of pain when it comes to Americans affording gas, connecting it with the conflict he wants to intensify in the Ukraine.

There is ample reason to think the war in the Ukraine will be lost by the West, however long it takes. The two-decade War in Afghanistan was more likely to succeed than a war on the Russian steppes of the Ukraine, where Russia is highly invested and sufficient millions of ethnic Russians reside, enough to justify not just a temporary Russian presence but a permanent one, even with great loss of life.

No hope of Western glory

The Ukraine conflict offers no hope of Western victory and expansion, just like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Revelling in Russian soldiers dying, which has been the case anyway for local Russian civilians in the Donbass since 2014, won’t change the connection of these people to a land they long possessed and have the ability to at least control a great deal of. For us to think killing Russians is the answer to the West's problem here is nothing more than a manifestation of violent urges to compensate for the Western flight from Afghanistan, and no more than a continuation of killing the Taliban, which turned out to be pointless. In the end, the land will always be possessed by the people who live and die on that land, and not by those who want to brag about how many people they killed there, which is all the US does in every conflict it loses.

Conflict with Russia exposes countries to potential famine, as Biden blamed food shortages on Russia. Western countries are not immune to this problem, and the West could be swamped with the emaciated fleeing migrants from other countries. Given that global warming can affect crop yields, we could end up facing famines in our own countries, the UK and US, if the war lasts a long time and the Russians are willing to endure it for decades.

Notice the unelected parasites of US policy

For the first time in recent history, foreign policy issues seriously affect Americans, such that their welfare may depend on identifying and removing the long-term US foreign policy strategists guiding successive administrations into failed wars. Unfortunately, there is no clear means to achieve this. The revolving door between so-called "journalism" and foreign policy advisory roles exposes that the junta of undemocratic maggots stays in control, no matter what administration replaces the last, and these maggots never leave.

Look at Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan and Ned Price, as a few examples of varied importance. While sharing the same murderous neoconservative glare, responsible for thousands of deaths in failed wars in the Middle East, each such person has never stood for election, instead cowering from the people and worming their way around them, and yet still shaping policy and laying out the only options available to the administration. The American people will need special tweezers or an iron fist to remove these unelected parasites, or their ideas will be responsible for creating unmanageable costs for citizens.

In my country, it seems Ukraine is a successful feelgood cause.

And who can doubt the ability of the British to recognise good causes, and support them? The eventual Sir Volodymyr Zelensky is most probably adored in households across Britain, in a similar way to Sir Jimmy Savile, who was to be followed by Sir Tony Blair.

What surer security is there against being discredited, than the favour of the British public?

The movie

Everyone in Britain seems to assume the war in Ukraine will end swiftly and righteously in Ukraine’s favour, for no reason other than our belief that Ukrainians are playing the hero role and the Russians are the villains of the story. Many people are so accustomed to dramatic structure, from the entertainment they consume, that they are quick to assume they know how history ends. They think we are just a little more than half way through this story.

But what if the war doesn’t end? What if, like the War on Terror, this movie just goes on and on, until we just decide to leave the cinema?

The arrest

What if Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s term goes on and on, with no elections, due to the war and the complete lack of opposition in the country? What if we see him presiding over a country in ruins, inhabited by a disease-ridden, war-fatigued, starving population with no way out in the conflict with an uncompromising Russia, even while retaining power after five or even ten years? What if, under the pressure of the war, there are increasing arbitrary executions of suspected traitors and defeatists by his regime? Worse for audiences, what if his beard grows long and he becomes unsightly, unsanitary or insane? What storytelling would work for him, then?

Eventually, prolonged war could turn Ukrainians against Zelensky or turn our own country against him, as he could be associated with a certain phase of war that could become inconvenient to us as we become more level-headed about the conflict. Zelensky himself may try to stay in power indefinitely, afraid that he will be used as a scapegoat or face some sort of prosecution under the next administration, if he leaves office. Remember that he himself tried to have his political rivals arrested, including former president Petro Poroshenko.

If Zelensky is arrested, then our obligation to encourage Ukraine as an ally will require our media to go after Zelensky and destroy him, just as easily as we had built him up and lionised him.

The long struggle

In the West, the public will become fatigued by the propaganda if the war drags on, like it did with the former Syrian rebels, now reduced to shabby terrorists at the country's fringes. We originally thought the Syrian rebels were brave, portraying them like rock stars, but that image sagged as ISIS grew and the image of those rebels turned into dying victims in Aleppo, rather than brave victors marching on Damascus for democracy.

People are receptive to simplistic messages and marketing at first, but it begins to wear thin if the same level of enthusiasm is being continuously demanded of them. If a face is shown to us long enough, we will begin to find it ugly. Zelensky's scowling, bearded face will be no different and people will begin to suspect something is hideous about him.

Wars are no longer fought over a few years, with a clearly marked turning point or end. Almost every war now seems to last immeasurably long, and only be ended out of fatigue. The Russians feel they have a centuries-long bond of blood with lands that encompass Ukraine, where millions of Russian soldiers died in the Second World War, whereas our connection to that land is nothing more than a simplistic marketing and messaging campaign that began in February 2022. An influx of Ukrainian refugees does not create any strong personal or cultural bond between Britain and Ukraine, other than as a fleeting illusion. As such, the long-term investment, emotional commitment and willingness to endure hardship in this conflict is more likely to be on the Russian side than ours.

Fatigue

As the hardship of the Ukrainian conflict may really affect us, like Covid measures did, Western populations could become fatigued by the efforts to prop up Ukraine after only two years, thereafter deciding to actively scorn and mock the Ukrainian cause. This would be in stark contrast to the twenty years it took for us to give up in Afghanistan and no longer care what happened to the regime in Kabul. The handling of dissent in Western regimes, where authorities simply try to brand anyone who raises questions as an enemy or a cretin, is also extremely ineffective and just increases resistance to whatever message the government tries to spread.

It is likely that the Russians will never grow tired of the conflict in Ukraine, no matter how bad we try to make it for them, as to them Ukraine is sacred ground lit by their memorials and eternal flames. Western media can claim the Russians are just temporary invaders, but the Russians see themselves as holy warriors fighting on their own territory. Our pretence as if Russia had just invaded Switzerland, and so doesn't belong there, is purposely ignorant and we know it.

Western media sources are trying to rattle Russians into thinking their country’s actions in Ukraine backfired and that they are in greater peril, owing to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

Some fans of Russia see a sudden Russian military offensive on Finland, like the attack deep into Ukraine in February, as a realistic possibility. Finland may well be much more vulnerable than Ukraine, as it has a much smaller military than Ukraine, although it boasts a better history of military success against Russia.

The Kremlin certainly is not happy about Finland joining NATO, saying an unspecified response will follow. Meanwhile, Sweden is a power in the Baltic Sea, but has already cooperated with the NATO powers and labelled Russia as hostile, and should have been expected to join sooner or later.

Russia should expect NATO in Finland

Finland has a small population and military, so the issue is more about NATO deploying to Finland than Finland joining NATO. Russia will have to target US forces in Finland, where it previously had no interest.

One can conclude that, far from being taken by surprise, Russia probably expected NATO to compensate elsewhere for the disappearance of Ukraine’s NATO membership prospects due to the Russian military presence in that country. That compensation is likely to now happen in Scandinavia, unless vetoed by NATO members such as Turkey.

Russians would be wrong to get too flustered about Finland joining NATO. One must remember that Finland was always tacitly aligned with the West. NATO and Finnish troops were likely under the mutual understanding that Finland would let Western forces use or pass through that territory during any conflict with Russia, even during the Cold War height of Finnish neutrality. Also, recall that Finland had no hesitation about even aligning with the Axis in World War Two to strike at Russia.

There is a certain peril to Russia associated with Finland’s entry to NATO, but it is solely a conventional military threat and a missile threat, perhaps mainly a threat that US military air power could be permanently based there. Finland’s population and military are likely to be too small to significantly threaten Russia, so Russian troops will be facing US and other NATO troops across that frontier. However, this is far less of a severe threat than what could arise in the much more populous Ukraine, so any claim that the Kremlin now has a bigger problem on its hands is just false.

Ukraine as NATO's 4GW base

Ukraine is highly populated, capable of enormous manpower. It was a viable springboard for fourth-generation warfare (4GW), which is the only reliable means of destroying targets in a nuclear-armed power's territory without provoking a direct conflict with it. Densely populated areas, zealous paramilitary formations practicing Syria-like hit and run tactics using pickup trucks, and sustained political extremism and grievances, all defined what was happening in Ukraine even before the Russian invasion. The war of 2014 to present created a threat in Ukraine that would have spilled over into Russian territory even if Russia did nothing. Supposing the West also funded mass protests within Russia with the aim of toppling Russian president Vladimir Putin, violence and insecurity could have spread across Russia, joined by people crossing over the border from Ukraine.

The Western strategy of creating security threats on the Russian periphery would eventually create conditions of civil war creeping into Russia like Syria, sufficient to destroy the Russian state but not obvious enough to trigger a retaliatory nuclear strike by Moscow. In fact, NATO would have used its current Ukraine pressure tactics to suppress Russia's ability to confront threats on its own territory at that stage, threatening intervention inside Russia if Putin uses chemical weapons, and all such claims that always arise under the NATO watch. What is being played out in Ukraine now is likely exactly what NATO intended to do inside Russia itself, sooner or later, all to the same applause of those who currently praise Ukraine. Putin's intervention likely pre-empted and forced the confrontation on Ukrainian territory rather than Russian territory, but even now there are Western officials expressing their support for the spill-over of the violence to Russian territory and US officials declaring that the violence is aimed to weaken Russia. If Western statements are not gaffes, then Russia's military action in Ukraine provides increased security for Russian people by keeping the confrontation as far outside Russia's borders and as far from Russian civilians as possible, which was also the Russian defence of their intervention in Syria. Such an action is, by definition, a success for the Russian soldier even if he is killed, if his task is to prevent Russian civilian deaths.

Finland as a quiet front

Finland isn't a place of great tension, extreme nationalism and unrest, like Ukraine. If Finland became a springboard to provoke Russia, it would be only a base for conventional warfare, and an ineffective one. As someone who walked in that part of Finland, I can tell you it is all densely wooded terrain in a sparsely populated wilderness, surely still unsuitable for conventional warfare as it was in the Winter War of 1940. Attacking forces would be constrained by the roads. As such, a war in Finland would be an almost entirely aerial and missile war, monitored by radar and missile troops and provoking mutual destruction if anything happened at all. Western attempts to undermine Russia have been desperately trying to dodge a direct military conflict and find unconventional forms of attack, such as those where local civilian hatreds and provocations can give rise to the murk of civil war, like in Syria from 2011 and Ukraine from 2014. Mere tourism-level numbers of Russians live in Finland compared to more than eight million in Ukraine, so Finland's internal affairs don't concern Russia.

On the Finnish frontier, following the country's accession to NATO, whichever side has aggressive intentions is going to either fail spectacularly to advance, or simply provoke everyone's destruction in a nuclear war, which means there will be no change in the calculus on either the Russian or NATO side. US nuclear missiles placed in Finland are a possibility, which will create an increased threat to the adjacent St Petersburg, but not much more than the existing Baltic NATO countries.

The possibility of US biological warfare facilities at the Russian border exists but does not require Finland's membership of NATO, if there is a determined US plan to introduce diseases into Russia as per Russian suspicions. It is hard to see how gaining a tenuous military hold on some forests in Finland at the expense of Russian soldiers' lives would provide much protection against such a threat, if it exists. A better move by Russia might simply be to create its own retaliatory biowarfare programs, as they developed their nuclear arsenal to counter the US.

Finnish cannon fodder for US wars

Finland reacted in a nervous and short-sighted way by deciding to join NATO and announcing it without debate. Its leaders underestimate the value of neutrality and the costs of NATO membership. They now risk selling their souls to a very dangerous neoconservative devil that still is in power in Washington and still believes the West’s destiny is to invade other continents to spread “democracy” and pacify hostile regimes.

Far from defending against Russian invaders, Finnish membership in NATO will most likely result in more Finnish troops dying in Middle Eastern countries invaded by the US in the future, and being deployed to Asia to confront China. NATO’s mission is being constantly expanded to a greater and more aggressive scope (“Global NATO”, as Liz Truss puts it), so there is no limit to what NATO may try to conquer next, with the increased cannon fodder and confidence it gets from the growing list of member states. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks to occur in Finland, as NATO countries all share the burdens, casualties, and inevitable consequences of the dream of Western conquest.

Pope Francis claimed that NATO "barking" at Russia’s frontier may be responsible for the ongoing war in Ukraine.

This will have led to rage from many, who believe that the only acceptable position on Ukraine is a one-sided condemnation of Russia.

Pope doesn't respect Western foreign policy

Interestingly, the Pope had previously seemed to align with NATO and Ukraine by kissing a Ukrainian flag. In reality, he was just trying to encourage peace, not giving his blessing to Ukraine's savage interethnic conflict of 2014 to present, to which Russia merely introduced itself as an apparently unwelcome belligerent in 2022.

While it may seem obvious that the Catholic Church is a Western organisation with commitments to a Western-led international order, shared by the supporters of NATO, this is not true. Pope Francis is not the Pope of white people, liberals or Westerners, but of the people in the slums of Argentina, whose views he is more likely to be receptive to.

Vatican staying above the fray

The Pope was trying to be neutral and not be seen as a participant in the conflict, as taking a side could undermine his international standing. We should bear in mind that the majority of practicing Catholics reside in the Southern Hemisphere, in developing countries, outside the exclusive zone of NATO political and military propaganda monopoly. For the Pope to align himself with NATO, against the better judgment of many Catholics, would be potentially damaging to the authority and credibility of the Vatican rather than any help to NATO.

At the same time, the Pope does not want to be seen as allying with Russia, since Russian troop presence in Ukraine is unauthorised by the United Nations. Russia violated the letter of the UN Charter by sending troops into Ukraine, albeit only as seriously as Turkey and the US are violating the Charter in Syria and hardly warranting the disproportionate, Russophobic Western response.

The Pope cannot be seen as an aggressive proponent of one side or the other, in a conflict in which Russia may expand with small territorial acquisitions and NATO is fully loyal to the bloody neoconservative dream of a new American century.

Pope Francis is right

The Pope is correct to accuse NATO of provoking the evil it supposedly wants to deliver us from. NATO is desperate to preserve itself as an organisation, therefore encouraging adversaries to be more aggressive so that people will be scared into believing they need NATO. NATO creates disaster by insensitively ignoring the security concerns of other powers, encroaching on them, declaring them ideological enemies, and declaring any subsequent response to be unprovoked and proof that the target began acting strangely.

NATO is worse than a barking dog. It yearns to create the threats it will shield us from. If neoconservative hawks did not have Russian and Chinese villains to talk about, they would only cook up some other villain. They might restart their so-called war on terror, combing the world again for the next imaginary or fantasy threat we can imagine to be menacing the fragile West.

Liz Truss went too far in trying to take ownership of the war in Ukraine and proposing conditions that would never be acceptable to any administration in Moscow, threatening to further inflame and escalate the conflict, even according to The Guardian.

Truss had said that Britain should set a war aim of depriving Russia of Crimea, which Moscow considers core Russian territory and protects under its nuclear deterrent. This is such a delusional statement that it would be less absurd to have heard Russian generals talk of recapturing the Reichstag. Crimea is long gone, and Ukraine is about as likely to send troops there as it is to Vladivostok. Even pro-Western dissidents in Russia refuse to talk of Crimea as anything other than part of Russia.

In addition to her, we see Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces James Heappey eagerly justifying attacks by Ukraine into Russian territory using UK weapons. Apparently, he is unaware of the potential risk to British territory if we set ourselves a goal of destroying targets in Russian territory.

Total war, by proxy?

In the case of both politicians mentioned here, Britain possibly overestimates its power, having no grasp of how or where Russia could respond in kind or the kind of casualties British personnel could suffer if Russia were to begin maliciously handing out all modern armaments necessary to kill British troops worldwide. It seems some of our leaders just view the Slavic mind as dull, easy prey, incapable of the creativity to even copy what we do.

We also assume that our playing by a set of rules forbidding direct attacks on the other side confines the Russians to also abiding by these rules, when that is not the case if the rules only benefit us and not them. Would we ourselves keep playing by the rules if Russia was the only beneficiary under them, and the costs for us playing were severe? A country will only allow so much damage to them indirectly, before they hastily look for ways to retaliate, even if they are caught doing so.

Any plan that includes averting a nuclear war but still destroying Russia's cities and strategic objects, using Ukrainian troops to do so as encouraged by Heappey, would be folly. Britain's targeting of strategic objects and vital defences in Russia, even using a third country or fiddling with the command structure to hide responsibility for the attacks, would trigger Russian strikes on strategic targets in Britain. It would be no different than if we began attacking Russia directly, so Russia could see nuclear attacks as a proportionate response.

A brag too far

Liz Truss seems at some level to be aware that her foolish and rash warmongering cannot be walked back. She has tried to take full ownership of the Ukrainian war effort, declaring that a defeat in this war is unthinkable and would mean a profound loss of security for us.

In reality, there is an alternative course that keeps the country safe: just get rid of Liz Truss, James Heappey, and the others who displayed misplaced military swagger and tried to take ownership of the Ukrainian war effort. This would restore a level of calm, helping prevent escalation while benefiting still from whatever they had done, if any of it had any benefit.

It is okay for common soldiers to belittle their adversaries and brag. However, a serving government minister, who believes a continent-spanning nuclear hyperpower is some easy prey they will soon hang on their wall as a personal trophy, is an imbecile. That person should not be permitted to speak another word in any official capacity.

Hysterical responses to the Solomon Islands signing a security agreement with China reveal hypocrisy over the Ukraine crisis of 2014 and subsequent conflict of 2022.

NATO’s Secretary General stated that the defining struggle in the world has become one of big powers forcing smaller powers to serve their interests, or letting them choose their own path, arguing that the Western alliance group is firmly in favour of free choice.

The argument was clear: Russia was behaving very irregularly and violating national sovereignty, by expecting to have any say on hostile troop deployments into countries adjacent to it.

Nothing At All Treaty Organisation

Unfortunately for NATO, such firm principles for which the world's most powerful military alliance stood were inadvertently denounced and shown to be utter nonsense by NATO countries. As soon as the Solomon Islands chose to align with China on its own free will, the US issued warnings of unspecified consequences. Therefore, it became suddenly unacceptable for nations to align in any way against others.

The hypocrisy on display now proves that the attempt of NATO governments to stand and fight for any set of principles at all could not last much more than a couple of months. This powerful alliance is proved to not stand for anything, much as the US’s own ideology is confused and America immediately steps on its own commitments like rakes, as soon as it tries to lay them down.

Menaces to democracy

The Solomon Islands may have chosen to side with China entirely of its own free will. Ukraine, in contrast, only sought alignment with NATO and the EU after extensive interference in its internal affairs and a violent takeover supervised by Western officials in 2014.

The Solomon Islands is now to be portrayed as some sort of threat to democracy, merely by the fact it is inconvenient to the West (i.e. "democracy"). In reality, the country is a democracy threatened by coercive Western powers that clearly have no interest in the wishes of the people.

One would be wise to expect fake mass protests sponsored and led from US diplomatic buildings in the Solomon Islands, covered by all the cable news channels and praised by them. In addition, expect any scale of bribery and attempts to subvert the wishes of the people of that land, perhaps in the months or even weeks to come.

The sinking of the Moskva and several concurrent strikes on Russian border towns by Ukraine seem like a coordinated escalation aiming to provoke a like response from Russia.

Whether it is its intention or not, Ukraine's actions will probably result in the Russian public wanting an increased use of force in Ukraine, which had been held back due to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertions that the Russians and Ukrainians are a common people.

Deliberately goading Russian escalation

The United States will help Ukraine to target disputed Crimea, considered core Russian territory by Moscow. The US may not recognise Russian sovereignty over Crimea, but the Russian government does. Therefore, should such strikes occur, they will be considered no different than strikes on the centre of Moscow ordered from Washington.

Even as it engages in the above risky policy, the United States is giving CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) suits to Ukraine, as if to prepare them to fight in radioactive wastelands. It seems as though the Ukrainians, led by the US, are expected to destroy their own country to save it, just to assert their nationalistic zeal.

The United States speculates openly about when Russia will get desperate enough to use a tactical nuclear weapon. Based on the tone, it seems as if they are certain it will happen, and are willing to maintain all policies with no interest in preventing it.

Scorched earth?

All of this shows clearly that the United States doesn’t stand with the people of Ukraine. It is primarily looking at frustrating Russia rather than preventing harm to Ukraine. Someone who stands with the people of Ukraine would not want it to become a nuclear wasteland, nor would they even believe it is wise for it to fight Russia in the first place.

But what does the US gain from nuclear detonations in Kiev, or elsewhere in Ukraine? We can only suppose the US might want this outcome just to incriminate Moscow and to convince the world of Western moral superiority, as the US had previously been the only country to ever use nuclear weapons in a war (a fact rival countries like to remind it of). It may also secretly view Ukraine as Russian territory, itself, and be wanting the lands burned and uninhabitable to punish the Russians.

If the US believes its power is in terminal decline, it might believe that incriminating a rival regime in the most barbaric act of the Twenty-First Century would give the United States vast moral authority against such rival regimes. Ultimately, it could mean excluding such regimes from the United Nations entirely, giving total control of the international system to Washington.

Russian and Chinese restraint

Russia seems not likely to use nuclear weapons yet, as there is no sign it is even interested in a troop surge or a strategic bombing campaign yet, although Russian generals suggested they could target Ukraine’s decision-making centres.

The US is encouraging conflicts at the peripheries of its rivals, while confusing gullible audiences at it home that it is somehow deterring aggressors. The same is certainly true of Taiwan, where almost the exact same policy is being pursued, despite it spectacularly failing to prevent conflict in Ukraine. This shows they are not sincere about preventing conflicts, in fact seeking conflicts and building traps at the doorsteps of their rivals in the hope to weaken them.

Much of the Western press and leadership are portraying the East-West conflict over Ukraine as a temporary issue that will be quickly remedied by regime change against what they see as problematic leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin. In some ways, they are correct.

Since the end of the original Cold War, the main tension in the world was emerging in the North-South relationship, not the East-West conflict, making the current geopolitical situation something of an anomaly. Except for direct contests over hegemony, the main struggle in the world has always been between the exploiter and exploited, or the ruler and the ruled.

War against the Global South

With wars mainly being "interventions" targeting Global South nations like Iraq and Libya, and the Global North having a distinct advantage, able to project the image of itself as a global policeman under the authority of the United Nations Security Council, for a time it seemed as if a simmering North-South conflict was becoming the accepted reality.

The alterations to the language of war in the 1990s and early 2000s to speak of humanitarian intervention, rogue states, terrorism and global policing showed a shift, conscious or otherwise, to waging wars on the economically undeveloped nations. Military technology and wargames changed to target lightly armed resistance groups, rather than peer opponents.

What is happening now, with the renewal of conflict between the West and Russia, is an unexpected hiccup in the dominance of the Global North and especially the Western powers. Russia had essentially been considered a solved problem and a defeated enemy for over thirty years, and the West had moved on to other targets. Russia refusing to be dead, and being capable of challenging the West again, is a potentially fatal impediment Western goals.

The wrong battle

For the West to now be bogged down in a contest with Russia essentially means that the Global North is unable to fight the battle it wanted to fight, namely a battle to maintain dominance over the Global South. The West is mainly responsible, failing to create Global North alliance structures that would include Russia and potentially even China in a world order that would see the North dominate the South.

The selfishness of, very probably, individual politicians and thought leaders in the United States and United Kingdom is most likely to blame for the failure of the Global North to form a united front against the Global South (a godsend for the peoples of the latter). It seems like the idea of having Russians and Chinese as part of the club was just unacceptable to English-speaking elites, who would prefer that the "civilised" world and its economically vital activity are only led by people who look and sound like them.

Russia and China are essentially too "developed" now to be considered an economic periphery that can be conquered or exploited by the West. Countries like India, Pakistan and Iran can also increasingly be considered "developed" and don't really fall into the "Third World" stereotype either, as they may have done in the past.

What next?

While there may be attempts by the East and West to use the Global South as a proxy battlefield again, like they did in the original Cold War, the degree of resistance there against all such interference will likely increase. The Global South was on the rise in its own right, with an increasing willingness of local regimes to defy any expression of global authority or global good, and instead take possession of their own resources. Leaders such as Chavez, Morales, Gaddafi and others were not anomalies but part of a trend that was sure to continue, and will continue.

Even if Western regimes are not impeded much, or Russia and China are quickly disposed of and the Global North falls under Anglo-Saxon authority, their attempts to police and control the Global South will still go severely awry. We will still see terrorism, devastating wars and refugee flows that, in addition to climate change, will complicate Western dominance. They will be unable to pacify the populations of the Global South, who will continue to elect leaders who defy foreign exploitation and dominance. As such, even the most optimistic forecast for the West is one of war, waste, misery and the defeat of global hegemony in the long term.

The thousand cuts to the globally dominant Western powers were already going to be a death sentence for it, even without the West encountering a resurgent Russia and having to fight an intra-North battle.

While the war in Ukraine may be sad for people with blonde hair and blue eyes, it offers much-deserved relief for some people of the Global South. Perhaps they may be spared, for a time, from being the focus of murderous rampages by the supposedly civilised West. The situation in Ethiopia seems to have calmed around the time the conflict grew in Ukraine. We should be mindful, however, that the Western-inflamed humanitarian disaster in Yemen is unabated. As the wars in Bosnia showed us, violence may briefly return to the Global North, but is almost continuously exported to the Global South.

Noam Chomsky asserted in his book, Media Control, that the corporate media had an ability to trigger totalitarian behaviour in people, stating "the educated masses goose-step on command and repeat the slogans they’re supposed to repeat".

America's history of making excuses for fascist types in Latin America and Eastern Europe, coupled with the veneration of police state figures at home and panic among elites at their collapsing economic and military power, could lay a path for our nations into actual fascism.

Sanitising fascism

As evidence accumulates that we in the West are supporting Nazis in Ukraine, such that even NATO itself is unable to avoid sharing evidence of these Nazis and then hurriedly deleting it, we may see excuses made for radical nationalism and fascism. It is accompanied by our own anti-Russian propaganda, sometimes rivalling the work of the Nazis, as we become enamoured with the monsters we support.

Nazism in Ukraine, however explicit, is uniquely weaponised and directed against the local ethnic Russians, such that Jews in Ukraine are seemingly able to avoid being hurt by it. But, as anyone who was properly educated at school knows, the selected scapegoat makes no difference to whether fascism is fascism. Portraying the West's declared enemies such as Russians, Muslims or the Chinese as subhuman is as wrong as anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, as Chomsky points out, educated people in the West seem able to forget their entire moral code and education when the media simply claims that things are different this time, and that fascistic sentiment is now necessary. They are then okay with calling for the death or silencing of those who oppose us. Making special exceptions where it is okay to censor or even murder people when we are told is a masterclass in turning a peaceful person into a monster.

The subconscious drift to fascism

Part of the reason for fascism is the feeling that one's country was meant to be the most successful, the best of them all, but that traitors and fifth columnists are hampering it. In the past, that was the essence of anti-communism. Today, the communists are simply "Russians", the word used for essentially anyone on the internet who contradicts the narrative, despite no evidence of any link to Moscow.

There has been a tragic history of the United States relying on fascists to secure its goals in South and Central America, and the US is typically aligned with the most reactionary forces around the world. This is no different in Ukraine, where, from the beginning, the US took as its allies the most violent nationalists and fascists it could find, and portrayed them as liberals to gullible audiences at first. Now, though, the audience is actually becoming illiberal, drawn more and more into pure hatred and flag-waving.

As the West declines in the face of a rising China, and is confronted by the unprecedented failure of its sanctions policy, statements from Western journalists and politicians can only be expected to become more deranged. As economic and financial punishments fail against rival countries for the first time, a new ideology that justifies the magnification of military force, terroristic violence, and the creation of vast armies may be demanded. As refugees flee Ukraine, many still with sympathies to fascism, and are lionised, it is possible that the Western media will engage in revisionism and justifications for a for at least a few variants of fascism.

Ukraine to be the model for the declining West?

Russia has been afraid for some time that World War Two could be rewritten by the West, in a way that puts all the blame on the Soviet Union. It could get worse. As Russia is increasingly vilified, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators are redeemed in Western eyes, and the usefulness of fascist thugs becomes increasingly attractive to Western elites, not just abroad but potentially at home.

Because the US is okay with bans on media in Ukraine, it is okay with bans on media at home. Because the US is okay with a war on terror abroad, it is okay with a war on terror at home. Does the US's support for fascist thugs on the streets in Ukraine mean that fascist thugs will be accepted on the streets at home?

Now, some will want to stop me here and attempt to make the case that groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM) or Antifa are the local variants of fascism. They are similarly lionised to the Ukrainian nationalists, and excuses are made for their violence in the US. Others will say this is different, because these are the anti-fascists. But are they? Anti-fascists may be expected to use reason, and explain exactly why fascism is wrong. The BLM and Antifa movements are not rationalist movements. Their followers are just addicted to the dopamine rush they get from being supported in the media and in the currents of social media. The ideology matters not.

Swastikas of freedom

It is not unrealistic to estimate that if the media began to fly the swastika, at first pitching it as a maligned anti-Russian "freedom" symbol, a fair majority of the self-styled advocates of BLM, Antifa and other social justice causes would steadily convert not just to fascism but to Nazism. Moreover, the amount of effort needed to convert a majority of Western society to Nazi ideology would require one week to one month of television broadcasts, social media hashtags, and some entertainment and education-related boycotts and products being cancelled by certain key companies. In total, it would only require the staff at the top of several organisations such as CNN, Facebook and Twitter to collaborate on achieving it.

What if Western policy elites responsible for backing extremists abroad should now decide that establishing full fascism at home is the way to mobilise the United States and the West to defend their hegemony? They are disturbingly well-equipped to do it. They have so far been able to pressure the previously mentioned types of organisation into adhering to their strategy. The informal hierarchy placing the US foreign policy elites and spooks over the media lackeys is obvious in the shocking speed at which propaganda is disseminated everywhere, and, as Chomsky said, we can be made to goose-step on command.

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